At its meeting on 24 February 2026, the county council’s cabinet approved a 23,000-word response to National Grid’s statutory consultation on LionLink, which closes on 10 March 2026.

Their selection of Walberswick as a landing site for the project demonstrates staggeringly bad judgement. It is a wholly inappropriate location and the construction impacts on this very special part of our Suffolk coast will be stark.

Councillor Richard Rout, Suffolk County Council’s Cabinet Member for Devolution, Local Government Reorganisation and NSIPs

Amongst its objections to the current plans are:

• disappointment that onshore cable routeing could not be shared with Sea Link

• the choice of Walberswick as a landing site and the long cable route to Saxmundham

• construction on a continuous basis including night-time working

• construction traffic use of the unsuitable Benhall Bridge

• private haul route which would cross the Fromus river and impact the setting of Hurts Hall

• multiple negative, highly sensitive consequences in terms of built heritage, archaeology, ecology, tourism, highways access, public rights of way, water courses and vegetation loss

Councillor Richard Rout, Suffolk County Council’s Cabinet Member for Devolution, Local Government Reorganisation and NSIPs, said:

“I find National Grid’s inability, or stubbornness, to fully coordinate with their own sister Sea Link scheme, frankly infuriating. We have been calling for this for years.

“Their selection of Walberswick as a landing site for the project demonstrates staggeringly bad judgement. It is a wholly inappropriate location and the construction impacts on this very special part of our Suffolk coast will be stark.

“The project, in addition to a long and complex cable corridor, would also put further strain on Saxmundham and Friston and exacerbate many of the transport concerns we have regarding the Sea Link scheme.

“The Secretary of State may still be minded to rush through an approval for LionLink, but through our consultation response, we are highlighting a host of issues. Hopefully National Grid will act on these to reduce the impacts on local residents, businesses and the environment.”

National Grid’s public consultation is open until 10 March, and the county council is encouraging anyone affected by the scheme to submit their views.

Councillor Richard Rout continues:

“We encourage all local communities to take part in the LionLink consultation. This is the last meaningful chance to help steer the project’s design, routing and purpose ahead of the application being lodged.

“We fully understand that people are feeling consultation fatigue, after being asked to respond again and again to different projects - something that better coordination between Suffolk’s major schemes might have helped to prevent.”

An application for a Development Consent Order is expected to be submitted by National Grid Ventures later in 2026.

The Council and other speakers raised concerns that proposed changes to the NSIP regime were not suitably robust to manage the significant changes which NSIPs can bring to host communities, particularly with the proposed replacement of a statutory duty for pre-submission consultation with statutory guidance.

Councillor Richard Rout, Suffolk County Council’s Cabinet Member for Devolution, Local Government Reform and NSIPs, said:

“I’m proud that Suffolk County Council continues to lead the way with its NSIP expertise and influence and can bring together colleagues and speakers from around the country. “Suffolk has one of the greatest concentrations of NSIPs in the UK, and for me it’s important to ensure that local communities are considered first-and-foremost by local authorities, project promoters and government. “Today there were some robust discussions around government’s proposals to scrap the statutory duty to consult for NSIPs. “This is something that the county council fundamentally disagrees with - our communities need more and better consultation, not less. “We welcome any opportunity to further engage with Government to share our expertise as to what meaningful engagement should look like.”

Delegates from across the country attended the Conference to hear speakers from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), legal experts, and industry leaders discussing the emerging

Planning and Infrastructure Bill, effective communication with project promoters, and the importance of local impact reports.

The conference further cements Suffolk County Council’s recognised role as a Centre of Excellence for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs) for its expertise when engaging with projects, such as Sizewell C, the Gull Wing, National Grid upgrades, solar farms and offshore wind farms.

The conference was sponsored by Cornerstone Barristers, Howes Percival, National Infrastructure Planning Association and Sharpe Pritchard.

Following the success of this year’s conference, it will take place again in June 2026.

The 250-megawatt solar farm and battery energy storage system will be spread out over 1,500 acres at multiple sites in the parishes of Occold, Eye, Brome and Oakley, Stuston, Thrandeston, Mellis, Burgate, Thornham Parva, Gislingham and Yaxley.

The report outlines many concerns, including:

• Numerous parcels of Grade 2 agricultural land to be lost

• Significant impacts on multiple communties and sensitive habitats and landscapes, such as Mellis Common

• Numerous sites of high archaeological sensitivity

• Cable corridors causing irreversible damage

“Frankly, there are serious questions about whether [this scheme] should ever have seen the light of day.”

Councillor Richard Rout, Suffolk County Council’s Cabinet Member for Devolution, Local Government Reform and NSIPs

Furthermore, the county council strongly recommends that EcoPower publishes an interim design report by the end of June 2025. This would provide refined plans in light of further assessment work to be conducted, and the responses to this non-statutory consultation.

This would go some way to providing reassurance and clarity regarding the proposals to the local community. It will also allow all concerned to review more details, in timely fashion, ahead of the statutory consultation expected later this year.

Councillor Richard Rout, Suffolk County Council’s Cabinet Member for Devolution, Local Government Reform and NSIPs, said:

“My primary concern remains for the many local communities, who are already feeling the direct impact of the proposals of this scheme – which hasn’t even been given approval, let alone been built. Frankly, there are serious questions about whether it should ever have seen the light of day.

“It seems that the aim of this project is for it to be delivered as fast as possible, encouraged by the government’s unrealistic obsession to decarbonise the grid by 2030.”

Suffolk County Council recently expressed its concerns in response to government proposals concerning reforms to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill.

One of the proposals is to remove the duty on project promoters to consult and engage with communities before a project is presented to the Planning Inspectorate. Further, the duty to have regard to any comments on voluntary consultations undertaken by a promoter is also proposed to be removed.

Councillor Richard Rout continues:

“In many ways, this EcoPower proposal can be a litmus test for how well communities are, or I fear aren’t, engaged with.

“Even before government’s latest plans to eliminate public engagement, this solar farm project was going to be running on the least amount of consultation possible.

“It is in EcoPower’s gift to work with local authorities, communities and organisation, beyond what is demanded of them by the current planning process. However, as a council our firm objection to projects that remove any of Suffolk’s best quality agricultural from food production, remains steadfast.”

EcoPower anticipates running its statutory consultation in Autumn 2025.

In this piece, I’ll pick up on some of the major entries on the Transmission Entry Capacity (TEC) Register over the last few weeks.

Over the late summer and early autumn, I highlighted some solar proposals from Noventum (460MW and circa 2,000 acres) at Long Stratton and Elmya (900MW and circa 4,500 acres) at Gissing. Both connect to the new “North Anglia Connection Node A 400kV” substation. Despite me raising it with them back in September, the local media have finally woken up to the scale of this and there has been coverage in the Eastern Daily Press (EDP).

Now, this week, two further schemes have been given connection offers to the North Anglia Connection Node A. Enso Green Holdings X Limited is proposing another 400MW solar farm with the project name Long Stratton 400. Using our usual benchmarks, this – like the Noventum scheme – will likely come in at around 2,000 acres. In addition, we have a 400MW Energy Storage System connection offer granted to Field Devco Ltd. Assessing land take for Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) is not straightforward, but a reasonable estimate would put a 400MW storage scheme at approximately 16 – 20 acres. Not nearly as vast as the solar proposals but, given the typical aesthetic, an example of which you’ll see further down this page, this is not insubstantial. Enso seem a relatively established player and you can view their website here. In terms of Field Devco Ltd, I can’t find a huge amount of information but they could well be a subsidiary, or UK development wing, of Field Energy. Both schemes have connection offers for 2034.

Taken together, the schemes from Noventum, Elmya, Enso and Field Devco could see approaching 9,000 acres of land developed in the Long Stratton area for new energy projects. I’ll stress once again, that we don’t yet know precisely where the North Anglia Connection Node A substation will be but, given the area these schemes are looking at, it’s clearly adjacent to Long Stratton and will, most likely, connect into the Norwich to Tilbury Pylon scheme, should it be consented. My prior entries on these pages set out more of this rationale.

In terms of other substantial connection offers made over the past few weeks, there are five further BESS schemes worth highlighting.

The first of these, which comes in at 1000MW, connects to the Yaxley 400kV substation and is proposed by NP SPV 40 Limited, whose name has now changed to Yaxley Energy Limited. The project name is National Power Yaxley Green Energy Park, which points to the scale of things to come at Yaxley – see my prior entries for a summary of the circa 13,000 acres of solar with connection offers in the area. This new BESS site would likely be around 40 – 50 acres in size. From experience, concerns about battery storage installations are not just about scale and impact on the landscape but, understandably given the BESS fire in Liverpool which took 59 hours to extinguish, focus on hazardous substance and fire management plans.

The second is mirror image, at Tilbury in Essex, connecting to a new “South Anglia Connection Node C 400kV Substation”. Once again, this is a new substation magically materialising along the yet to be consented Norwich to Tilbury pylon run. As at Yaxley, this is a 1000MW scheme and while it’s proposed by Natpower Marine UK Limited, their address is the same as NP SPV 40 Limited / Yaxley Energy Limited. The name too reflects that at Yaxley - NatPower Tilbury Green Energy Park.

There are two further BESS schemes, also at 1000MW, clearly from the same parent company, Natpower UK Limited (registered at the same Mayfair address), at Allington Green Energy Park and Immingham Green Energy Park. All four schemes have connection offers in 2034.

Another scheme which seems to have flown under the radar is at Sizewell in Suffolk. Proposed by Greenswitch Capital Limited, we have a 500MW energy storage scheme called Manor Farm given a connection offer to the Sizewell 400kV substation. Although not as large as the 1000MW schemes above, this is unlikely to be received well in an area already besieged by energy projects and adjacent to a National Landscape (formerly Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty). Manor Farm has a connection offer date of 2034 and you can read more about Greenswitch Capital on their website here.

Finally, it’s worth highlighting the 600MW Lightsource BP Amlwch BESS and Hydrogen scheme granted a connection offer at Wylfa South 400kV substation in Wales, with a connection offer for 2037.

As I said previously, the Norwich to Tilbury Pylon proposals already include an East Anglia 400kv Connection Node (EACN), into which the North Falls and Five Estuaries Wind Farms, alongside the Tarchon interconnector, are due to connect in Essex. However, this is an entirely new substation and given connection offers at Long Stratton and now Gissing, we are getting a better idea as to its likely location. The map below shows the route of the proposed Norwich to Tilbury Pylon run and I’ve crudely circled Long Stratton and Gissing. These two connection offers help build up a picture of where the new 400kV substation, which is as yet un-consented and has no plans in the public domain, is likely to be located.

While I stress that it is not confirmed that this new 400kV substation will later form part of, and connect to, the yet to be consented Norwich to Tilbury Pylon run, it is becoming more and more difficult to think it won’t. These two connection offers correlate with my conversations with solar developers where, quite understandably from a commercial point of view, their search corridor for sites is along the Norwich to Tilbury pylon run as they know National Grid will want to sell redundant capacity on the line. Where, as ever, I have more quarrel is the piecemeal and opaque way in which the combination of schemes come about. These two solar schemes are contingent upon a yet to be consented 400kV substation, around which no information is known to the public, and that substation is - seemingly - contingent upon an unconsented transmission scheme, in the form of Norwich to Tilbury. Infrastructure begets infrastructure and nothing is being openly and honestly debated or consented.

Returning to the RPC Elmya scheme, using the now consented Sunnica scheme as our usual benchmark, we can reasonably assume that this scheme near Gissing in Norfolk will be between 3,600 acres and 4,500 acres in size. Alongside the Noventum Long Stratton scheme, this means we already have as much as 6,500 acres of solar with connection offers in this small part of Norfolk. Both schemes will likely be within 5 to 7 miles of the new substation. The connection date for the RPC Elmya scheme is October 2024, the exact same date as the Noventum solar farm.

Reform of connection offers and regional spatial planning around energy is underway, with Ofgem dealing with spatial planning and the new NESO tackling connection offer reform. However, this is slim consolation to those living along or around the new Norwich to Tilbury Pylon route, and the similar route between Grimsby and Walpole in Lincolnshire, into which connection offers seem to be being made at pace. Ed Miliband’s haste to decarbonise the grid by 2030 will be driving this and much more will follow.

Unlike me, NSIP solar developers have not paused for breath and two new schemes are worth mentioning. I’ll start with the larger of the two, East Lincolnshire Solar, which appeared on the TEC Register yesterday evening. This is an 800MW solar and energy storage scheme so, using our usual benchmarks, somewhere between 3,500 acres and 4,000 acres in size. The project promoter is Statkraft UK Ltd who are, by their own description, “Europe’s largest renewable energy producer and a global company in energy market operations”. The connection offer is at the Lincolnshire Coastal Node B 400kV Substation, with a connection date of May 2035.

