Britain’s Secretary of State for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy has complained that U.S. President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is “dangerous” at the World Economic Forum (WEF) summit in Davos, Switzerland.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s business secretary, Grant Shapps MP, took aim at the controversial legislation– actually more of a green energy bill than anything else, according to at least one Democrat lawmaker — during a panel discussion at the globalist summit.
“[T]he issue that the world has experienced, particularly through Covid and then through Putin’s war in Ukraine is you’ve got to be just a little bit more self-reliant; so how do you train people into this market, how do you make sure that your supply chain can provide the PPE equipment if you have a pandemic, how do you make sure that energy isn’t reliant on unreliable partners… it has led to a greater sense that you’ve got the be self-reliant,” he said — brazenly, considering the Sunak government is prioritising the green agenda over energy independence by re-banning fracking and is more focused on using even more mass immigration to meet labour shortages than upskilling Britons.
“But we are great global traders and we want the world to be as open as possible as well,” Shapps went on.
“[I]t’s very, very important we don’t slip into protectionism, and that is where, at the edges, the Inflation Reduction Act, in the U.S., is dangerous, because it could slip into protection[ism],” he added — then tried to soften the criticism by adding: “That it’s not its intention, I don’t think it’s necessarily where it is going.”
While Britain’s governing Conservative (Tory) Party invests huge sums of public money into the green agenda, funding for activist non-governmental organisations, and the woke diversity industry, it retains a vestigial opposition to “the government getting involved” when it comes to supporting British industry, even in the face of unfair competition from subsidised or less onerously regulated foreign competitors.
British steelmakers Liberty Steel, for example, recently announced they would have to fire some 440 workers, citing energy bills — driven up at least in part by British government policy.
The Times, Britain’s de facto newspaper of record, noted at the time the firings were announced that the British steel industry “pays up to 60 per cent more in energy bills and carbon emission penalties than its German and French rivals,” for example, but the Tories seem uninterested in doing anything to either lower their costs or imposing tariffs on foreign imports to level the playing field — which would be an example of Shapps’s dreaded “protectionism”.
In late 2015, then led by David Cameron, the Tories allowed the strategic SSI Redcar steelworks to shutter altogether, destroying around 1,700 jobs — with then-Industry Minister Anna Soubry claiming that the government “hands [were] tied” by EU laws preventing a rescue.