[mattomac]

Well Thatcher would know a bit about flogging off assets cheaply, oh and all the money from North Sea oil went far.

[Tubby Isaacs]

While Reform's chairman has criticized the call by their new MP for a burqa ban, the lovely Nick Timothy has supported it. His logic is that it's "as British as Jeddah". Timothy' crank politics is as British as Alabama, but most of us don't usually call for it to be banned.

[Bones McCoy]

Nick Timothy - sporting his Ayatollah Chic new look.

[Youngian]

Tough on law and order Jenrick getting very shirty at the suggestion that fish rots from the head. Ministers not being held account for unlawful property deals is just a liberal elite obsession, apparently. Not being Robert Jenrick is Kemi's best card.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Ha ha, what a silly arse.

This stuff is OK if you've never been in power, though it's a stretch to think that Nigel Farage is going to wipe out fare dodging. It's laughable when everyone knows exactly the same stuff happened last year, when you were yourselves in power.

[Tubby Isaacs]

In the Commons Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, has delivered his opening statement setting out the three related nuclear energy announcments from the government today. (See 12.40pm.)

Nick Timothy was responding from the front bench on behalf of the Conservative party. He said the Tories were pro-nuclear power. But he said the coalition government was not able to make progress commissioning new nuclear power stations because the Liberal Democrats ruled this out in the coalition agreement.

He also claimed that the last Conservative government had paved the way for the announcement today with decisions it had taken.

Nick Timothy is on the Front Bench.

Can he explain how Nick Clegg vetoed nuclear power after 2015?

Anyway, the Tories had way more MPs, If they'd wanted new nuclear, they could have made that a priority, rather than the Lansley health reforms, or Toby Young schools. I think they were more than happy to shelve new nuclear because it's expensive and they set themselves (absurdly) spending rules with no extra space for investment.

[Tubby Isaacs]

This statement is a downgrade on what the last government put in motion. Today, the energy secretary has announced only one small modular reactor (SMR). There is no clear target to increase nuclear power generation, and no news on Wylfa.
The nuclear industry is expecting news of a third gigawatt-scale reactor. The last government purchased the land and committed to build but on this today, the energy secretary said nothing.
So can he commit to the planning inherited for a third gigawatt-scale plant at Wylfa? And will he recommit to the Conservative policy of 24 gigawatts of nuclear power by 2050?

If a lame duck minister announces some plans for 25 years in the future, do those plans meaningfully exist?

I think we might be able to answer this by looking at the budgets they provided for the next parliament. Didn't seem to be a lot of money for ambitious capital projects kicking around.

[Andy McDandy]

"We want it but the pansies won't let us have it!" is the paradox at the heart of modern right wing arseholery.

[Tubby Isaacs]

David Laws made it sound like the Coalition Agreement was fairly easy to draw up, with both sides happy to get rid of stuff they weren't keen on anyway. I don't recall much Tory reaction to new nuclear going by the wayside. Did they even do a David Brent style "you should have seen me in there" flourish afterwards to suggest hard negotiating?

[Tubby Isaacs]

A new one on me. Jerome Mayhew, who squeaked home in Broadland and Fakenham because loads of people voted for the no hope Lib Dem candidate.

He was quoted in Rail Magazine claiming that the money for rail investment was "smoke and mirrors" because the some of it had been announced by the previous government in 2023. By that logic, the Coalition/ Tory governments deserve no credit for delivering Crossrail because Gordon Brown had announced it. There's now funding for the stuff Reeves announced, which would pretty likely not have existed with the Tories' sudden enthusiasm for spending cuts (cunningly put in the next Parliament because they'd have been so unpopular).

[Tubby Isaacs]

I was reading Hansard earlier, and came across a Lords debate on the Chagos Islands. The Tory contributions were as you'd expect.

Here's a new one on me, Lord Mancroft. Here's his distinguished contribution.

Governing, like everything else in life, is always a question of priorities. In this case, the Government have decided that obeying the edicts of an international court and paying a great deal of money to do it is the priority. The Prime Minister and the Attorney-General—both lawyers but of demonstrably poor political judgment—have decided that settling a legal dispute in a far-away court between people of whom we know Toggle showing location of Column 505nothing, takes priority over the interests of the British people, for whom this is not a good deal. They have got their priorities wrong.

Surely a better solution is to sell the Chagos Islands to Mauritius for whatever the market deems a fair price for the freehold, which will obviously be rather greater than the leasehold value. If the Americans want their base, let them negotiate a new lease with the Mauritian Government, who will in any case be looking for a big mortgage to fund their freehold purchase. Is President Trump, with his lifetime of expertise in property, not the ideal man to do that deal? Thus, Mauritius will get the Chagos Islands, the international court’s opinion will be adhered to, the Americans will get to keep Diego Garcia, and the British taxpayer will not get fleeced again and may even make a buck or two, which would be a nice change. That way, everyone is a winner.

He's a hereditary peer. His removal from the Lords can't come a day too soon.

There's a funny moment earlier where Lady (Helen) Liddell, a formidable Scottish Labour veteran, calls out the Tory nonsense.

My Lords, at times this afternoon, I was beginning to think that I had turned into my namesake, Alice Liddell, walking through the looking glass. The speech that began this debate was from a noble Lord who had been a Minister in the previous Government. His attempts to knock back everything that had been achieved were quite remarkable.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

I was reading Hansard earlier

Now there's a man who knows how to have a good time...

[mattomac]

I see Richard Holden was openly questioning why Labour were taking their time on the issue of bands touring Europe and vice versa.

You’ll remember this was a small thing that the EU offered and the last government rejected….twice.

They are remarkable.