I’ve done a little preliminary digging on the Coastal Node B Substation and there is very little information out there. Basic Google searches keep pointing to the proposed Grimsby to Walpole pylon run and the new associated substations but this could be a false positive. Searching the TEC Register doesn’t make things any clearer, as the Statkraft scheme is the only project connecting to it. Unlike other solar schemes, which helpfully give you a clue as to their location by their name, all this project tells us is that it’s in east Lincolnshire. The indicative map below, from the Grimsby to Walpole project page, gives us the location of four new substations associated with the scheme. The Outer Dowsing Offshore Wind Consultation Report Appendix, from March of this year, refers to the Holistic Network Design (HND) of July 2022 recommending two possible connection points be considered for the Project; Lincolnshire Coastal Node (Lincs Node) and Weston Marsh. This Node, albeit without the B, could be one and the same. The second map below is from the HND and the two do seem to line up in terms of the second new substation (large purple dots) from the north on Grimsby to Walpole map.

This is a fair amount of speculation and all we know as fact is that there has been a connection offer given to a new 800MW solar scheme somewhere along the Lincolnshire coast within 5 to 7 miles of a new substation. Typical levels of transparency from National Grid.

It’s far easier to give more detail around the Chapel Rush Solar Scheme in Yorkshire, which was added to the TEC Register just over a week ago. The Thornton 400kV Substation, to which it connects, is just east of Thornton and approximately three miles south west of Pocklington. A vast number of schemes already have connection offers there, including an energy storage scheme from Zenobe Energy Ltd (330MW), an array of already approved schemes from Balwen Ltd (including more large solar schemes) one awaiting consent from Elmya RPC UK Melbourne Ltd (300MW energy storage) and some projects in scoping from IGP Solar 19 Ltd (500MW solar and energy storage), Rewe 9 Ltd (200MW energy storage), GP Thornton Energy Ltd (400MW energy storage), and a 160MW solar scheme from Anesco Ltd.

The Chapel Rush scheme, at 600MW, will likely be in the region of 3,000 acres and within 5 to 7 miles of the Thornton Substation. The promoter behind Chapel Rush is Renewables UK Solar and Storage Ltd based in Swindon. They look to be part of RWE Technology, of the same address, who have a large portfolio of solar projects around the UK.

The scale or projects with connection offers at the Thornton Substation is vast and, alongside Yaxley in Suffolk and Biggleswade in Bedfordshire which I’ve written about previously, it seems to be an emerging hub for renewable energy connections.

I won’t repeat here my criticisms of the way projects appear on the TEC Register or our approach to solar and spatial planning more generally, for those please refer to earlier entries on this Substack.

Please consider normal service resumed and I will be back updating these pages regularly.

When I do see my friends, I’m not the easiest either. I’m demanding and opinionated. Many of my largest friendship group like real ale. I’m not even sure what it is. Are there lots of fake ales out there, masquerading as ale? When does an ale become a beer and vice versa? Is there a committee of bearded men in Lord of the Rings t-shirts declaring when a beer achieves real ale status? All I know is I don’t like it. I’m not talking about mass market Greene King fare, that even I can quaff if the occasion demands. I mean the really dank stuff that smells like something between a Parisian street-toilet and heavily used dishwater and, worse still, the places that typically specialise in serving it have an aroma closer to the former and feel like they haven’t seen enough of the latter. Yet many of my friends enjoy it and want to go to places that sell it. So you would think I, out of the goodness of my heart, would tag along stoically and simply please myself with the fact I’m fortunate to be in their company as they sup a pint of imaginatively named delights (I never really remember any of the names but my guess is it’s usually something like skull-crusher or headbanger, if it’s at the strong end, or amber dusk if it’s something more sophisticated). But I’m not stoic. I moan like hell. Then I order a gin and tonic, of course they’ve only Beefeater so I moan about that too and the fact it came in a tumbler, and move on to wine, after demanding to see a wine list, and being pointed at a chalkboard that says house red and house white. At some point during the evening, I usually get my way, and we move on to a bar that sells good wine and mixes a decent negroni (if it’s that terrible watery premixed stuff that’s now fashionable in low effort establishments, cue another tantrum). This is possibly the best example of when I’m hardest to be around. But my friends are better people than me and they persevere. Fortunately, they also like wine and decent cocktails too.

The other example of when I’m at my worst is when it gets political. Now, my friends are very respectful and get that I can at once be a functioning member of the human race and a Tory. But enter friends of friends or, even more difficult, new boyfriends or girlfriends. These newcomers don’t know my good points, they’re unaware of how fun I am to be around as I moan about the places we drink and the drinks we’re drinking. As a result, they indulge more readily in a game of poke the Tory. I behave for all of five minutes before biting and giving them the greatest hits - taxation, Europe, Israel, the NHS. Full Tory fire and brimstone. Sometimes, in fact quite often, it’s not my nuanced view but I serve it up – it’s what they wanted, after all. If these new friends or significant others hang around, then the next months of my life are dominated by making up for this and convincing them that us Tories are people too. There’s only been one where I’ve failed and although it didn’t cost me the friendship, things haven’t been the same since. There’s a reticence there on my part and a scepticism on his.

My lack of effort has cost me friends too, at least I think that was the reason – I never made the effort to find out, but two of my closest friends of twenty plus years ago disappeared and removed me as friend on Facebook (the final step in friend cancellation for the pre-Tik Tokers). It was either my lack of effort or the fact that in 2005 I became much more politically active and that pulled the plug. I still think about them a lot, and miss them to this day, but sometimes, perhaps, friendships just end.

Those friends that I haven’t lost on the battlefield of life never cease to amaze me. We all look up to our friends. We think that, somehow, they have it totally together while we in our thirties, or now forties, are still figuring out how to be an adult. Like each of us, they will have their hidden darkness, but it doesn’t show. To me each of them is a superhero, with their own distinct power. There are those you turn to when you’re down, those you theorise and fix the world with, those who always know the right thing to do, those who are funnier than any stand-up comic you’ve ever seen, those who you haven’t seen in years yet you can pick up right where you left off, and…in my case…those who, despite your very best efforts to read every blog known to man, somehow manage to always be better than you at fantasy football.

Perhaps due to the lack of a true father figure growing up, I’ve always had some wiser older friends too – people that cross the mentor-friend barrier and guide you. I’ve had three in that mould, all of whom are no longer with us. Or, should I say, dead. Another friend reprimands me for beating about the bush around death – I’ve a tendency to say, ‘passed away’ or, worse, ‘lost’, as though they’ve taken a wrong turn on the way to the shops. It makes it easier to think that but she’s right to chastise me. There was Pete Bailey, who I’ve written about previously and who guided me out of academic mediocrity, and then Mark. Mark was only a few years older but when we met in my late teens, it felt like an eternity. He too enjoyed the sophisticated things, that Pete had introduced me to, like fine wine and proper coffee. Thanks to him, I was probably the only 18-year-old with a Gaggia Classic on their bedside table. He was also a bounder and a cad. His was an example more of what not to do, absinthe for example, but I looked up to him still. When he had got his own life on track, remarkably so in fact, he was killed in a car accident while on holiday in Australia. He died saving his son and partner – turning to take the impact from a huge out of control truck on his side of the vehicle. As a haemophiliac, he didn’t stand a chance. After the atheist hedonistic years of Mark being my older guiding light, I by chance became friends with a retired priest, Ron Casebow. We came upon each other in Waitrose, he remembered me from years ago in the Bury St Edmunds branch of Ottakar’s bookshop – I’d helped him locate his wife, whom he’d misplaced but was easily locatable due to her impressive purple hat (one of many impressive hats). He invited me for tea, I signed the visitors’ book at their house in Palgrave and for eighteen years, until his death in 2023, he was a stubborn voice of reason in my life. None of the three were perfect, far from it, but they all helped shape and influence me. They taught me that older is often wiser. It’s a lesson I try to remember and I now try to be that voice of reason for people who have also ‘lost’ their father. A now close friend, nearly two decades my junior, lives 3,424 miles away in Ismailia, Egypt. We’ve never met in person and came to know each other gaming online during the first covid lockdown. His father died when he was young and we speak each week, either on WhatsApp video or Messenger. Despite the cultural differences – which are stark – we get along famously. That I count someone I’ve never met in person amongst my closest friends is not just a miracle of technology but also part of the far grander miracle of the human condition. We are, beneath all the noise, the same.      

Returning to the particular friend with whom I’m celebrating this weekend, he shall remain nameless. I’m striving not to name anyone still alive in this piece, though they can probably pick themselves out. Even if I did name him, you wouldn’t find him anywhere, he’s a secretive and private fellow. No digital footprint. Google him and he doesn’t exist. It’s a remarkable feat in an era when someone can’t make a coffee at work without the entire internet congratulating them on LinkedIn. The fact that he doesn’t appear to exist is probably quite apt because, like other of my friends, someone quite so kind has little right to. Pass through Cumbria this weekend and you may see me sat at a restaurant table alone, speaking to an empty chair – it could very well turn out he’s a figment of my imagination. The few photos I’ve been permitted to take over the years reassure me this is not the case but, you know, the mind can do strange things.

We first met twenty years ago this weekend. Things got off to a cracking start when he politely informed me that I drove a hairdresser’s car and most of my life choices to date were poor. He was right on both counts. The end of 2004 was not a great time for me, much of 2005 wasn’t brilliant either. Boy meets girl, heartache, anguish – you know the deal. If there’s a year of my life that still haunts me, it’s that one. Exactly what I needed was courteously delivered ridicule and someone who didn’t indulge me for a second. For the twenty years that have followed, the advice has been remarkably consistent – ‘don’t date her, she isn’t interested - don’t try to date her, perhaps don’t marry this one, that’s a waste of money, stop feeling sorry for yourself, football is stupid, anything smaller than a V8 isn’t actually a car engine it belongs on a flymo, and, oh, conservatives aren’t really conservative anymore, by the way – let’s go out for dinner’. It’s usually exactly what I need to hear, even if I don’t want to hear it. He and his family took me under their wing and I’ve not looked back. There are several ‘sliding-doors’ moments in my life that I reflect on and think they set me on a better path, or at least kept me from a worse one, and embracing this friendship was definitely one of them.   

Like all of my friends, his life is moving on - marriage and the patter of tiny feet will inevitably follow. Sometimes, in this moment, we all have a pang of jealousy – a fear that our friends’ happiness will take them further from us. But, as much as my inner bitterness may want to, I can’t begrudge it. What we see in our friends, others will see too and we all deserve happiness. That I understand this is, perhaps, what stops me being a failure as a friend. Though I’m terrible at staying in contact, if I could make their lives easier or happier – I would do it in an instant. They just might need to call me to ask.

It's not just my friends who are superheroes. We are all, each of us, endowed with our own superpower - we all just have something slightly different in our toolkit. We may be our group’s best listener or the one that pulls everyone together when people like me are making no effort at all. What mine is, and why my friends associate with me, I’ve no idea. It could be that knowing would break the magic. I can throw a damn good party, and, thanks to Pete and Mark’s influence, the wine and coffee is always on point and, thanks to Ron’s, I’m pretty good at leading the repentance that follows too. It’s been several years since my last shindig, covid and all that. Perhaps it’s time to dust off the best wine glasses, throw another bash and raise a glass to all my friends – dead and alive. I just need to remember to make the effort and get around to it.

Energy is a weirdly tribal political issue. It basically goes something like this: far left – renewables only and nuclear will kill us all, left – renewables plus nuclear and decarbonise really fast, centre – renewables and nuclear but decarbonise a little slower, right – nuclear, hydrogen, cynical acceptance of renewables but let’s hang on to oil and gas for a while, far right – it’s all a globalist conspiracy and we’re weeks from George Soros and Bill Gates instigating  ‘climate lockdowns’. I would wager that I could determine who someone traditionally votes for simply by chatting about energy for less than a minute. There are few other areas where one could say that. Immigration, perhaps.

Returning to the accusation that I’m anti-solar, why has this come about? Well, I’ve led the charge against the Sunnica solar farm from a political perspective for some years. I won’t rehash the arguments but it’s a bad scheme that never should have been approved. In addition, I’ve sounded off about the scale and quantity of solar schemes in the pipeline for Suffolk. In fact, I referred to it as a ‘tidal wave’. Taking these two things together it’s not an unfair leap to have made.

