by DR ANDREW MURRISON
Conservative MP for South West Wiltshire

THE seemingly relentless rise in interest rates is causing real pain to businesses and householders. It continues to threaten the housing market, despite an ongoing demand-supply mismatch.

I am though a bit wary of talk of ‘underlying inflation’ as if cherry picking the worst affected items and ignoring others, notably energy, in the basket that makes up CPI is legitimate. That’s an approach that Eeyore would choose. I want to hear from Tigger.

The sober truth is that energy underpins most of our economic activity – including food production – and hikes in the cost of it have fuelled much of the inflation we have seen since Putin’s violation of Ukraine.

Inflation is now receding as a threat in this country and elsewhere. Action taken now will take a while to have any real-life effect. I worry that in continuing to bump up interest rates the Bank of England risks overshooting, causing avoidable hardship to householders and businesses.

It should be completely obvious that being less reliant on oil and gas is sensible, whatever you might think about the extent to which human activity contributes to climate change.

Happily, the UK has a vast territorial sea that can accommodate wind turbines and it possesses the associated industrial base, including bits of it locally. When the wind doesn’t blow – and it blows more reliably offshore – we will be able to smooth supply with nuclear, the decision having now been taken to invest in it.

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However, announcing that an incoming Labour government would close down the North Sea offshore oil industry seems reckless, even if appealing to Sir Keir’s North London bien pensants. Pumping oil and gas thousands of miles is plainly considerably less green than producing it here.

Further, only a fool would fail to learn the lessons of Putin’s hydrocarbon blackmail. But, given the international nature of the energy market, that only works if our neighbours too approach green energy with the same enthusiasm.

We also learn that Sir Keir will ‘decarbonise’ the steel industry. What that means in practice, as he must surely know, is rendering it non-viable again against cheaper imports from countries whose credentials are far less verdantly green than our own. So, more UK jobs exported. Not an immediate problem for Islington but a real one beyond the M25.

I’m proud that this country is taking a lead on net zero, but to have an effect that goes beyond virtue signalling, the greening of our economy must be accompanied by similar action on the part of our planet’s big polluters.