SARAH VINE: Another slice of paradise turns to dust - just to please Comrade Miliband and his eco-zealots

• e-mail

Comrade Miliband will be most pleased. Construction of a 250-acre solar panel farm (that’s about 160 football pitches, for context) has been approved by the Lib Dem-run Hart District Council in Hampshire, which voted five to four in favour of the application to build on fields between the village of Long Sutton and Odiham airfield.

I know that part of the world a bit. It’s delightful countryside, quintessentially English, dotted with pretty villages full of antiques shops and old-fashioned pubs. In summer, the sound of leather on willow fills the air, and every parish is a-buzz with fetes and other festivals, quite often involving rather a lot of jollity and Pimm’s.

Well, not for much longer. The development will comprise 8ft-long solar panels, surrounded by galvanised steel fencing (to keep out deer and other wildlife) and 11ft-high metal poles, supporting CCTV cameras at 50-yard intervals.

All this in an ancient area of the English countryside renowned for its beauty and historic importance. The Harrow Way – thought to be the oldest road in Britain, dating back to the Stone Age – runs through Long Sutton.

Even the local Green Party candidate has described the project as ‘an abuse of the climate emergency’, and the vicar is said to be ‘distraught’. Talk about paving paradise and putting up a parking lot. Tame by comparison.

'Energy Secretary Ed Miliband (pictured) will be most pleased. Construction of a 250-acre solar panel farm (that’s about 160 football pitches, for context) has been approved by the Lib Dem-run Hart District Council in Hampshire'

The proposed area for the soal dar development in Long Sutton, Hampshire

Not that any of these things will move Comrade Miliband and his band of eco-zealots. They have about as much regard for the lives of ordinary people and their pathetic little existences as any of Labour’s other government departments currently crushing people’s hopes and dreams.

The aspirational parents who hope for a better life for their children: Comrade Phillipson has seen to them with VAT on private education. The farmers who’ve toiled for generations on family land: clobbered by inheritance tax. The entrepreneurs who’ve built companies and provided jobs: hobbled by crippling National Insurance rises, beginning today. Artists, writers, musicians, film-makers and other creatives: being sold down the river to AI by a government that thinks it’s perfectly fine for Big Tech to steal all their ideas to train bots to do their jobs for free. Lifelong taxpayers, saving for a retirement nest egg, now also subject to inheritance tax on their pensions (assuming they have any left after Donald Trump’s stunt last week, but that’s another story).

On and on the list goes, every new directive a kick in the teeth.

Read More

SARAH VINE: If I had one wish, it would be to spend a joyous day with my children as toddlers again

But none is quite as zealous or quite as deaf to protest as Miliband’s ambitious plan, which is to double onshore wind capacity, treble solar and quadruple offshore wind – all while shutting down other potential sources of home-grown energy, such as shale gas, which Britain has in abundance.

People’s jobs, homes, wildlife, plants, flowers, trees – everything about this green and pleasant land that makes it so – are all expendable in the crazy drive for Net Zero.

And the most infuriating thing about all this is that none of it even makes sense if the objective is to make the world a better, more eco-friendly place.

Because where will the components for these solar panels come from? China. And how does China make these parts? With energy from the coal-fired power stations that it’s building at a rate of two per week. And who does China use to make this stuff? Forced labourers, including Uyghurs and other minorities, and dissidents.

China has the highest percentage of global emissions of any country on the planet – just over 30 per cent, at last count. Britain, by contrast, has less than 1 per cent. Admittedly we are much, much smaller. But the idea that outsourcing our dirty work to China will make the planet any cleaner is insane. It’s just cheating. Emissions are emissions, it doesn’t matter whose balance sheet they appear on. It all adds up on a global scale.

As for forced labour, just last month the Government blocked a Lords amendment that would have stopped the newly created state-owned Great British Energy buying panels manufactured by slaves. Those are your taxes. It’s unconscionable.

Energy Secretary Ed Miliband visits Tiln Farm Solar Park. He has 'about as much regard for the lives of ordinary people and their pathetic little existences as any of Labour’s other government departments currently crushing people’s hopes and dreams', writes Sarah Vine

'People’s jobs, homes, wildlife, plants, flowers, trees – everything about this green and pleasant land that makes it so – are all expendable in the crazy drive for Net Zero.' Pictred: Long Sutton village in Hampshire

And that’s not even the end of it. If those fields in Hampshire are full of panels, they’re not growing food. Field mice aren’t living in them, owls aren’t hunting in them, farmers aren’t working in them. Nothing grows around those things. The ground will turn to dust for the next 40 years, which is the length of time before the solar field will be decommissioned and the land returned to the owner.

But what I find really insidious, frightening and dystopian is the way all this dovetails with Labour’s inheritance tax on farmers. How many will be forced to sell land to pay, or just give up altogether? How many fields, which for centuries have grown crops or fed livestock, will lie fallow? And waiting in the wings, Big Energy, ready with the fencing and bulldozers.

Even Big Food stands to gain from this: no more locally grown fruit and veg, no more hand-reared pork sausages when

Miliband’s blood-stained Chinese imports have carpeted the land. It’ll all be chlorinated chicken from America. At least Trump will be happy.

Destroy the creative industries to kowtow to Big Tech, decimate the countryside to swell the coffers of Big Energy, kill off our farmers to fatten up Big Food: is there any greedy monopoly Labour won’t serve?

The new Miss Marple - but with added sass

Edwina Findley and Uzo Aduba in The Residence, now showing on Netflix 

If, like me, you could have cheerfully throttled Donald Trump last week, I can recommend The Residence on Netflix. It’s a joyful, quirky murder mystery set in... the White House. It has a cameo from Kylie Minogue, a neurotic Swiss-German pastry chef, a rampant Australian foreign minister and Uzo Aduba, above, who is brilliant as the bird-watching, sardine-eating detective Cordelia Cupp. Think Miss Marple, with added sass.

If Virginia Giuffre embellished the extent of her injuries after her ‘bus crash’, what else might she have embellished? She may be troubled, and for that she deserves sympathy. But her accusations have ruined Prince Andrew’s life. If she is prone to exaggeration, does that not cast a different light on things?  

Brosnan’s true love

Pierce Brosnan with wife Keely Shaye, pictured in New York earlier this month

All week the internet has been gushing about Pierce Brosnan’s wife Keely Shaye Smith’s weight loss. But I can’t help feeling these compliments are slightly backhanded. There’s always an implication that no one can understand why he stays with her. The answer is: because he loves her. Not all men are obsessed with upgrading their partners for a younger, slimmer model. Some, like Brosnan, appreciate the value of a timeless classic.

I write from my own version of The White Lotus. Two of my oldest girlfriends and I are at the LifeCo in Bodrum, Turkey, renowned for its juice cleanse and famous clientele, which includes Kate Moss and other supermodels. I had high hopes, but alas, it is day six and despite the fact that not a morsel of food has passed my lips – just watery juice, supplements and gallons of ‘detox broth’ – I remain stubbornly un-Moss-like. Now at least we know which one of us will survive the apocalypse.