There’s more that I’ve said publicly that could see me further painted as anti-solar. I’ve highlighted, repeatedly, how inefficient it is compared with other forms of energy generation. Taking a broad brushstroke approach, what I’ve dubbed the ‘Ronseal factor’; Nuclear does 95% of what it says on the tin (it has some downtime for maintenance), off-shore wind does around 65% (maintenance plus sometimes the wind isn’t blowing hard enough or is blowing too hard), on-shore wind does around 50% (the same reasons but the wind blows less hard generally) and solar in the UK…14%. Why is solar so gloriously inefficient? Straight out of the blocks, for three months of the year the sun isn’t high enough in the sky for it to do anything and for the remaining nine months there’s a good deal of cloud cover. Therefore, when people say six Sunnica solar farms generate as much energy as Sizewell C, what they mean is the generating capacity is broadly the same – not the actual output. In reality, you’d need around 40 Sunnica solar farms to be sure of generating the same amount of energy annually as Sizewell C and, even then, you’d get nothing for three months of the year. To put that in terms of acreage, you’re looking at 80,000 acres of solar to match the output of Sizewell C. The new nuclear power station at Sizewell will need 80 acres or, to be absolutely fair, 900 acres if you included everything through the build, maintenance and operation. How big is 80,000 acres? It’s bigger than the metropolitan borough of Birmingham. Looking at this in tandem with duration of consent, which is typically 40 years, and the rate at which technology is evolving – is greenfield solar really a good use of land?

Then there are the supply chain issues. There is, as yet, no guarantee around where solar panels are produced and how the workers are treated. In fact, quite to the contrary, dig into the subject and you’ll get increasingly alarmed about forced labour in Xinjiang, the appalling treatment of – in particular – the Uighur minority, and the wider production of polysilicon (an essential component in solar panels and 75% of the global supply is made in China). Back in 2022, members of the UK solar energy industry condemned and opposed ‘any abuse of human rights, including forced labour, anywhere in the global supply chain’ and went on to commit to  ‘the development of an industry-led traceability protocol’. Not too much happened until the Solar Stewardship Initiative (SSI) was launched in December of last year. What does this actually do? Apparently independent assessors will be able to evaluate compliance with ‘robust sustainability and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) criteria within companies active in the solar value chain’. That word salad aside, the mission still seems high level and vague – ‘establish mechanisms to create supply-chain transparency’, for example. You would think somewhere between 2021 and 2024 someone would have figured out how to give this transparency, the industry must know where it is buying its panels from, but it has yet to come and nor has the government really pressed the issue. Perhaps they know the answer but don’t really like it.

Now let’s move on to the ‘tidal wave’ of solar facing not just Suffolk but the whole of the UK, particularly now the Tigger-esque Ed Miliband is excitedly bouncing up and down at the thought of all these highly ethical solar farms arriving by 2030. My major quarrel is one I’ve written about before – how connection offers are made and the fact National Grid ESO are legally obliged to provide one within six weeks. No thought is given to spatial planning and, therefore, vast swathes of solar follow new transmission lines, grid connection points and areas where there’s redundant capacity. It’s not driven by best land use or any wider strategic planning, it’s simply led by where we can plug it in.

So, there you have it, I’m anti-solar. Well, no, actually. I’m all for it. Just not the way we’re doing it. First of all, we need to fix the supply chain issue and that will make panels more expensive and solar, initially at least, less commercially viable but it’s important. We need those guarantees. We must not deliver our nation’s energy on the back of slave labour in China. There are, of course, ethical questions about all aspects of all forms of energy production but, hopefully, we can all agree forced labour and the treatment of the Uighur people is abhorrent. It is resolvable though and despite the industry’s procrastination, it should be pretty simple. It will drive up prices and in turn make the energy generated by solar more expensive but eradicating forced labour from the supply chain, or at least our supply chain, is worth it.

But how, you might ask, do we fix solar’s relative inefficiency in the UK? You can’t, although the technology continues to improve, which is why we need to focus on dual land use. Part of my opposition to the Sunnica scheme was the loss of good quality food-producing land. It’s about now someone pipes up and bangs on about 1% of the UK being golf courses and we only need 1% of the UK to be solar. Well, if you wanted to make another 1% of the UK golf courses, I’d have something to say about that too – particularly if they were all concentrated in the same places around grid connection points. But my real quarrel is this; why would you give over good quality food-producing land solely to something so inefficient. It’s just a waste. If you have a rooftop that’s doing nothing, then putting solar panels on it that generate 14% of their total capacity is a win. It’s a lot more than zero. You give dual use to something you live or work under. The same argument can be made for over car parks, schools, down motorway embankments, the sides of railway lines. The list goes on. The big challenge here is local grid connection points. The local distribution grid, managed in my part of the world by UKPN, isn’t up to snuff and not enough effort is going into upgrading it. This matters because to be able to sell excess power back into the grid and contribute to national energy supply, that local distribution network needs to be there and have sufficient capacity. UKPN are one of six Distribution Network Operators (DNOs) in the UK who between them hold the fourteen distribution licences. Let’s focus on this part of the grid as much as we are the transmission network because, ultimately, it means more decentralised power generation and less big infrastructure.

This argument about dual land use can be applied to agricultural land too. Enter agri-voltaics. These are, essentially, panels mounted vertically (rather than pitched), or mounted higher, between or under which you can still farm. This has the added benefit of being able to help reduce water usage by affording shade where it is needed. The panels can be relatively low and robots or casual workers pick crops between or underneath them or high enough – and far apart enough – for full size combines and farm equipment to farm under or around them. Italy is all for agri-voltaics, TotalEnergies in France have been doing some interesting trials and there is growing support in Germany. In effect, they shoot the food security vs energy security fox by allowing land to do both and allowing farmers to make more money out of the same piece of land. Early trials even suggest yields markedly improve. However, agri-voltaics still leave one glaring downside - the changing of our landscape. This is an altogether different argument and if we avoid our most beautiful areas, have the right mitigations, avoid settlements and public rights of way – ie take a constraints led approach, then it’s harder to argue against them. In fact, vertically mounted panels, in the correct location, could arguably have less visual impact than traditional ground mounted panels. We’ve yet to see an agri-voltaic NSIP scale proposal in the UK but I know we’re not far off having the first.

The problem of siting will remain and, at the moment, we’re still in a situation where infrastructure begets infrastructure with nobody watching over the whole. As I’ve mentioned previously, Regional Energy Strategic Plans (RESPs) will likely be coming in 2026, perhaps – with a fair wind – late 2025. Until then, however, we’re in a gold rush situation. I won’t return to it in detail but all of this is another argument for taking a breath and reverting to decarbonising by 2035 rather than 2030. It still allows us to reach net zero by 2050 but allows us to do it better.

I mentioned one argument at the start of this piece that I often fall back on and it remains the case. Sometimes the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. It’s why we need an energy mix to make our supply in this country resilient. We need nuclear, small modular reactors, ‘pocket nuclear reactors’, hydrogen, methods of storage (battery and hydrogen), wind and solar. If we want to make best use of technology and our geography, while ensuring a fair and just transition to clean energy, then we need a balanced approach.

So, there you have it, I’m not anti-solar. I’m just against doing it badly.

I grew up on a decent dose of comedy thanks, in many respects, to the good taste of my mother. Blackadder (1983 - 1989), Frasier (1993 - 2004), Whose Line is it Anyway (1988 - 1999), Fist of Fun (1995 - 1996), Father Ted (1995 -1998) and Brass Eye (1997 - 2001) all set the scene. With her approval, I delved further back into Yes Minister / Yes Prime Minister (1980 -1988), Fawlty Towers (1975 - 1979), Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969 - 1974) and The Goon Show (1951 - 1960). With the exception of Frasier, all of these were British creations, and our one point of difference was my love of another US show, Friends (1994 - 2004).

From the late 70s through to the late 90s, we seemed to be in a golden era of British comedy on the mainstream broadcasters. Things staggered on through Ricky Gervais’s masterpiece, The Office (2001 - 2003), and brilliant, offbeat shows like Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace (2004) and The Mighty Boosh (2004-2007). Looking back, The Thick of It feels like the last hurrah, the almost dying breath of actually being allowed to be funny on British broadcast television.

Part of this could just be me getting older. It’s quite typical to look back and say we’re not allowed to be funny anymore. Such arguments are often made on social media about things that most of us now, quite rightly, regard as offensive and discriminatory – in this category, I’d place people like Jim Davidson, Roy Chubby Brown and Bernard Manning. That kind of comedy is, and I risk like sounding like a member of the wokerati here, simply cheap and ‘othering’. So I choose not to watch it and hope others do the same. But we seem to have overcorrected to the point that we stifle creativity in new British comedy and retrospectively ‘cancel’ moments of comedic genius. Fawlty Towers is one example where, of course, things would, and should, be written differently today but that doesn’t mean we should strike off one of the best examples of British comedy. Those who delight at being offended have even retrospectively come for Friends due to the lack of diversity among the leading cast. Correcting these issues in shows made now is important but that does not mean we can’t use comedy - as we did in the past - to call out ridiculous and offensive behaviour, through satire, and darkly chuckle along the way. There is a big difference between the genius of John Clease, where we are laughing at Basil Fawlty, and jokes from the likes of Bernard Manning but somewhere along the line, in the UK, we’ve lost the ability to trust the audience to make that distinction. On the other side of the Atlantic, there seems to be far more faith placed in the viewing public.

Looking at comedy that’s come out of the USA over the last decade is what reassures me that it’s not just me getting old. Veep is one obvious example but The League (2009 – 2015) is another as is What We Do in the Shadows (2019 – present) and the ongoing animated series South Park (1997 - present), Family Guy (1999 - present) and Rick and Morty (2013 - present). Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000 - 2024) has also endured over that period. Even moving into the sphere of ‘dramedy’ there are shows originally broadcast and created in the USA that enter comedic spaces that shows produced for broadcast television in the UK wouldn’t dare to touch. Succession (2018 - 2023) is a clear example where we see a stream of the most hilariously despicable characters.

Perhaps it’s the First Amendment that’s allowed the USA to better ride the wave of political correctness that’s seen British broadcast comedy falter. South Park is often dismissed as a crude cartoon on these shores but since 1997 it has clearly shown that truly brilliant comedy pushes boundaries and treats everything, equally, as fair game. It is at once able to point out the absurdities of certain positions or groups and make us laugh at those who are discriminatory. Consider for a moment how long it would take the Guardian reading masses to cancel Matt Stone and Trey Parker were they British. Would the BBC, or even Channel 4, dare go there if such a show was pitched to them.

We’ve lost our desire to be brave in British comedy, it’s why we see the likes of Ricky Gervais turn to Netflix, who as an international player aren’t afraid to push boundaries, but his ability to do that so freely with content like After Life (2019 - 2022) is, perhaps, the product of his prior success. Other British masters of the darker side of comedy, such as Matt Berry, have also found a home for their talent stateside. It’s not that I simply want our comedy to be dark, as much as I enjoy that, I just want it to be good and getting to good means creative freedom. Growing up, I idealised Niles Crane – those of you who have seen me wipe down a chair will now realise it’s a hang-up from that era. Frasier was spectacular, even the recent reboot was better than anything we’ve managed for a decade on these shores, and it managed to at once to be perfectly written, ‘he was eminent when my eminence was merely imminent’, and brilliantly physical and slapstick – the finest example of this is David Hyde Pierce in the Three Valentines episode.

It’s the wider creative freedom, that doesn’t over censor humour, that has allowed American sitcoms to thrive. Over the past ten to fifteen years, the USA has given the world quality mainstream comedies like The Good Place (2016 - 2020), The Big Bang Theory (2007 - 2019), New Girl (2011 - 2018), Brooklyn Nine-Nine (2013 - 2021), Parks & Recreation (2009 - 2015), Upload (2020 - present), Only Murders in the Building (2021 - present) and Modern Family (2012 - 2020) to name just a few, alongside darker comedy and ‘dramedy’. Comedy in the USA has not lost its edge like ours has and through Saturday Night Live (1975 - present) has the most reliable of comedic production lines - watch their relatively recent Washington’s Dream sketch which is not only hilarious but contains a critique of racial discrimination which would likely be too much for a British broadcaster.

