Robert Jenrick, the housing and communities minister who helped Richard Desmond dodge up to £45 million in community taxes on a new housing development after sitting next to him at a Conservative fundraising dinner, has now, it was revealed at the weekend, greenlit the first new deep coalmine in Britain for 30 years. It is a tiny bit more complicated than that but, essentially, at a time when we’re all congratulating Grampa Biden for bringing the US back into the Paris agreement, when the abandonment of fossil fuels is our children’s only hope for a secure future and when I have just spent north of fifty grand on an electric Jag, this gurgling Tory halfwit has — to the impotent dismay of Boris Johnson’s new “climate tsar”, Alok Sharma — okayed a £165 million plan to smash virgin coking coal from thousands of feet below the Irish Sea. As Greta Thunberg has rightly said, Jenrick’s actions show that Britain’s commitment to go carbon-neutral by 2050 “basically means nothing”.
Times 26th Jan 2021 read more »