HEALTH Secretary Wes Streeting was heckled by climate protesters a day after MPs said wood-burning biomass company Drax should not be receiving £7 billion in green subsidies.

Two women shouted over him as he used an address to the Fabian Society to call for the centre-left to challenge the populist right on Saturday.

Both said they voted Labour in 2024 but were protesting against the continued subsidisation of Drax power station in North Yorkshire.

Speaking after she was swiftly removed from the conference in London’s Guildhall by security, Zoe Courtney-Bodgener said: “Labour promised change and we voted for them because we wanted change and they are continuing to subsidise.

“We still believe that there’s time for them to make a difference, but they need to end the subsidies now.”

In his keynote address at the Fabian Society’s new year conference, Mr Streeting claimed that the government feels a responsibility to be “the light on the hill for progressives around the world” in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

But he also described the government’s actions to hire more doctors, ending strikes and cutting NHS waiting lists were “much better than shouting from the sidelines.”

Mr Streeting’s speech came after Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party topped a national opinion poll for the first time, with 26 per cent of the vote, in a survey carried out by Find Out Now on Wednesday.

On Friday, Labour MP Barry Gardiner accused the wood-burning firm Drax of “deliberately misreporting” the sustainability of the wood pellets that it uses to fire its plant near Selby, North Yorkshire.

Speaking during a debate on a proposed Climate and Nature Bill, he said: “We should not be paying them at the moment — I think it is £9bn.

“The impact on biodiversity is disastrous … they say it is renewable but not in the timeframe we need for the 2050 targets.”

A BBC Panorama investigation has claimed that the power company burned wood from some of the world’s most precious forests in Canada — which Drax denies.

The company is however still in receipt of billions in environmental subsidies because the electricity it produces is classified as renewable.

Drax imports the equivalent of 27 million trees a year which it ships to Britain to burn.

Energy Secretary Ed Miliband is due to make a decision on whether to grant the power station more subsidies.