Some might suggest that there is a correlation between the deterioration of British broadcast output and the emergence of Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, AppleTV - I could go on for far too long listing them. But were this the cause, there would have been a similar fall in quality and output overseas too. To be fair, streaming services do offer some glimmers of hope for the collective British funny bone. Shows like Sex Education (2019 - 2023), though relatively inoffensive and unwilling to push boundaries with any force - despite the risqué title, demonstrate that a lack of British acting talent is clearly not the problem. But it is a far cry from the outright comedy we used to excel at and remains many miles from the era defining shows we used to produce. Something about it, and other shows we produce on these shores, feels like the handbrake is still being held. That we don’t quite dare go where writers in other countries more freely tread.

Recently, the Director of Comedy at the BBC, John Petrie, called on the TV industry to ‘save our sitcoms’. His goal is noble but the root cause of the death of the British sitcom isn’t the TV industry it’s the heads of British broadcasters who seem to stifle creativity and no longer dare to be different lest they hurt someone’s feelings. The BBC has long since stopped pushing boundaries and instead pushes agendas with shows like Dr Who now feeling more like a lesson in inclusivity than irreverent science fiction. Channel 4, which held out for longer with The Inbetweeners (2008 - 2010) being their most obvious final flurry, now seems equally terrified to offend. Censorship stifles creativity and our broadcasters have overcorrected. To create good sitcoms again, we need to be free to push the boundaries. I return to Freud – humour lets out forbidden thoughts. Here in the UK, however, we seem to be intent on forbidding humour out of the fear of causing offence.

There is a wider point here too, these little restrictions – the removal of the darker outlets for our humour all contribute to the sense that our freedom of speech in this country is being increasingly restricted. The new Labour government’s criticism and likely cancellation of the new Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act is another example of this. Beneath this the tension bubbles and people begin to believe their very thoughts are being policed. Rather than preventing hatred this over-restriction gives a platform to those who truly want to divide, who truly want to spread hatred.

We need to release this tension and what better place to start than comedy, so let’s take the shackles off. The left think that freedom of speech only extends to those with whom they agree. Fortunately, there is – as yet – no right not to be offended. Comedy should always push boundaries, it was true when Chaucer wrote about a bare-behind being thrust out of a window in The Miller’s Tale and it’s true today. If someone could remind our broadcasters of that, they might find their way to being funny again and if, heaven forbid, you’re upset by what you see – just switch it off.

The Norwich to Tilbury Pylon proposals already include an East Anglia 400kv Connection Node (EACN), into which the North Falls and Five Estuaries Wind Farms, alongside the Tarchon interconnector, are due to connect in Essex. However, I’ve yet to see mention of a North Anglia Connection Node, with - please note - the suffix A! Leaving open, of course, when B or indeed C might appear. We need to press National Grid, with some urgency, on where precisely this new North Anglia Connection Node will be but given the location of the proposed solar farm is Long Stratton, one can reasonably assume it will be within 5, to a very maximum of 10, miles from there. There are plans to expand the Norwich Main Substation to the east and west, which I recently wrote about Ofgem planning to accelerate, but the name doesn’t line up at all. Therefore, we can reasonably assume this is the first of one or more brand new connection points in the “North Anglia” area.

Earlier in the year, I met with a solar developer - who I will not name - and, to their credit, their preferred process of constraints led site selection was far better than we experienced with Sunnica. However, when discussing where, in the broadest sense, they were looking in our region, their search corridor aligned quite precisely with the proposed Norwich to Tilbury route. I queried this and they stated, as we of course know too, there will be redundant capacity on the Norwich to Tilbury line and National Grid will want to sell that capacity. Is this new Connection Node the first in what will be several steps of National Grid cashing in on that capacity?

In terms of Noventum and their Long Stratton proposals, these will be very much in their infancy given they’ve a connection offer of October 2034. The recently consented Sunnica scheme has a connection offer of 2027, so this project is some 7 years behind that. We first had discussion of the Sunnica scheme in public in around 2019, so we are unlikely to see lines on maps for 12 months. Noventum is emerging as a major player in the renewables sector, with multiple schemes on the TEC Register including one at Biggleswade which I recently highlighted. A lot more detail about Noventum can be found on their website.

The announcement of many more vast solar schemes being given connection offers is inevitable, particularly in the context of Ed Miliband’s 2030 decarbonisation target. However, what this proposed scheme at Long Stratton and the new North Anglia Connection Node highlight once again is the glaring absence of any true spatial planning and joined up thinking around energy generation in the UK. As I’ve repeatedly said, communities need and deserve clarity and the iterative and opaque way that schemes emerge, with connection offers granted prior to any consultation, does nothing to build trust in a just energy transition.

You can listen to these two admissions below:

In answer to the clear question about whether West Suffolk Council still oppose the scheme, Cliff says “no” and then goes on to say “we didn't oppose it, we had some objections to the scheme”.

This is quite the reversal of position from West Suffolk’s Labour and Independent “Progressive Alliance” and a position that has never been adopted or voted on in public. In fact, the last publicly stated position from the Council was prior to the May 2023 District Council elections when there was still a Conservative administration. Later in the interview, he says that the approval of Sunnica “puts Suffolk in a really good position”. There are, of course, jobs and skills benefits from some of the energy projects coming forward in Suffolk but few, if any, of those are associated with NSIP scale solar. There is a clear question here of public accountability and transparency - simply put, when did the Independent and Labour administration decide they no longer opposed the Sunnica scheme and why wasn’t this decision taken in public?

This apparent about-turn gives added context to what I expected to write about today, the withdrawal of West Suffolk Council and Cambridgeshire County Council from our joint legal action.

This action was on a key but narrow point of principle - that local councils were being shortchanged by the Secretary of State’s decision and not adequately compensated for the work we do discharging conditions attached to the scheme. During the examination, the local authorities put forward representations on what fair compensation would be and stated that the applicant, Sunnica, was not being sufficient in their proposals. The Examining Authority seemed to side with the councils in their judgement but the Development Consent Order (DCO) as presented to the Secretary of State didn’t reflect this. The Secretary of State, in making his decision, didn’t address this and thus, seemingly without consideration in what was an extremely hasty decision, left local councils inadequately compensated. In such an event, it’s then left to local councils - and therefore local taxpayers - to foot the bill. Given developers stand to make a huge amount of money from these schemes, it’s only right they and not local residents pick up the tab. This is all the more important in Suffolk where, as I’ve written previously, a raft of similar solar projects have been given connection offers.

In withdrawing from the joint legal action, West Suffolk District Council and Cambridgeshire County Council made it unviable for us to proceed for two reasons. First, a fifty-fifty split of costs between East Cambridgeshire District Council and Suffolk County Council was too much for East Cambridgeshire, who are a smaller authority than West Suffolk. Second, it would, therefore, have left Suffolk County Council trying to pursue this action alone. We considered this but our legal advice was as the local authorities adversely affected (ie the District Councils who discharge the vast majority of conditions) were not seeking to challenge the decision, we were highly unlikely to get permission to bring a Judicial Review (JR). In short, West Suffolk District Council and Cambridgeshire County Council killed the JR by withdrawing and making it too expensive and less credible.

Was this their plan all along and why did they initially join us in a pre-action protocol letter? I’m at a loss to explain. However, the cynic in me finds it hard to get beyond the thought that Labour councillors who form part of the ruling coalition on Cambridgeshire County Council and lead West Suffolk District Council’s “Progressive Alliance”, with independent colleagues, may have found it increasingly difficult to so publicly go against a new Labour government and Labour Secretary of State. The two councils will, of course, say we may have lost the legal action - this is true of any legal action but we were assured we had a reasonable chance of success. They will also say that it was possible we’d go through all of this only for the Secretary of State to make the same decision again. Again, this was a potential outcome but so too was the reverse - that the councils were adequately compensated. Fear of a negative outcome should not prevent us standing up for local communities and all of these outcomes were equally possible when we first sent the pre-action protocol letter.

This debate over fees and Planning Performance Agreements (PPAs) will rage on in the NSIP space and we need to continue to press for adequate compensation for local authorities. Developers will clearly favour a minimal fee arrangement that doesn’t address all of the costs local councils incur. It remains to be seen if the new Labour government will side with developers, as early decisions seem to indicate, or listen to us.

Despite the Independent and Labour Councillors that run West Suffolk District Council turning their back on local communities and now seemingly giving their public support to the Sunnica solar farm, there is still some hope. The Say No to Sunnica action group are continuing with their JR which, unlike ours, has the potential to quash the scheme. JRs from community groups are very difficult to mount and you can contribute to their fundraiser here should you wish to do so. I for one hope they are successful - as I have repeatedly said, the Sunnica solar farm is the worst NSIP we’ve ever dealt with.

You can listen to my full interview with Wayne Bavin on BBC Radio Suffolk here.

Why Leeds United? A question I ask myself every day. It is the most punishing of existences. You don’t choose a football club to support. They choose you. For some, it’s a familial loyalty but growing up without a father, I eschewed the obvious choices of some in my family – Ipswich and Norwich. My friends were mostly fans of one of the holy trinity of Liverpool, Arsenal and Manchester United. But none had tugged at my heart. I forget the exact match that I fell in love with Leeds, I think it was in 1990 against Wimbledon. But I was definitely watching it, or the highlights, at my grandparents’ house and something about the noise from the crowd, angrily defiant, and the ferocious levels of passion on the pitch spoke to me. I was besotted and when told by my disappointed Ipswich supporting uncle, who lived with them, that my grandfather on my dad’s side hailed from Yorkshire, I realised it was written in the stars. Leeds were meant for me and I was meant for Leeds. Looking back, my family always had a predilection for sporting heroes whose commitment bordered on the violent. Other enduring memories include my very diminutive Great Aunt bellowing ‘kill him’ and ‘give them hell’ at an England rugby player launching himself at a Welsh opponent and my mother looking, rather too affectionately, at John McEnroe smashing tennis racquets like he was warding off evil spirits at a Greek wedding. Leeds and I were a match made in heaven.

In fact, being a football fan is the closest thing to organised religion that I practice. For true football fans it is a core part of who you are – cut me and I bleed the white of Leeds United. From August to May, it dictates my mood. Finding ourselves now in the Championship and one of the main TV draws, all too often we play on a Friday night or early on a Saturday. Thank you, Sky TV, for ruining so many weekends last season and – I am sure – this coming one. There is something inherently sneering about being a football fan, a feeling that nobody quite understands the passion of the game like you do and Leeds fans are amongst the most devout. We look at those who have a ‘second club’ with the disdain they deserve. If you’re a real fan, you can’t split your affections like you’re Lord Voldemort squirreling away parts of your soul. Your soul, in its entirety, belongs to one club and one club alone. Politics had to come into this at some point and when, during the recent General Election, I saw an opponent who claimed to be a Norwich City fan wishing Ipswich Town well, I knew they either weren’t really a Norwich fan or were lying. I love Suffolk, I love Ipswich as a place, I see all the economic benefits of Ipswich being in the Premier League and the logical side of my brain wants them to stay there. But deep in my soul I don’t, I want them to lose and lose terribly – I wish nothing upon them but Sheffield United levels of incompetence in defence just to spare me my smug friends gloating even more and parading their freshly pressed Kalvin Phillips shirts in front of me. If you’re a football fan, this is how you feel about your rivals – particularly those signing up your former stars. Admitting it might not be politically astute but all real fans know it’s the truth.

So many of my fondest memories revolve around the game, whether it was watching Euro 96 with my friend, Scott, or dropping in and out of the stockroom at Ottakar’s bookshop, a chain I worked for at the time, to keep up to date with Leeds putting four goals past Liverpool in the early 2000s. This latter match was made all the sweeter due to the fact my colleague, Pete, who I knew from school and who was unpacking boxes listening to the game, was an avid Liverpool fan. Much like the kung-fu adept girl at the bus stop, Pete had – and continues to have – the last laugh. Then there was the advent of Marcelo Bielsa and Leeds’ short-lived return to the Premier League, a feeling so pure it still brings tears to my eyes. Other football related events stick in my head because they opened my eyes to the game’s part in our collective behaviour. In October 1997 – while at university in London – I got wrapped up in the celebrations following England’s 0-0 draw with Italy that saw us qualify for the World Cup. Before I knew it, I was stood by a statue in Trafalgar Square with hundreds of others dancing and chanting. A year earlier, I’d read a book – which still sits on my shelf today – on ‘the power of the crowd’. This was an early lesson for me not just in the power crowds, literal and figurative, wield but also the power they hold over individuals caught up in them. Crowds can take on a life of their own and move with collective consciousness, in times of celebration – like 1997 – this can be unruly, unseemly even, but not destructive. At others, we see internal darkness and frustrations spill over into something else entirely.

