Mr Pride is precisely right about the dangers of handing the British gas supply over to Russia and China. Putin’s government is violently autocratic: any journalist or political figure that does not toe the line is beaten up, to the point of journos having been thrown down stairwells. As for cutting off oil and gas supplies to those countries that don’t kowtow to Russian interests, this is a very real possibility. Putin did it to Estonia or one of the Baltic countries when they started standing up for their independence against Moscow. Yet maintaining the security of British energy resources hasn’t been a priority of the Tory party since Thatcher. It was Maggie, remember, who closed the pits down on the grounds that it was cheaper to import coal from Poland and Latin America. And at sometime in the future, we will have time to regret this policy, and those of Cameron and Bob Dudley.
(not satire – it’s the UK today!)
The Ukraine crisis illustrates the folly of Cameron’s mad dash to hive off essential UK infrastructure to Russia and China
In 2011, the Prime Minister David Cameron – accompanied by British Petroleum’s chief executive Bob Dudley – met Russia’s then Prime Minister Putin to agree a contract which would allow Russia’s Gazprom to supply 20 per cent of Britain’s gas.
This resulted in an agreement to allow the Russians to become the UK’s second-biggest supplier of gas after British Gas:
BP in secret talks with Gazprom to pipe Russian gas supply to Britain by 2016
This was part of a policy by the Lib Dem/Tory coalition government to hand over large parts of the UK infrastructure to foreign investors such as Russia and China.
I’ve already flagged how dangerous this policy might be. China is a brutal dictatorship, Russia is barely democratic run by…
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