Hello from The National and welcome to the View from London – your weekly guide to the big stories from our London bureau
Big fan
Picture in your mind's eye the span of a wind turbine blade, longer than a top-flight football pitch, speared into the sky. A record-breaking offshore wind turbine – which will be joined by 94 others – is being installed this week at the East Anglia Three offshore wind farm on the Suffolk coast in the east of England.
At a 262 metres tall, each turbine gives the London Shard a run for its money. For those of us who used to work in Canary Wharf's One Canada Square, the turbine is taller.
The project is a partnership is between the UAE's renewable energy company Masdar and ScottishPower, a subsidiary of the Spanish company Iberdrola.
The £4 billion ($5.4 billion) wind farm will be “one of the world’s largest” when it comes into operation, generating enough electricity to power 1.3 million UK homes. Each blade on the 14MW turbine is 115 metres long and all 285 of them are being made in the UK at Siemens Gamesa’s factory in Hull.
It is part of a growing energy partnership between the UAE and the UK. UAE-backed investments in the UK since 2021, when a Sovereign Investment Partnership was signed by the two countries, have reached £30 billion. A deal for clean technology co-operation was signed in 2023.
Winding back
The International Monetary Fund and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development downgraded UK growth by 0.5 percentage points this year – the biggest markdown of any member of the G7 group of advanced economies.
The OECD blamed Britain’s “exposure” to gas, which accounts for 62 per cent of household energy consumption – a double whammy for growth given a “heightened sensitivity” of UK interest and mortgage rates to global developments.
Inflation was already on the move in March, jumping from three per cent to 3.3 per cent.
Into the frame steps Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, with a reform to the pricing (and taxing framework) for electricity. He announced plans to start “delinking the electricity price from the gas price, so that actually we get the benefits of cheaper, cleaner power”. A mini version of the windfall tax is included in the carrot and stick.
Wholesale UK gas costs are now 30 per cent higher as a result of the US-Iran war and household energy prices alone are expected to rise more than 10 per cent from July when the quarterly price cap is adjusted.
Unexpected gains
There's one thing that's not so prevalent in Green Party campaigning. That's the messages on renewables, once its core passion. Not that it seems to matter. The party, which has four MPs in Parliament, is currently polling joint second-most popular, level with the Conservatives and ahead of Labour, in a YouGov survey of people’s voting intentions in the coming local elections in Britain, with 17 per cent of the vote compared to Labour’s 16 per cent. The right-wing populist party Reform leads the poll with 27 per cent.
Party leader Zack Polanski – hailed as the British equivalent of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani – raised the Greens' profile since his election in September as he also campaigned for wealth taxes, affordable housing and rent controls.
His main obsession on the stump is anti-war themes from one side of the Middle East to the other. One of the party’s London candidates, Antoinette Fernandez, said conflict was on people’s minds when she was on their doorsteps campaigning. “I’ve yet to meet anyone that feels what is happening in the Middle East is a good thing.”
Europe's opening
Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam told European foreign ministers on Tuesday that a stronger Lebanese army is needed to weaken Hezbollah, as he toured European capitals in a bid to shore up support for his country amid a precarious ceasefire with Israel.
“We will not be intimidated by Hezbollah and those who are fanning the flames of civil war,” was his comment in Paris.
One clear worry is the winding down of the UN's Unifil peacekeeping mission. It is scheduled to begin withdrawing its 7,500 troops from Lebanon at the end of the year, after the US last summer vetoed the renewal of its mandate at the UN Security Council, with Israeli support.
The decision has raised questions about how the border area will be policed in the future. For more than four decades, Unifil has monitored the so-called Blue Line, supported the Lebanese military in disarming Hezbollah and conducted humanitarian operations.
France, which has colonial ties with Lebanon, is now understood to be laying the ground for post-Unifil scenarios in the south of the country.
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