Being a football fan is difficult but being a Leeds fan is somewhere over the horizon beyond difficult. This becomes part of who you are. Sometimes, I wonder if I let it define me. We are a sleeping giant of the game in the sense that the history of the club, the size of the fanbase, the unrivalled passion, and the city being one of the largest ‘one club’ settlements in the country, all suggest we should be feasting at the top table of the English game. But we’re not. We are the worst kind of sleeping giant, one that’s actually awake and spends most of its time shooting itself in the foot or enduring the worst of luck. We are, forever, on the cusp of great things. In 1991/92 we won the league, only to nearly get relegated the next season. Under David O’Leary, we built one of the best squads in Premier League history, only for the then Chairman, Peter Ridsdale, he of expensive goldfish fame, to stretch the club financially and into ruin. Relegations followed.

Then came Bielsa, a god-like figure to Leeds fans – I’ve a statue of him on my desk which people always look at quizzically. Bielsa was Leeds; passion, unrelenting belief and a refusal to compromise. He gave himself fully to the fanbase and the fanbase reciprocated. Promotion under him was glorious and he so very nearly built a team that, with investment, could have kept us in the Premier League. When he was sacked, in hindsight unfairly, the fire that he started went out and another relegation to the second tier was inevitable. Terribly drafted contracts have seen us lose our best players at the most inopportune moments and now, a week into the Championship season, having sold our three best players, things – once again – look gloomy. But the fanbase persists, like Bielsa, unrelenting and unforgiving. Such is the weight of expectation that we heap on the players and manager, the pressure is all too often too much. We snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, there is sometimes an inevitability about it that we almost relish. That, in our collective subconscious, a glorious and valiant defeat brings comradery like nothing else. All Leeds aren’t we.

When giving a speech to the local Conservative Party following the general election defeat, I invoked some of my inner Leeds fan. I quoted a terrible film, that you should never watch, the sort of thing Channel 4 will show on a rainy Saturday afternoon, called Cockleshell Heroes and the line, ‘On this glorious occasion of the splendid defeat’. I quoted it because when you’re doing something you believe in, with a group of likeminded people, sometimes in defiance of the odds, you build irrepressible bonds. Being a Leeds United fan has taught me how to deal with loss and disappointment but also how important honesty and being true to yourself is. It’s also taught me, that when I give myself to something or to a task, it’s only worth doing if you fully commit and give it your all. Better to go down swinging than regret it later. Everyone will take something from the club they support and the journey it has given them. I’m just aiming to bounce back quicker than my beloved football club and rest assured, in the words of my Great Aunt, I’ll continue to give my political opponents hell until then.

PS. Ipswich, look after Kalvin, he’s something special…

Concerned as we all are by the big topics of the day – the war in Ukraine, the conflict in Gaza and heightened tension across the Middle East, inflation, the NHS, immigration, a changing climate or taxation – if, when we step outside our door, the road surface looks a mess, the pavement is uneven, our bin hasn’t been emptied, a pothole has gone unfilled, and a god awful block of flats has been given planning permission while those in conservation areas jump through hoops to replace a window….we’re angry. Then we drive to the shops only to see that the parking charge has increased, or the hours we must pay to park have changed, and then, oh boy, the red mist truly descends. You see, local councils are responsible for those little things that we all see when we leave our homes, that contribute to our quality of life, and often dictate our mood for the day.

After spending nearly 20 years on local councils, at one level or another, do I really think they are that bad? Yes and no. My biggest gripe today remains what it was 19 years ago when I was first elected in a Bury St Edmunds Town Council by-election; that all too often council staff explain, at great length, why you can’t do what you want to do rather than help you get somewhere close to what you want to achieve. Their starting point is ‘no’ and you, the elected representative, are a necessary evil of democracy who is not an expert, have no idea just how complicated siting a dog poo bin actually is, and must be thwarted at all costs. It’s all part of a merry dance where, eventually, you think you’ve won a major victory by having a dog poo bin in the next postcode replaced with a slightly larger one. This isn’t all staff, of course, I’ve had the pleasure of working with some brilliant individuals over the last 19 years who ‘get’ this and as a result we’ve gone on to do and change some pretty key things, which have resulted in hundreds of millions of pounds of investment in Suffolk.

If I have another major complaint, it’s this; councils are too risk averse. They are terrified of being sued. Quite often, this fear is warranted and caution is needed. If you’re dealing with what I call ‘hidden services’, like adult care or supporting children with very acute needs, then the utmost care must be taken. If, however, you’re dealing with hanging baskets, Christmas lights or a road closure for a street market…then perhaps we don’t need to risk assess the project into oblivion. These things have been going on for decades and we’ve not seen scores of the population taken out by plummeting pelargoniums. Let’s find a sensible middle ground that makes death by daffodil unlikely but still allows things to go ahead.

A case in point is the Bury St Edmunds Christmas Fayre, it was one of the foremost Christmas Markets in the country – often listed in the top two or three, alongside the likes of Bath, Lincoln and Winchester. Of course, there were issues with traffic – and those could have been addressed – but, following a terrifying training course, West Suffolk Council staff returned determined to prevent it ever happening again because the risk assessment was just too scary. And they won. One of the region’s best loved events bit the dust because of red tape. Battle weary councillors, exhausted by years of being told no, barely put up a fight. But, at least we’re all safe, eh? In this sterilised world where less and less is allowed to happen.

Some council employees might be reading this and feeling rather wounded and, here, let me come to their defence. I don’t recall meeting a council officer who did not care, much as I’ve never met a single councillor who does not care. We all get stuck in loops of working practice and councils are places drowning in red tape. I sometimes think we’re addicted to bureaucracy in this country. I used to blame the EU but even without their dictats, we’ve proven ourselves incredibly adept at creating regulation where no regulation at all would be better. As a councillor, when you escalate smaller issues to senior staff at director level, they tend to understand and help you find a way to fix it. They’re at that level for a reason. But councils are an environment where, all too often, you end up speaking with one of the highest paid individuals there to fix a pothole or an emerging PR disaster relating to a hanging basket risk assessment. People further down the food chain are just doing their job and enforcing the reams of regulation foisted upon them. So please don’t hold it against council staff, it’s the system and culture that’s broken.

So far, I’ve not done much to alleviate the fears of those who think ‘townhall fat cats’ do nothing but deliberately make life difficult for your average Joe, or indeed Josephine – it’s 2024, after all. That’s far from the case, lots of really good work goes on in so many areas. There are projects I’ve been involved with that I’m so proud of – from small wildlife friendly gardens through planting over 200,000 trees across the county, not to mention all the residents I’ve helped with planning applications or issues with local schools and education. But that’s enough of me blowing my own brass instrument, I do what councillors are elected to do.

Where a good deal of the real work goes on is within those hidden services I referred to earlier. Homelessness, children in care, special educational needs and adult social care. Unless you’re unlucky enough to call on one of these services, you wouldn’t know they were happening. And the problem is more and more people are unlucky enough. People are living longer, a fundamentally good thing. Children are surviving childbirth who would not have survived even ten or fifteen years ago, a fundamentally good thing. Yet these two happy advances have consequences. We have an aging population, with a growing elderly cohort, and at the other end of the spectrum, more children with more and more complex needs. Wherever you live, regardless of the structure of local government (more on that in a moment), caring for those most in need very often falls to local councils and this costs money. Lots of money.

That the individuals that work in these services care can’t be disputed but, bluntly, through the fault of successive governments, many local councils – particularly those in rural areas due to the way funding formulas are based on historic deprivation indices – do not have the resources they need to adequately deal with the pressure on the service. Too often, this is seen as uncaring. Bad services, of course, exist and should be called out but many of the issues faced by councils are due to resourcing. Taking Suffolk as an example, where I led on the finances at the County Council between 2021 and 2024, over the last fifteen years these key services have gone from accounting for roughly 60p in every £1 the council spends to 76p in every £1. But even that is not enough to keep pace with demand where, in Special Educational Needs alone, the number of Children with Educational Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) has gone up from 5,000 to nearly 8,000 in a few short years. National funding has not kept up, increases in Council tax (often reluctantly voted through) cannot keep up and national attempts to address issues like the cost of social care are repeatedly kicked into the long grass. The result? Amongst other things, potholes and lots of them.

The brutal reality of local government is that when these key services that legally must provided cost more and more, then optional services get cut or reduced. Roads must be kept ‘safe’ but that doesn’t mean looking nice and it means potholes are allowed to reach an ‘acceptable’ depth before being repaired and often a temporary repair is made to buy more time. This can, quite literally, mean someone in a van turning up and stamping some tarmac into it. White lines on minor roads don’t need to be repainted, advisory signs don’t need to be replaced – so those can respectively fade away and fall over. Weeds go untreated for longer. You get the picture. In real terms, what councils spend on maintaining roads and pavements is less than it was fifteen years ago. As a result, they look worse and the road or pavement (‘asset’ as it is known) is older and more likely to fail. So, when you step outside your front door and the area looks, frankly, not as good as it should and not as good as it did twenty or thirty years ago – it’s not because people don’t care, it’s because the funding of those hidden services is broken, and nobody has fixed it. This is just the roads, the same applies to other ‘nice to haves’ like grant funding to arts and museums, tree planting and other environmental initiatives, economic development and investment in town centres. The list goes on.

But money is finite. It’s not just local government asking for more. Compelling arguments are made for the need to invest more in defence, tackling illegal immigration, cleaning up our rivers and waterways, building national infrastructure and, of course, the NHS always wants more. In a world of finite resources, how do we fix local government finance? Parking reform of social care and SEND funding, which must come, and the re-evaluation of funding formulas (which will bring winners and losers if the overall pot stays the same size), the next part of the answer may surprise you. Particularly coming from someone who has been a local councillor for the best part of two decades. You need to cull us and cull the number of councils. Figuratively, of course, don’t get too excited. And it can’t just be a light trim, we need a military grade short back and sides. Simply put, there are too many councils and too many councillors at a time when we need economies of scale.

Some areas already have unitary councils but not nearly enough. Here in Suffolk, I was a triple, yes triple, hatter in Bury St Edmunds until 2023. I was a Town Councillor, District Councillor and County Councillor (I remain the latter two). I stood for all three for a very simple reason, people don’t care which council empties their bin, fills in potholes or is responsible for allotments. They just want those things dealt with and to email someone about it. When you’re not on all three, you become a glorified email sorting office…’many thanks for your email, I’ve copied this to Councillor X who is your representative on…’. It is a waste of time. But strategically it’s a bigger headache. It makes no sense that one council is responsible for collecting waste and another for getting rid of it and it makes even less sense that one council is responsible for giving permission for a load of new housing to be built but an entirely different council is responsible for building the roads and schools to service it. In some parts of the country, local councils are responsible for the Fire Service (the County Council is in Suffolk), in other parts it sits with a standalone Fire Authority and in some places with the Police and Crime Commissioner. Some parts of the country have unitary councils, some have combined authorities, some hold elections ‘in thirds’ every year and others have ‘all out’ elections every four years, in some places there are directly elected Mayors and other councils are led by the leader of the largest political group. It is bonkers. Joined up decision making is too difficult and with different tiers of local government they too often end up at loggerheads, particularly when controlled by different political parties. While all you want, dear reader, is for your bin to be emptied, not to lose another alloy wheel in a pothole and to feel slightly less fleeced each time your council tax bill arrives.

Why hasn’t proper, national, local government reform happened yet? A few reasons. Nationally governments have tried to do it by consent and few local councils can agree on what the new structure should look like and even fewer councillors, when push comes to shove, want to be the turkey voting for Christmas. Local consultations take place and lots of emphasis is placed on a few thousand responses from people who really don’t care and, wait for it, would just like their bins to be emptied and things to look nice. Too often, it all descends into squabbling and, low and behold, the status quo persists. I have my own view on what the right size and geography is for rural and urban unitary authorities and whether the leader, or mayor, should be directly elected but so too does every other councillor. We won’t do this to ourselves, or – at least – we likely won’t reach a consensus by ourselves, so government will have to impose a solution. This was always the message I gave when, on the very rare occasion, I had a moment with a Local Government Minister: settle on a model for counties and a model for our major cities, decide what the critical mass needs to be to effectively deliver key services and, in the words of Nike, just do it.

However, we didn’t grasp that particular nettle and now there’s a new Labour government my gut feeling is they will. Just not necessarily in a way that’s good for rural areas. My fear is they will go too big and try, as much as possible, to ensure the demographics make it hard for Conservative control. This might not bother you but what should bother you is that if the size is wrong, giving proper attention to smaller towns and villages could be a challenge. Local identity is important and while reform is desperately needed, the scale and structure must be right.

