John Cooper
Main Page: John Cooper (Conservative - Dumfries and Galloway)Department Debates - View all John Cooper's debates with the Department for Business and Trade
(3 days, 14 hours ago)
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Sarah Jones
The National Wealth Fund and Great British Energy will be incredibly important in this space. Most countries have a sovereign wealth fund like the National Wealth Fund. We have set that up. Most countries have their state energy companies. We have loads of state energy companies�just other countries�. It is absolutely right that we set up our own. We also have the clean energy bonus, which will mean that we are encouraging supply chains and jobs here in the UK, so we can move away from reliance on other countries.
John Cooper (Dumfries and Galloway) (Con)
With due deference to the newly appointed Minister for Aberdeen on the Conservative Benches, the question of these jobs is not a matter purely for the north-east or purely for Scotland. Those 200,000 jobs are spread across every constituency in this country and they are all at risk. As we heard from the hon. Member for Edinburgh West (Christine Jardine), they are being pushed off a cliff edge. The Minister talked about our energy bills being in the hands of Vladimir Putin. Does she not agree with me that we are stuck between a rock and a hard place? We have Vladimir Putin on one side driving up energy bills and her dogmatic Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero on the other.
Sarah Jones
I do not agree with that framing whatsoever. We have Putin who invaded Ukraine, leading to the massive global shock for energy prices, and we have a Secretary of State who is very pragmatically taking forward plans to, as the triangle tells us, protect and grow jobs, and give us energy security. I think most people in the country understand that. They get that we need energy security and to tackle the climate at the same time.