UK politics: Tories’ energy policy shows they are ‘anti-science, anti-jobs, anti-future’ Miliband tells MPs – as it happened | Politics

Key events

Afternoon summary

Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, has used what he said will be the first annual statement to parliament about the state of the climate to accuse the Conservatives of being “anti-science, anti-jobs, anti-energy security, and anti-future generations”. (See 4.24pm.)

Wes Streeting, the health secretary, has said the British Medical Association (BMA) is acting in an “shockingly irresponsible” way by telling members not to tell their employers if they are planning to strike. (See 2.57pm.)

For a full list of all the stories covered on the blog today, do scroll through the list of key event headlines near the top of the blog.

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Cooper taunts Philp by saying 5 years ago he said Tories hopeful of getting returns deal with France – but only Labour clinched it

Cooper is responding to Philp. She says he wants to pretend that the last eight years never happened. The small boats crisis went on for 340 weeks, under the Tories. And she says Philp himself admitted that the Rwanda deportation policies never started. (He missed out the four volunteers who went, she says.)

She says, as chair of the home affairs committee, she asked Philp when he was immigration minister about the Tory plans to negotiate a returns agreement with France. Philp said he was optimistic, he says. She says he should have been optimistic for a Labour government – because in five years the Tories never got a deal, but Labour has got one now.

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Updated at 12.22 EDT

Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, is responding to Cooper.

He says she used to talk about “smashing the gangs”. But she did not use the phrase today, he says. He claims that is because she knows this approach is not working.

He says the last 12 months have been the worst on record for small boat crossings. Cooper has lost control of the border.

He asks Cooper to say how many people will be affected by the returns policy. If it is only 50 per week, as people have reported, that will by only 6% of people arriving per week, he says.

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In the Commons Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, is now making a statement about the returns deal agreed with France at the summit last week.

She says in the space of just five years, the number of small boat crossings increased by more than 100 fold.

Summing up what was agreed, she starts by saying it will involve much stronger “upstream cooperation” with other countries.

She says action against criminal gangs has intensified.

The border is being strengthened, she says. She says 496 boat crossings this year have been prevented. But 385 boats have crossed, she says.

She says the French have reviewed their rules, which means they will now be able to intercept boats more effectively.

And the border security bill will make prosecuting people who crowd migrants onto boats more easy, she says.

She says the deal also means, for the first time, some people arriving on small boats can be sent back to France. And people in France will be able to apply for asylum in the UK. Returns and acceptances will match on a one to one basis, she says.

And she says the government will intensive the crackdown on people working illegally in the UK.

Already, we have increased illegal working raids and arrests by 50% since the election.

Already, we have more than tripled the value of employer penalties issued to over £89m and we’ve launched a new surge in enforcement linked to the gig economy with changes to the law in the borders bill to compel companies to conduct proper checks on the right to work.

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Helena Horton, a Guardian environment correspondent, suggests Ed Miliband has rather understated the extent of environmentalist opposition to the government’s planning bill.

Ed Miliband tells parliament “some people don’t agree” with the Planning and Infrastructure Bill. Those “people” include pretty much every nature group in the country

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The Green Alliance, a pro-green thinktank, has welcomed Miliband’s statement. Shaun Spiers, its executive director, said:

With extreme weather becoming the norm in the UK, it’s good to see Ed Miliband and Steve Reed commit to act on climate change and biodiversity loss together and with urgency. We’re a nation of nature lovers and everyone can see and feel the impact of climate change. Voters want to see the cross party consensus behind ambitious environmental policies restored. They want to see our government do more, and do it more effectively, and addressing these two issues together is a good start.

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Back in the Commons, Sammy Wilson (DUP) claimed Ed Miliband was losing the argument with cabinet colleagues, who were losing faith in net zero policies. And consumers were withdrawing support from these policies, he said. He said Miliband may be trying to take the lead; but people were not following.

Miliband said he had been arguing with Wilson for this for about 20 years, and Wilson was wrong to dismiss this as scaremongering. He said people could see the impact of global warming with their own eyes.

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Work starts on building electric arc furnace at Tata Steel’s factory in Port Talbot

Bethan McKernan

Bethan McKernan is the Guardian’s Wales correspondent.

Work has begun on the new electric arc furnace at Tata Steel in Port Talbot after a £500m UK government grant which ministers say will secure 5,000 jobs in the steel-making south Wales town.

At a groundbreaking ceremony at the site on this afternoon, Labour also launched its steel strategy, which it says will deliver up to £2.5bn of investment to rebuild the steel industry nationwide.

Indian-owned Tata Steel’s last blast furnace was shut down in September 2024, putting almost 3,000 people out of work. Many in Wales felt Port Talbot had been let down after a UK government decision in April to to step in to save the Scunthorpe steelworks in Lincolnshire from a similar fate. Government ministers have repeatedly argued that the two plants were facing different futures.