I’ve written this longer than normal piece because local government is important, but it has become little more than a subcontracted arm of central government, tasked with doing so much of the difficult stuff that national politicians are afraid to touch – social care, housing, special educational needs, roads and buses, public safety and economic development. Local government is too often asked to do all these things without the local freedom, flexibility, structure or funding to make it possible. Where reform has taken place, and it has been given the resources and structures it needs – the metro mayors are an example – local government and devolution is proven to have worked. We need to re-enable local councils, because while we’re not getting enough done, we’re just getting in the way of those, like Business Improvement Districts and others, who are trying to fill the void. Local government reform is the only way to do that.

Despite the inefficiencies, the heated debates with council staff which too often feel like pushing treacle uphill, and the texts and WhatsApps from my friends decrying the latest decision from ‘the bloody council’, I enjoy being a local councillor. I’ve succeeded in more things than I’ve failed and genuinely feel I’ve left Bury and Suffolk in a better place. But the deck is stacked against us both in terms of funding and structure. It is a system born in another age, woefully out of date with the services councils are now responsible for. I could construct an argument about how important it is that councillors are truly connected and only represent small areas, that it’s a great thing that places like Suffolk have 233 district councillors and 74 county councillors on top of 372 town and parish councils, each with at least five councillors…but the financial and strategic reality is that it no longer makes sense. It’s time to wield the axe and, if the scale is right and it comes to a vote, this turkey is pulling out his own giblets, inserting his own stuffing and leaping into the oven whilst giving a heartening rendition of O Come, All Ye Faithful. Bring on Christmas.

The driver for this seems to be interim 2030 Net Zero targets, with the consultation document stating at point 2.3:

“As part of the drive to meet Net Zero interim targets by 2030, there will be a significant growth in offshore wind generation and interconnector customer connections in the East Anglia and Southeast England areas. The network in these areas will require a range of reinforcements to provide these new customers with secure connections and to ensure that there is sufficient system capacity to allow the network to be operated in an economic and efficient manner without exposing consumers to either inefficient levels of constraint or investment costs.”

In a clear signal that National Grid Electricity Transmissions (NGET) are determined to press ahead with the project despite local opposition and calls for a pause, the document goes on to say at 2.8 and 2.9:

“NGET made an application for ECF under Part C of SpC 3.41 of their licence to enable funding of early construction activities for the project. These activities align to early enabling works, and early procurement commitments.”

“The ECF has been submitted at this stage as NGET is satisfied that their plans have sufficiently progressed to make this submission.”

Points 2.10 through to 2.13 speak to the scope of the acceleration, setting out:

“An opportunity has arisen to accelerate part of the Norwich Tilbury delivery works. NGET is contracted to deliver works to facilitate numerous connections at Norwich Main substation set to be delivered by 2027.

These include:

• Hornsea Offshore Wind Farm 3GW

• Equinor Energy – Wind Farm 1.3GW

• Norwich GREEN –1025MW TBC

• O&G Solar – Solar Energy 500MW TBC

• Innova Battery Storage - 400MW

To facilitate these connections, the existing AIS substation will be extended to the east and west, with the Norwich to Tilbury project planned to connect into two new bays in the western extension. NGET are engaging a main works contractor to deliver the substation extension works to facilitate the customer connections above. The FEED works for the new Norwich to Tilbury bays has been factored into the main works contractor’s scope to assess the overall substation design holistically, combining the Norwich Tilbury project’s needs with the requirements of NGET’s contracted customers.

NGET awarded a main works delivery contract for the substation extension works in March 2024, with delivery forecast to start later in 2024. By including the design and build of the two new Norwich to Tilbury bays into the substation contractors main works, NGET state that this presents an opportunity to deliver:

• Accelerated delivery of a key component of the project;

• An ability to optimise the use of skilled resources; and

• An opportunity to leverage cost efficiencies.

This will revise the completion date for part of the works to 2027, instead of 2030 as per the original Norwich to Tilbury programme (all subject to Development Consent Order (DCO) approval).”

The full consultation documents are online here and the consultation runs until 10 September, with replies to be sent to: RIIOElectricityTransmission@ofgem.gov.uk

At a time when I, and others, have led calls for the project to be put on ice while offshore and underground alternatives are properly considered this a blow for local communities and displays a clear desire on the part of the new Labour government and National Grid to push ahead with the new pylons through Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex.

If there is a small glimmer of hope here, it’s that Ofgem demonstrate in this announcement the willingness to be flexible to ensure projects are as coordinated as possible but just imagine how much more coordinated we could be if Miliband reverted to the 2035 target for decarbonisation and all alternatives to Norwich to Tilbury were properly considered. That Ofgem now seem to believe you can coordinate generation and transmission projects, shows if we are able to win the wider battle over Norwich to Tilbury, the door to a better approach is clearly ajar and that wider opportunity must be grasped.

I’ve held responsibility for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects in Suffolk since 2018 and I’ve gone on record multiple times saying this was the worst scheme to ever come across my desk. It should have been refused. Worse still, in his child-like haste to approve the scheme, the Secretary of State made an embarrassing, clumsy and wholly avoidable error in failing to address how local authorities would be properly compensated for the work they must undertake discharging conditions associated with the scheme. In short, he left already stretched councils – and therefore local council tax payers – footing the bill for this work rather than the developer. It is such an obvious error that the four local councils had no choice but to commence legal proceedings and issue a pre-action protocol (PAP) letter to the Secretary of State. The action from the councils will likely not be the only potential JR and we can only hope that the project can yet be stopped in its entirety.

The Secretary of State’s actions speak to a wider problem. A major pillar of the Labour Party Manifesto at the recent general election was ‘clean power’ by 2030 – ie decarbonising energy generation in the UK. This moved the target forward from an already ambitious 2035 under the prior government. As I’ve written previously, 2030 is an unachievable goal and, in his desperation to get there, Ed Miliband will be forced into increasingly poor, uncoordinated and rushed decisions. Officials will already be telling him it is unachievable, the industry is telling him it’s unachievable and now it’s been revealed that this target will have to be met without material contributions from carbon capture and storage (CCS), new nuclear or clean hydrogen. There is a chasm between the 2030 goal and any credible prediction for energy generation in this country. Not a single pathway from National Grid Electricity Systems Operator (ESO) predicts net zero power by 2030. It is clear, Miliband and the new government must abandon the 2030 goal and they must abandon it now.

Writing things like this could see me painted as a climate sceptic. I am not, as those that know me well will tell you - I am far from one. I believe we should decarbonise energy generation in this country to the prior timeline, that we urgently need to deliver energy security and that – yes – a changing climate is a real and present danger. For those sceptically tutting at me and muttering ‘the climate has always changed’ and ‘without CO2 trees will die’, consider this; the biggest driver of mass migration and conflict in the coming decades will be a warming world and the fact that places that could once grow food, no longer can. Unchecked, it will make the waves of migration currently seen across western Europe look like nothing before. So, if you don’t take climate mitigation and adaptation seriously for any other reason, consider our borders and the already huge pressure on them.

It's because I take these things seriously that I find Miliband’s 2030 goal so dangerous. To meet our energy needs, the amount of energy generated in the UK will need to more than double, likely nearly treble, from a base of circa 120GW to over 300GW in 2050. That energy doesn’t just need to be generated; it needs to be transmitted to where it is needed. The scale of change required to do this is vast and to deliver change on this scale you need to carry people with you. Already we can see that the uncoordinated and piecemeal way that this is being done is having the opposite impact. Speak to communities in East Suffolk, particularly around Friston, Aldeburgh and Saxmundham and they will tell you that nothing feels particularly just about the way the UK’s energy transition is currently being undertaken. This isn’t the fault of the new government, for too long the way connection offers are made (see what I’ve written about the TEC register and new solar farms) has been opaque and iterative. What was proposed as a substation for two wind farms at Friston, Scottish Power Renewables EA1N and EA2, has become a hub into which a myriad of schemes are connecting. Planning consent was never sought for a hub of this kind, it’s just emerged over time. There is not, and will not be until 2026, spatial planning around energy generation. At the moment, projects just ‘plug-in’ to the grid where there is capacity to connect, and National Grid are legally obliged to make connection offers.

Look at this in tandem with the Norwich to Tilbury Pylon proposals. We have seen from National Grid ESO’s own report that in 2034 under-grounding the project becomes at least cost equal, if not cheaper. We know that offshore transmission technologies are developing and being deployed overseas and that, by the second half of the next decade, will likely be where we need them to be to alleviate some of the strain on communities like East Anglia. That is why I, and others, have called for the project to be put on hold while alternatives are explored. That pause, however, is not compatible with Ed Miliband’s new 2030 goal.

It's not just Norwich to Tilbury, there are so many schemes coming forward at pace that could be delivered in a better, more joined up, way if we paused for breath. Returning to the prior target of clean energy by 2035 does not put Net Zero by 2050 at risk, in fact 2035 is in line with the Independent Climate Change Committee’s recommendation to achieve that goal. It is an exercise in vanity from the new Secretary of State and one, for the sake of our communities, that we need to convince him to abandon. In November of last year, David Powell wrote for Climate Outreach on the need for public engagement and the risk of a Net Zero ‘backlash’, we are very much at that point.

Doing our energy transition badly, and in a few short weeks Miliband has demonstrated he is doing it badly, will turn people against it. Very few people I speak to, particularly in East Suffolk, are against clean energy but they see nothing ‘green’ in the piecemeal industrialisation of their area. To do it better, we need to slow down.

Today, the Daily Telegraph reported that the South East risks blackouts within a few years, partially due to an increasing over-reliance on wind and solar and the inconsistent level of generation they provide. Last year, FTI Consulting carried out a review for the former government highlighting this risk and, in analysis for Ofgem, found that splitting the country into regional pricing zones would encourage energy companies to generate power closer to where it is needed. They also found it would lower bills for consumers in every region. Such an approach would be music to the ears of communities in East Anglia, a region that will be responsible, under current plans, for generating upwards of 30 percent of the nation’s energy whilst using just 6 percent. The obstacle? Once again, it’s Miliband’s new 2030 date for decarbonisation and warnings, predominantly from the offshore sector, that big regulatory changes would make his impossible goal even more distant.

A shift back to 2035 would also make Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) a much more realistic part of the decarbonisation agenda. These can generate the same amount of energy as the 2,000 plus acre Sunnica solar farm on an area the size of two football pitches. Oh, and the sun doesn’t need to be shining. Currently, we are likely to see the first SMR trial from Rolls Royce online by the end of the decade. Too late for Mission 2030 but not too late for the prior 2035 goal. Add into the equation even smaller nuclear options, likely the size of a shipping container, and we begin to build a picture of much more sensibly constructed generation and distribution of energy around the UK. These innovations are just a few short years away and I’ve not even mentioned hydrogen and CCS in detail. Nor have I mentioned the increased cost, ultimately to bill payers, of chasing 2030 - you can find much commentary on that elsewhere.

Sitting where I do, at the coal face (we need to find a new decarbonised term) of all these schemes in East Anglia, and their impact on communities, it is clear that the biggest danger to decarbonisation, and by association Net Zero, is now the very man tasked with delivering it. His ‘bounce off the walls’ videos, excitedly running past wind turbines, may endear him to his well-heeled Guardian reading friends but they fill communities here in East Anglia with dread. We sit on the cusp of another industrial revolution. To deliver that, it is incumbent upon those leading the charge to deliver it well and to get the societal consent to make it possible. Any Secretary of State serious about clean power and net zero must carry communities with them. The first step is abandoning Mission 2030.

Now, you will either get this or you won’t. Some of you will probably be in tears, or close to tears, thinking of a lost pet, some will understand but stoically keep the British stiff upper, but others will think I’m absolutely bonkers and some sort of weak specimen as a result. Of course, a few people will be wondering where the pylons, substations, interconnectors and solar farms are and closing their laptops. Apologies, I did say this would be wide ranging but they will be back soon.

I didn’t have a dog growing up. We were a cat and guinea pig household. My mum wasn’t really a dog person back then and, until I was ten, she was a single parent. Then, when she remarried, another four children and an additional cat arrived. Understandably, a dog was out of the question. She will be the first to confess she is now a fan of two of our dogs, Rufus and Claude, who she affectionately refers to as her granddogs (she discovered the term on a trip to California). I’m not quite sure how I feel about the status afforded to them, it’s at once endearing but also a reminder I’ve yet to provide her with a grandchild. In any case, they’ve won her over. Dogs tend to do that.

