The decline of Vestas exposes Tory hypocrisy

By Emma Burnell / @realemmaburnell

I fully support the position of LabourList in supporting the workers of Vestas. It’s the right thing to do both as socialists and as environmentalists. But as socialists and environmentalists we cannot ignore the underlying causes of what has happened.

We know from Ed Miliband’s response that Vestas have decided that the UK market is not where they see the future of onshore wind. And who can blame them?

The polls are the polls. Yes, there’s only one poll that counts, and like all Labour activists I desperately hope it will differ from those we’ve seen over the last year or so, but we have to accept that businesses are looking at the future are almost certainly planning for the sad eventuality of a Tory government.

And the Tories are a disaster on the environment. Oh, Cameron may (once) have talked the talk and even driven the husky, but wherever Tories are in power, environmental policies are the first to be junked.

Take London for example, where Boris Johnson has been in power for just over a year. You might think all he’s done in that year is employ about a million dodgy advisors, but you’d be wrong. In that time he has abandoned the Western Extension to the Congestion Charge keeping thousands more cars on the roads, supported the expansion of City Airport, suspended Low Emission Zone measures putting Londoners at risk of dangerously high air pollution levels. At the same time he has slashed the environment team at City Hall in half, reducing the climate change and energy team to three. Hardly the leadership Londoners deserve on the environmental issues Boris himself campaigned on.

Again, Ed Miliband’s response was spot on in putting the blame for the delay in wind farms where it belongs – squarely in the court of Tory councils who have recently blocked wind farms in Somerset, Buckinghamshire, Shropshire, Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, Essex and Norfolk. In Fact Owen Paterson, Conservative MP for North Shropshire is reported as saying the halting of a wind farm near Market Drayton was a “tremendous result”.

In fact, since David Cameron became leader of the Tories, SERA research has found that Conservative-run councils have opposed 80% of wind farm applications submitted to them. In contrast, Labour councils have approved a huge majority.

So is it any wonder that a company whose business strategy will rely on the continued long term investment in onshore wind – so recently boosted by measures taken by the Government in the Renewable Energy Strategy – are nervous about what an incoming Tory administration might do?

As Labour activists we should be campaigning on the fantastic work Labour has done on the environment – particularly since the establishment of the Department for Energy and Climate Change. We don’t always get it right, and I’ve been critical here and elsewhere when I think we’re getting it wrong, but we do have a strong positive story to tell.

But alongside that, we need to shine a light on Tory hypocrisy, and expose the nonsense of Cameron’s “Vote Blue Go Green” rhetoric. In fact The Tories have the worst record on this area in Europe.