My constituent, Elizabeth Wood, who runs Cake Buds in Burghfield, has asked me to share her story about her collaboration with cake artist, Rosalind Miller on the Coronation Cake, which was presented as a gift at Windsor Castle in commemoration of the Coronation. I am delighted that she had the opportunity to take part in creating such a splendid cake which was indeed a work of art.

Please find below my Interview with Talk TV’s Richard Tice where we discussed the Coronation, the local election results and net migration.

You can find my interview below between 26:18-36:48.

Yesterday we debated the Energy Bill. This piece of legislation has support from the main Opposition parties and is more to do with the road to net zero than how to have plentiful good value energy for homes and businesses. It proposes additional complex regulations to seek faster movement to a decarbonised future.

It raises a number of questions which I have been posing to Ministers and the wider public in my words on energy. They include

Why does it require a 140% increase in our interconnector capacity to be able to import more energy from the continent? If the aim is energy self sufficiency and more domestic production we should not need that extra spending on connectors.

How will a £20 bn spend on carbon capture and storage be paid for? The Secretary of State says the Uk has storage for £5 trillion of saved carbon costs, but as the saved carbon costs are presumably at least in part UK tax revenues foregone from emissions trading and carbon taxes, it is not obvious to see how the money is raised to purchase the facilities or how the costs of running them are defrayed, other than through other additional tax payments.

What impact will the higher standards for the energy performance of buildings have on the supply of rented accommodation? Isn’t there a danger more landlords will decide they cannot afford the extra costs of installation of energy saving measures and will withdraw their properties from the rented market? What will be the rent increase where they do put in the new measures?

The Bill talks about the need for more smart machines and more time switching to ration available electricity. People will not be able to come home from work, put an electric car on charge and turn on a series of home appliances all at the same time but will need persuading or requiring to run some machines and rechargers overnight when there is less electricity demand. What will the likely balance be between discounted night rates, penalty day rates and cut outs or bans on smart machine use and via smart meters?

The Bill perpetuates a complex system of managed prices, price controls, bidding competitions for rights to supply, windfall taxes, company subsidies and government interventions to try to ensure sufficient power. What impact does this wide ranging and frequently changing set of interventions have on private sector willingness to invest in future energy provision?

The government says it wants nuclear to play an important part of reliable domestic electricity supply, yet on current plans nuclear output reduces substantially this decade with various closures and only one opening of a new station. When will firm orders be placed for small nuclear installations?

Why is grid expansion proposed at only a doubling when if most people had electric cars and heat pumps and industry had gone largely electric we would need considerably more capacity than that?

The ever growing population of the UK means more to feed and clothe, more utilities needed, more to house and more needing school places and medical care. The UK needs to do more to promote extra capacity to meet these needs.

Instead tax and regulation is getting in the way of producing more. This decade we have lost 700,000 self employed when we need more to set up in business. The government should revert to IR 35 rules used prior to 2017. It should be easier to get started as self employed.

The Treasury should raise the VAT registration threshold from £85,000 to £250,000. Too many small businesses turn down business to avoid the need to register.

The government should remove the 31% hike to corporation tax. If it was really serious about more investment and getting the deficit down it would cut the rate to 15% to attract more large companies.

The government should lift the planned ban on making and selling new diesel and petrol cars in 2030. The ban is putting car companies off investing here.

DEFRA should stop offering grants to farmers to prevent them farming. The money for wilding should be switched to supporting growing food.

The Business Department should suspend the emissions trading and carbon tax system. This is imposing the highest taxes on UK steel, ceramics, glass and other intensive industries of the advanced world. It is leading to closures.

We need to foster enterprise and promote home production. That would bring prices under control.

The UK, Euroland and the USA all have “independent” Central Banks, all are charged with keeping inflation around 2% and all presided over inflation surging to around five times target. They all blamed energy prices that were driven up by the Ukraine war, ignoring inflation well above target before the invasion. They do not ask how Chinese inflation stayed around 2% and Japanese around 3% despite importing a lot of energy. Nor do they tell us why inflation has stayed high long after the oil price subsided.

All three printed large sums of money and deliberately paid very high prices for bonds in 2021 during recovery , driving interest rates to very low levels. They stubbornly refuse to even accept the inflation in assets they created let alone the more general inflation these irresponsible policies were bound to cause.

Now they have lurched too far the other way. Cutting the money supply, selling bonds off or accepting maturity repayments at big losses they are trying to bring on downturns. The Bank of England’s rate rising announcement of large bond sales undermined the pension fund/LDI market so they temporarily had to reverse the bond sale policy and buy up some more. The Fed has helped undermine some large US regional banks with bond price drops and had to tip an extra $400 bn of money into markets to stop a wider collapse.

All 3 Banks should invite in some new people and new thinking. They have done damage through inflation and slowdown policies. They need to monitor and understand the path of money and credit growth to avoid these big errors.