Labour will launch publicly owned Great British Energy, Starmer vows
Keir Starmer has said Labour will launch Great British Energy, a publicly owned energy company run on clean UK power, in its first year of government, saying the party will “fight the Tories on economic growth”.
In his speech at the Labour conference in Liverpool, Starmer said the largest onshore wind farm in Wales was owned by Sweden, China had a stake in the UK nuclear industry, and millions of people paid their bills to an energy company owned by France.
He said Great British Energy would be “a new company that takes advantage of the opportunities in clean British power and because it’s right for jobs, because it’s right for growth, because it’s right for energy independence from tyrants like [Vladimir] Putin”.
Labour said the new company, akin to EDF in France or Sweden’s Vattenfall, would provide additional capacity, alongside the private sector, but that its goal would be to establish the UK as a clean energy superpower and guarantee long-term energy security.
Starmer said earlier in his speech that the Conservatives had left the UK economy at the mercy of the aftershocks of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
“I will never accept that the war is an excuse for how unprepared Britain was to tackle the fallout. The war didn’t ban onshore wind, the war didn’t scrap home insulation, the war didn’t stall British nuclear energy. The Tories did that.”
The Labour leader began his speech railing against the economic plan announced by Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng last week, which cut taxes, including abolishing the top rate of tax. Starmer said “what we’ve seen in the past few days has no precedent” but said it was just one of a multitude of problems facing the country.
He said the Tories had “lost control of the British economy… not for you,
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