I will make progress.
The Labour party’s position is to immediately and artificially retard the amount of oil and gas that we produce domestically through penalty taxation, not necessarily because a windfall is needed, for aims that should or should not be laudable, but because reducing production is the ultimate objective. If the Labour party wants to reject the notion that getting to net zero requires a transition period, let it be clear about that. Let it highlight the fantastical world that Labour Members live in, shorn of the reality that we are on a journey over a generation.
Moreover, the Labour party should be clear that its objective over the long term—no doubt as it comes back for more and more money—is to reduce our energy security. Taxing out of existence the oil and gas industry, which we need to conclude the transition, will make us more dependent on other countries whose actions may have caused some of the things that the Labour motion seeks to deal with—greater foreign imports and fewer jobs in north-east Scotland and in supply chains all the way through constituencies such as mine, North East Derbyshire, or the shadow Secretary of State’s constituency of Doncaster North. The Labour party has no clear plan for energy to ensure in a measured and balanced way that we move from hydrocarbons to renewables and tread more lightly on the earth. That is what the Labour party is about these days: extinction, not transition.
We are used on Opposition day debates like this, on motions that do not add up, and this one has it in spades—incoherent, confused and unclear. Perhaps some of the hon. Members who are about to speak might be able to clear up the ultimate objective in the way that the right hon. Member for Doncaster North failed to do. For a party that talks so much about good government, Labour has demonstrated this afternoon that it is only interested in good headlines.
4.25 pm