Britain has lost the plot for abandoning a major fracking site for possibly absent owls

Owls of protest

A COUNTRY in which a major fracking site is abandoned for the sake of possibly absent owls has utterly lost the plot.

It is also dangerously complacent about the hardship and potential blackouts now coming our way.

Public opinion is finally shifting towards shale gas and away from the successful eco scaremongering which proved such a gift to Putin.

If lights go off this winter, millions will want to know why we weren’t fracking a decade ago.

Since Net Zero cannot be achieved without more gas first, it may be the perfect solution.

The Sun likes owls. But we must not let wafer-thin arguments about their supposed welfare block a potentially vast source of cheap energy.

Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss have both committed to fracking only if local communities back it. That is a copout.

As we see in Nottinghamshire, locals will use any excuse to scupper it.

So much of what we desperately need to build — also including homes, reservoirs and nuclear power — requires a PM prepared to overrule NIMBYs. Who’ll do it?

MPs in trough

WHY are skint taxpayers still buying MPs lunch? Why can’t politicians on £84,144 pay the market price for their food?

In Westminster’s subsidised restaurants they scoff pan-seared salmon for under a tenner, beef curry for four quid and a jacket potato for 85p.

No wonder some MPs live in the past. These are 1990s prices.

How can politicians justify it, when ordinary people face a winter so bleak they’ll be cutting back on THEIR grub?

What with bumper salaries, and the expenses scandal from which their reputations never recovered, MPs don’t exactly help themselves, do they?

Scratch that. Helping themselves is exactly what they do.

Starmer in mire

IMAGINE Keir Starmer’s sanctimonious, confected rage if a Tory rival was guilty of eight breaches of the MPs’ code of conduct.

Imagine the pious sermon. Imagine his face, puce with faux indignation.

Imagine how he would paint himself as Captain Integrity and put Labour on a moral pedestal far above the wicked Tories.

Starmer is a terrible actor and a worse hypocrite, as millions have concluded.

Only tribal Labour backers believe his boozy curry was any different from the Covid breaches for which Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak were fined at work.

And we now know Starmer broke the MPs’ code repeatedly despite his denials.

One breach involved seven acres of Surrey land, potentially worth a fortune, which he owned but kept from Commons authorities.

Nailed by the Standards Commissioner, he finally accepted responsibility — then blamed his staff.

What a leader this man is.