The new £1.25bn furnace at Port Talbot will process scrap steel, rather than make virgin steel, and is expected to cut the site’s carbon emissions by 90%. It is due to come online by the end of 2027.

Wales’s first minister, Eluned Morgan, the Welsh secretary, Jo Stevens, the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, and Tata Group chair Natarajan Chandrasekaran were in attendance on Monday.

Reynolds described the beginning of construction as “great news for Welsh steelmaking”, which would give “certainty to local communities and thousands of local jobs for years to come”.

The steelworkers’ union, Community, called the groundbreaking ceremony “bittersweet.”

The Guardian reported last month that Donald Trump had threatened to leave Port Talbot out of a tariff deal because Tata has been importing steel since closing down its blast furnaces. Stevens said on Monday that the UK government is still in talks with the US administration over the issue.

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Zero Hour, a group campaigning for a climate and nature bill with environmental targets much tougher than the ones already in place, said Ed Miliband should be going further. Amy McDonnell, the group’s co-director, said:

As he delivers the first of his long-promised statements on climate and nature today, the energy secretary is right to praise grassroots campaigners for their efforts to highlight the existential threat of the climate and nature crisis.

Miliband does, however, need to do more than berate his opponents. Even now, his own colleagues are intent – through the planning and infrastructure bill and airport expansion – on ripping up environmental and climate protections in pursuit of ruthless economic growth at all costs.

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Adrian Ramsay, the co-leader of the Green party, welcomed Miliband’s statement, including what he said about the need for cross-party consensus. He said the need for the UK to show “resilience” should not be a political football. He said protecting Britain from climate change should become a sixth government mission .

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Seamus Logan (SNP) said he agreed with what Miliband said about the climate and nature emergency. But he criticised Labour for abandoning the plan it had in opposition to spend £28bn a year on the green transition.

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Roz Savage, the spokesperson, said she please by the news this might become an annual statement.

But she said Ed Miliband had “missed a trick” because his department had not consulted enough with stakeholders.

If stakeholders had been involved, he might have acknowledged calls from the wildlife trusts and the RSPB to remove the threat to nature protection in the planning and infrastructure bill, or the Nature Friendly Farming Network’s concern over the suspension of the sustainable farming incentive.

She said the government should back Lib Dem calls for an annual climate and nature bill.

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Miliband says Tory energy policy shows they are ‘anti-science, anti-jobs, anti-energy security, anti-future’

Andrew Bowie, a shadow energy minster, responded for the Conseratives – not Claire Coutinho, the shadow energy secretary.

He said it was “ridiculous” for Miliband to suggest in his Guardian interview that opponents of net zero were unpatriotic. He went on

We need to bring back a sense of rationality, of proportion to this debate, because … language like this is alienating more and more people from the important cause of ensuring that the planet we pass on to our children.

Bowie suggested Miliband was not telling the truth about the impact of net zero policies.

Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker, intervened, to object, saying MPs should not accuse each other of being dishonest. Bowie withdrew that suggestion.

But he said it was “shameful” of Miliband to use the Met Office report as cover to attack the opposition.

Labour’s climate policies would make Britain poorer, he said.

In response, Miliband said:

We’re in a situation now where the shadow secretary of state goes into hiding when there’s a statement about the climate crisis, because it’s just too embarrassing to try and articulate the opposition’s position.

And look at the central chasm. At the heart of [Bowie’s] response is that he and his colleagues have taken the decision to abandon 20 years of bipartisanship when it comes to climate.

One of the great strides forward was Theresa May’s net zero by 2050 – now he’s trashing it and saying it was a disaster.

Miliband said Bowie was wrong to claim net zero policies would have a net cost. “All the evidence is delaying action costs more, not less,” he said.

He said it was not clear if the Tories have any net zero target at all now.

And he said Bowie was wrong to claim, as he did in a recent interview, that the net zero target was not based on science.

The point is net zero was a target that Theresa May adopted, driven by the science.

So what are they [the Conservatives]? They are anti-science. They are anti-jobs. They are anti-energy security, and they are anti-future generations.

He said he agreed with May, who described opponents of her net zero policies when she was PM as “ideologues at the political extremes” or “populists who offer only easy answers to complex questions”.

Miliband said he could not have put it better himself.

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Miliband said the driving ahead with plans to achieve net zero by 2050.

But the government was also working on protecting the environment from the damage caused by rising temperatures, he said.

He confirmed the government was consulting on expanding the boile upgrade scheme to cover heat pumps that can offer cooling as well as warming. (See 3.24pm.)

He ended by saying the Commons was at its best when MPs worked together on this issue.

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