Back in the dim and distant, I’ve memories of my grandparents’ dog, Baska the Basset Hound. I say memories, they are the sort of memories that one thinks exists but may just be the product of old family photos, I’ve still one framed of me and said Basset in the bedroom. But those memories – real or not – tell me I was very fond of the old hound. When my grandparents replaced Baska, who eventually moved to live on another farm (a strange decision and one I’m now sceptical about), with a disappointing looking black cat, I punished them when I was given the naming privileges. I was very young, yet to develop the family conservatism, and decided that given Arthur Scargill was often on the television screen and miners were covered in soot, it was simply logical that the cat, who also looked like he’d been down a mine, should be named after Mr Scargill. My grandfather was unimpressed, but a deal was a deal. It remains the most left-wing act of my life.

Dogless years followed until, when my mum remarried, I became rather unsettled at home and spent a good deal of my time with a retired businessman in the village, Pete Bailey. I’ll write more about Pete and how he helped snap me out of introspection and underachievement but, for now, it suffices to say Pete had a dog, Jodie. Jodie was a Springer Spaniel and an absolute handful, but she was my first proper experience of something close to dog ownership and loss. When Pete had to have her put to sleep, he did so without warning me – probably knowing I’d try to talk him out of it. I was young, impetuous, and had no idea then what he was going through. I didn’t speak to him for a couple of weeks. Looking back now, a few months after having to have a dog put to sleep for the first time, I’m wracked with guilt over how I treated someone who gave me so much. Pete lived alone and Jodie was his sole companion. Jodie was my first true experience of the light pet ownership, particularly dog ownership, can bring to people’s lives and how important they can be to independent living. Dogs give structure, exercise and companionship – all things that keep us healthier for longer. Looking back, Pete – who for reasons of his own failing health didn’t get another dog – was never quite the same after that.

My own first dog, Rufus, is now into his eighteenth year. Harking back to memories of Baska, I wanted a Basset Hound but one wasn’t suited to a three-storey townhouse in Bury St Edmunds, so I arrived at a similarly sausage shaped miniature dachshund. They can’t use stairs either, so in hindsight, he wasn’t the best choice, but he’s been a fixture in my life ever since. As have stairgates. The first time the Google Street View car visited the town’s medieval grid, I was walking him - for years we were on the images for half the roads in the town centre. He’s seen me through most of my adult life, several failed relationships, starting my career working for MPs, the death of my brother and my best friend, and a parliamentary campaign. Three slipped discs, two back surgeries and some very big vet bills later, he’s still here and as determined as ever to stay here. When he entered his eleventh year, I decided he needed a younger brother to keep him sprightly, so Claude, another miniature dachshund arrived on the scene

When Caroline and I met, in 2019, one of the many things that helped us click was that she was a dog lover too. Dog owners get other dog owners. She had two Cypriot rescue dogs, Freedom and George. The thing about rescue dogs is that they tend to come with a name and it seems rude to change them, I’ll come to this point again in a moment. Now, two separate two-dog households doesn’t seem that outlandish, does it? We would meet for walks, visit each other with our dogs, it all worked rather well. Then covid hit. Opting, as many new couples did, to live together rather than not see each other for months, my two-dog house in Bury St Edmunds was suddenly a four-dog house. Nor have I yet mentioned my two cats and Caroline’s two rabbits. We were officially, and quite accidentally, those crazy people who had passed through what was a sensible pet threshold into a zone where your pets are how other people define you.

In 2020, we gained Velvet, another rescue dog from Cyprus. Like Freedom and George, she came from a shelter Caroline found on a trip there, Dog Valley. Velvet was initially intended as a foster to rehome project. Caroline had done this several times, but I couldn’t part with her and she became dog number five. At this point, it became clear that however lovely the house in Bury St Edmunds was, it did not work for five dogs, two cats and two rabbits. My neighbours who were incredibly tolerant throughout will probably attest to that. The house went on the market after some refurbishment and, to keep it looking good, we all upped sticks first to Caroline’s house in Stowmarket and then on to her dad’s, while it sold and we found something suitable back towards Bury.

All of this is a convoluted way of me saying we built our lives and made big life choices around our pets. From the choice of house, dominated by the size of garden and how it could be fenced, through to the sacrifices we made financially to do so. They were and remain the defining factor in most decisions. I’m holding back from saying ‘like children’ because I’m acutely aware that a big failing of mine, whenever a friend speaks about their child, is – when trying to relate – to give an example of something one of the dogs has done. It rarely washes but, hey, at least their children can wash the car, do the vacuuming and may eventually go to university. Rufus, on the other hand, is still here eating me out of house and home eighteen years later. Of course, like any parent, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

When my friend and I sobbed and embraced in the garden on Saturday, I knew how he felt because in May, Caroline and I had to have dog number six, Mr Shy, put to sleep. Mr Shy was another rescue dog from Dog Valley and the unluckiest of souls. He was their longest tenant, at seven years. I believe George was the prior record holder. Shy’s name had been earned, he trusted very few people, and one look at his big soulful eyes, in the image Caroline sent me, told me we had to help him. He arrived with us in March, two days after our wedding – we didn’t have a honeymoon, we rescued another dog. Within two weeks, we knew something was wrong. Mr Shy was diagnosed, after many tests, with lymphoma and despite amazing care from Dick White Referrals, only lasted six weeks. He had finally found a home, after many years searching, and fell asleep here.

None of this was the fault of Dog Valley. Before sending a dog a huge number of checks and blood tests are done. He was passed fit to fly by a vet and was, on paper, a healthy dog. Our vets and Dick Whites said the same thing, unless you knew to run an MRI – and there were no triggers to do so – there was no way of knowing he was sick. Mr Shy was just very unlucky, or maybe he was the luckiest dog – he spent seven years waiting for a home and got to experience what one was like, rather than spending his whole life in a shelter. Those big sorrowful eyes attracted me for a reason. When we said goodbye to him we were broken. The decision to have him put to sleep, after he suddenly lost the use of his legs, was so hard. When he left us, my thoughts flashed back to Pete and Jodie, and how I behaved, and more guilt washed over me. We spend our lives becoming the person the younger version of ourselves needed and, for me, this was one of those moments.

Now, nearly three months later, we don’t regret adopting Shy. Despite the expense and the heartache, I’d do it all again tomorrow. So please don’t let it put you off either. There is nothing quite like adopting a rescue dog. Velvet arrived with us as quite the project, untrusting and fearful, but now the loyalty she shows us – and the affection she shows other people – is so rewarding. If you don’t want a challenge like Velvet, shelters and charities can advise you on the best dog for you and your home. In fact, to make sure you’re compatible, there will be far more forms and possibly home inspections than if you were going out to buy a puppy!

There are far too many dogs in need of help here and in Cyprus, Romania and Turkey in particular. The treatment of street dogs by the government in some countries, particularly those three, is quite appalling. If you travel there, or speak to an official from one of those countries, be sure to mention it. All the good work is done by private shelters and some governments are even making it harder for those to operate, instead trying to rely on municipal ‘kill shelters’. It’s a heartbreaking plight not just for the dogs but also for the volunteers at shelters like Dog Valley, who work so hard to rescue the animals.

At the start of this entry, I mentioned an epic task. Since being founded, nine plus years ago, Dog Valley have rescued and rehomed over 1,500 dogs, many of them to homes here in the UK. Recently, they have been told that their landlord wants to sell the land where the shelter is located. He has, however, offered them first refusal on the land. So, between now and March, they need to raise a substantial amount of money – 200,000 Euros. While there are many good causes closer to home that I’ve supported previously, and I will come to another of those in a moment, Dog Valley are an incredible volunteer run organisation in a country where being a stray dog is unforgiving.

Therefore, between 15 September and 1 November, Caroline and I will be covering 1,501km (932 miles) on foot between us – running, walking and hiking to raise money for Dog Valley. For me, it will culminate in the final week with covering the breadth of Suffolk, making my way from Newmarket to Southwold across approximately 101km (62 miles) non-stop, on foot. We’ve chosen 1,501km as it’s a kilometre for each dog they’ve saved so far.

While on the subject of dogs, and pet ownership, I wanted to mention another Suffolk based charity. Earlier, I recalled how Pete benefited from the companionship Jodie provided and how lost my friend and his partner felt after Bonnie’s death. A couple of years ago, Caroline became involved with volunteering for Our Special Friends. I mustn’t call them a ‘dog charity’, they are far broader than that. In short, they help people continue to benefit from animal companionship by providing physical and emotional support during illness, bereavement or other crises.

The importance of this cannot be understated, imagine someone struck down by a debilitating illness suddenly unable to walk their dog and, therefore, at risk of losing it. Or someone isolated in a community, in need of some gentle exercise and a visit from a volunteer with their own dog. Our Special Friends help in these circumstances and more, including bereavement and sourcing, introducing and monitoring a new pet for people. They are a triaging and signposting resource, a bit like Citizens Advice, that act as an early warning for social services. They too, rely entirely on fund raising. If you’re unfamiliar with them, please do look at their website and consider donating.

I will speak and post more about our fundraising for Dog Valley in the coming weeks; a Facebook page where you can sponsor us, if you wish, and watch video updates will soon be live. Of course, I’ll also be writing a lot more political and energy related posts, which – I imagine – will be rather more controversial than this one.

Thank you for indulging this pet focused entry and please stay tuned!

What looks to be today’s new addition is quite a big one. Connecting at the new National Grid Biggleswade 400kv Substation in the North Bedfordshire Parliamentary Constituency, represented by Richard Fuller MP, we have a new Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project (NSIP) scale Solar Farm and Storage scheme entering scoping. The project has been given a connection offer of 31/10/2034. The Biggleswade Substation is currently under construction, on land north of Dunton Lane, and is looking to go into operation in February of next year. The Google Maps screenshot below shows the location of the substation site.

Where the solar farm will be, or where they are trying to assemble land, doesn’t yet seem to be in the public domain. Looking at proposals elsewhere, it is usually within a 5 - 7 mile radius. The Company behind the proposal is Renewable Energy Systems Limited and the scheme name is Greengage Farm.

Taking the recently approved Sunnica Solar Farm in West Suffolk as a benchmark, a 500MW scheme is likely to be in the region of 1,500 - 2,000 acres in size depending on the proportion of battery storage to PV. This is a very rough guide and by no means exact.

While taking a look at this scheme, I thought I would see what else had also received connection offers at the new Biggleswade Substation. Sizeable schemes include:

1000MW (1GW) Solar and Storage scheme from Biggleswade 10 Renewables Limited, known as “Biggleswade” on the TEC Register. This is a sizeable scheme, double that of Greengage Farm, so feasibly as large as 3,000 - 4,000 acres (again a very rough guess). Surprisingly, I can find nothing online about this proposal either and it doesn’t yet seem to have had any press attention. Given the potential scale, the lack of attention is odd. This scheme has also been given a connection date from 2032.

249MW Solar and Storage scheme from NOVENTUM POWER SOLAR 7 LIMITED, known as “Noventum - Biggleswade” on the TEC Register. Noventum seem to be an established operator in this space, there is a lot of information on their website here although nothing as yet about Biggleswade. This is perhaps unsurprising as the scheme looks to have a connection offer for 2037.

200MW Storage scheme from Harmony Energy Ltd, known as Biggleswade BESS on the TEC Register. There is also a smaller 57MW scheme with same name on there being brought forward by Central Bedfordshire Council. The Council scheme has a connection offer for 2029 while Harmony’s is in 2035.

All of these schemes, and the new Greengage Farm scheme, are currently in “scoping”.

From what is currently on the the TEC Register at Biggleswade, like Yaxley and Bramford in Suffolk, it could well be a hub for multiple solar and battery storage schemes that will dominate the debate around land usage over the coming years.

I’ll finish with the health warning I put in my last piece about the TEC Register, just because something appears on there does not mean it will be built. There is more on the TEC Register than needs to be delivered but appearing on there is always the first step in the process of scoping, consultation and consent.

No hatred was thrown my way, it was a lovely evening, but I’ve thought about it a lot since. There is an assumption, amongst those on the left, that we Conservatives are quite awful people. As if we climb out of bed, put on our smoking jackets, grab the nearest down-trodden soul and use them as a footstall whilst pouring port on our cornflakes, a copy of Horse and Hound in hand, before going on to spend the day devising ways to get richer and make others worse off. We are, in their eyes, inherently bad people or, at very best, not very nice ones.

