Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg has said Labour should follow the advice of Tony Blair and abandon their net zero policy.
Speaking on GB News, he said: “Tony Blair suddenly becomes a right-wing hero. Could you believe it? He has said that we need to have an energy policy that gives people abundant and cheap energy rather than following net zero and I agree with him.
“Nobody ever votes to be cold and poor and Tony Blair was remarkably good at winning elections in 1997, in 2001 and in 2005. He’s the only Labour leader ever to have won three significant majorities. Only Harold Wilson competes with him, and he won four elections, but only one big majority, and not in succession.
“Will the government listen? Because we’ve got a situation where we have simply offshored our emissions. We’ve made our energy expensive, and we have undermined our economy.
“Remember this one fact, in 2000 UK GDP per capita was about 90% of that in the US. Now, 26 years later, it is 60% of that in the US and in the same time, our electricity prices have gone from being broadly the same to four times higher than the average.
“You see the connection; our net zero policies are making us cold and poor. They are undermining the ability we have, for one generation to be more prosperous than the next. We are falling down the league tables globally for GDP per capita.
“Our industry is disappearing. Our steel industry has basically gone and then the government taxes you more to give subsidies to industries to keep them going, having priced them out of the market through the energy prices that have pushed prices up.
“There is no proper plan for cheap energy. It is on the never-never, the assumption that renewables will eventually be cheap, but they’re not, because they’re unreliable and they require gas on standby, which is fundamentally expensive.
“So Tony Blair, an election winner, understands what this country needs. It needs plentiful, abundant, cheap energy, then we can thrive and prosper and grow economically.
“But I have a nasty feeling Ed Miliband isn’t listening. He is persevering with his ideological crusade that is making us cold and poor.”