I’ve been at many social events where, because of my once relative but now receding youth, the people around me are often far from self-identifying Conservatives. I am the rare creature in the room, not one they necessarily want around but one they are intrigued by. Is he as bad as we think, is probably the collective thought in the room. We wouldn’t necessarily choose to be around one but let’s test the waters. Walt Whitman advised us to ‘be curious, not judgemental’ but people at such occasions are frequently both. Initially talk will be about politics and that’s where it’s hardest, we often disagree, and if wine is involved and the topic turns to something emotive – Israel is the current incendiary one – then things can turn sour. However, politics aside, when we discuss football, holidays, music, food, film, comedy and pretty much any other subject, even dare I say the other social taboo – religion, we all get along famously. I even like dogs.

So where does this initial dislike, sometimes hatred, come from? Hate is such a strong word. I probably spat it in anger at my mother as a child, not meaning it and knowing it would cut deep – children can be cruel. But I don’t use it freely now. I reserve hatred for things that are truly an afront to humanity; root vegetables, hipster restaurants that serve food on coal shovels, and Manchester United. I wouldn’t direct it at an entire political movement, much less an individual.

It may sound odd, or arrogant, but other than sitting down to write things like this, I never give ‘the left’ that much thought. I certainly don’t bear them any ill-will. I don’t think they want to purposefully inflict harm on the world, even if their policies might result in it. Actually, I think rather the opposite – like me they want to do good. I just think they’re wrong. But I accept that they’re wrong and would still, quite willingly, choose to spend time with them if, politics aside, I enjoyed their company. Someone’s political views don’t form part of the measure of whether I like them or not.  

On social media, the hatred is at its worst. People are unleashed. It’s usually left on right hatred in this country. America is rather different. There are, of course, some outliers who spill ultra-right-wing bile into threads but when you look at the reverse, it’s not those on the fringes doing it. It’s art teachers, university lecturers, doctors and nurses. Pretty plausible people. Often with words like ‘compassionate’, ‘inclusive’ or Follow Back Pro European (FBPE) appearing alongside their pronouns in their bio. Acceptance and inclusivity is their driving force, unless – of course – you happen to disagree with them over economic policy and the size of the state.

If you put it to someone that they dislike Tories because of differing views on matters of policy, they’d deny it. For them it runs deeper. Words like ‘evil’ are readily thrown and ‘Thatcher’ is often mentioned. They think we are mean at best, downright malevolent at worst. I had it on the doorstep during the recent general election. ‘You disgust me’ comes quite freely from many mouths. We’d never met. It was almost flattering in an inverse sort of way. One porch in Harleston even had a sign in the window saying, ‘the only good Tory is a dead Tory’. Replace the word Tory with pretty much anything else and you’d have seen people calling the police. But say it about a Conservative and people walk by, unmoved.

We need to test and challenge this. Maybe Maggie (sometimes I think we call her that just to irk them – we’re not blameless in this) did some things they didn’t like, or their parents didn’t like, perhaps the consequences of pit closures for their family were stark. Anger I can understand. Even historic anger – I believe intergenerational trauma is real. But here I am, on the doorstep thirty-four years after Thatcher left office, and apparently the only good version of me, is a dead me. That can’t be right or acceptable. On social media, during the run-up to the general election, I couldn’t post a photo of my wedding day, mother, dead father, or cancer-stricken dog without me, or often them, being insulted. The charge? Tory. Well, I’m guilty of that but no more.

Do we have a packaging problem? It’s certainly part of the issue and why we’ve been through many resets that try to shed the ‘nasty party’ tag. Yet, try as we might, it returns. Are our policies, that place much more onus on individual responsibility, rather than big state support, simply seen as ‘mean’? We’d argue that the freedom this affords both in terms of liberty and opportunity to succeed is kind, at its heart it has a belief – rather than doubt – in the individual. But that gets lost. Too often we get sucked into the negative side of the debate. “Getting people off benefits” is a classic example. We lose sight, in the heat of debate, that perhaps there are people that don’t want to be reliant on the state and would rather like a job and the freedom that affords them. To enable that, we need to encourage those who can work into work. Doing this not only gives them freedom but it frees up what is a very finite amount of government cash to do other things, like – you know – build new hospitals or care for children with special needs.

Brexit is another great divider and eight years on it remains so. I’ve lost count of the number of people who fell out with their friends or family over that vote and it’s the remainers who pull up the social drawbridge, ‘we can’t stand to be around them, they voted to leave’. Accusations that those who voted to leave robbed children of their right to roam free across Europe hang in the air. As if that is why people voted to leave – a bitter, vengeful act. No consideration that perhaps, disagree as some might, those who voted to leave did so because they thought young people would grow up in a more free and prosperous nation. Again, it’s never those who voted to leave saying they can’t be around a remainer. It’s those who identify as being inclusive demonstrating they really are quite the opposite.

We Conservatives don’t help ourselves, of course. There are those in my party who delight in disappearing into a Tory caricature. There are some Young Conservatives I’ve encountered at Conference, who turn up in their late teens dressed as stockbrokers, replete with tortoise shell spectacles, and decide it’s awfully clever to get drunk and be rude about ‘poor people’. But that’s not all of us. Much as the lunatics gluing themselves to roads or throwing soup over paintings aren’t all of the left. All sides have their share of idiots. It’s the human condition.

We ‘on the right’, whatever that quite means in these topsy-turvy days, don’t hate those on the left. So why is it ok for them to hate us? Of course, we let people down over the last few years and mistakes were made but the acceptability of this hatred existed before that. And even if it is based solely on the last five years, does even that make hatred of an entire political class acceptable? Do they really need to insult my wife and dead dog?

During the general election campaign, I showed some of the hate-filled abuse I received to a good friend. Rather than their first reflex being to ask if I was ok, it was to rationalise to me why some people felt that way about Conservatives – bringing up the historic anger I mentioned earlier. Societally, we continue to normalise this hatred and not call it out – it seems the few examples of ‘acceptable hatred’ we now see is that which is directed at ‘the right’ or those groups perceived to be on ‘the right’.

One of the fundamental reasons I’m a Conservative is that I believe in people, in the individual. The same is true for many of us. Whether I agree or disagree with someone, I have faith in them to be fundamentally good and to do what they think is right. I don’t think ‘the left’, for all their talk of compassion, has that. For them, the state is there not just to support people but to indoctrinate them with their version of compassion. Seemingly, we’re all free to think what we like just so long as they agree.

Could this be me doing exactly what they do to us Conservatives, generalising about people with specific political views? My wife even called this piece a tad self-indulgent, she may very well be right. But disagree as I might with those on the left, as wrong as I may think they are, I don’t hate them. That they may hate me doesn’t cause me lost sleep, but I do dwell on it and wonder why when we preach tolerance from the rooftops these days, it doesn’t extend to those of us who think the state should be small, our taxes should be low, our borders secure, our nation’s defence robust, and our people free to think and speak what they wish. That is not the voice of evil. It doesn’t warrant hatred. It’s just a different point of view.  

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We can’t have a state that does everything and low taxes, we can’t at once sign shiny new trade deals but not expect some goods to flow into our country, we can’t eliminate our reliance on cheap foreign labour and have a high-wage economy and then be surprised when British food costs more or the cost of care homes goes up, and we can’t dish out public sector pay rises that are well above inflation and not have it be, well, inflationary. Simply put, we can’t have our cake and eat it too. Tasty though it may sound.

In politics we over-simplify everything. Stop the boats. Get Brexit done. Build back better. Change. Then when things aren’t so simple, people are rightly annoyed. We do it in no other walk of life. Imagine going into hospital for brain surgery, being told it would be a simple procedure, only to wake up to discover you have to learn to walk again. Politically, this is what has been done to the British public again and again and again.

Politics is only simple when we’re honest – we’re going to improve x but you need to pay for it through y or we’re going to cut your taxes, but you need to accept the state can’t do everything, so we’ll stop doing z. It’s rare you hear either of those pitches, but they are our reality. On the doorstep during the recent general election, I met a man who said, “I’ll vote for anyone who tells me how they’re going to do all the things they promise to do”. He had a point. Like a healthy diet, politics is about balance…. well, governing is anyway.

Unfortunately, we’re all addicted to sugar. And there is no greater purveyor of fine sweet treats than Nigel Farage and, unlike we Conservatives or Labour, he’s not restricted by the slightest possibility of being in government. Increasing the basic rate income tax threshold to £20,000? Sure! Abolishing Stamp Duty below £750,000? Why not. Collect billions of pounds in unpaid tax? Why didn’t we think of something so simple. 3% of GDP on Defence within 6 years? Sign me up now. The Reform Manifesto (or Contract, more on that in a moment) was in many places a decedent Tory treat. A lot of the stuff we fanaticise about in one document. In other places, it delved deep into socialism. It was politically confused but, in the words of Simon & Garfunkel, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest. The price tag? Oh, only £160bn in unfunded promises that made the Kwarteng mini-budget look like a trip to Poundland. Farage is a brilliant salesman and like so many parties of protest (I won’t go into the Greens today) it frankly doesn’t matter that what he promises is undeliverable in the near term.

So how do we beat Reform? How do we stop our addiction to cakeism? Better people than me have tried for over twenty years and he’s still here periodically blowing up our party. We can’t just be Reform-lite while the full-fat version is on the shelf next to us.

More importantly, how do we beat Labour who aren’t immune to saying we can have our cake and eat it too? Prior to the election they very carefully ruled out increasing income tax, national insurance or VAT. That specificity should have, and did in some circles, raise alarm bells that they would raise other taxes. But of course, they didn’t mention that or what they would raise. They wanted the electorate to think they could have it all. Now, with the election an increasingly distant memory, it’s time for Rachel Reeves to snatch the cake away. Once onto the serious business of governing, she will take to the stage to – quelle surprise – say things are ‘worse than she thought’. This, despite the fact she had access to the figures for months, admitted she had access and wouldn’t be doing what she’s just done because now we have the OBR. The IFS has even stepped in and said a claim of ignorance is not credible. So, come the autumn we can probably expect a raid on one, or all, of pensions, capital gains and inheritance tax alongside cuts to much needed programmes – like new hospitals. This will hit communities like mine in Bury St Edmunds hard. My dad worked at the West Suffolk when it was a new hospital, and it was never intended to last this long.

Perhaps this is just a nice way of saying lying, or at least concealing the truth. Political interviews are exercises in gymnastics and we all leave none the wiser. A subject for another day. But how do we break the cycle? Can we win without going there ourselves – is anyone brave enough?   

When we’ve tried before it hasn’t gone awfully well. The 2017 Manifesto is a case in point. Social care needed fixing, we said exactly how we’d fix it. It turned out it would be horribly expensive and the rightly unpopular ‘dementia tax’ was born, then quickly dropped. It’s now 7 years later and we’re no closer to a solution.

So, we need honesty not just about what we want to fix and how, what we want to fund and how but also those problems that are too big to fix without widespread political and social consent for something that will be painful. We need to rebuild our party and ask these questions and slowly rebuild trust.

The relationship between voters and politicians is a contract. Farage was clever to call the Reform manifesto that, despite the fact he’d have breached it in weeks if, by some miracle, he’d found himself in Number 10. Therein rests the problem. Time and again politicians have breached the contract they make when asking for a vote. We’ve said we’ll do something and not done it or not properly explained the price of doing it. So, when Farage pulls up will a shopping trolley full of undeliverable tasty diversions, can we blame people for having their heads turned? No, because we’ve all been at it and that is why parties of protest like the Greens, Lib Dems and Reform are currently thriving.

We need to break the cycle. The 2017 manifesto came in for much criticism and was politically disastrous, but it tried to get one thing right. It took a major issue facing the country, said it needed fixing and said how we proposed fixing it. We should have seen how unpopular the solution would be, and that it wasn’t the correct one, but the approach was right – honest answers to honest questions, then test that at the ballot box. Convincing all political parties to do that simultaneously is, however, beyond unrealistic.

I’m a firm believer that the voting public is as intelligent as you treat them to be and all political parties have been stuck in a cycle of treating them like fools. Rachel Reeves’ rapid about turn on the state of the economy is yet another example of this. She will further erode trust at a time when it’s in desperately short supply. As a result, at the time of the next general election it will be even more scarce.

Returning to our core values and being honest is the only way to get the trust we’ve lost back. Looking inward and steadily rebuilding faith may sound boring but, despite their own lack of honesty, boring just won a general election with a record majority. Starmer is so devoid of personality that all I really know about him is that he says he likes football and his dad worked for Black & Decker. Yet, there he is in Number 10. The Farage cake stand is a sideshow, and we can either have our heads turned by his flirtatious glances and stay out of power or we can knuckle down and start telling it like it is. Once people start trusting us again, then and only then, will we have an opportunity to deliver on the promises we make. This time, let’s make sure they’re ones we keep.