Ed Miliband’s green delusions will bankrupt Britain

For a brief, fleeting moment, it seemed as if the penny had finally dropped for Ed Miliband. On Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, the UK energy secretary was asked why energy prices are four times higher in Britain than they are in the US. Why is it that America, which has pledged to ‘drill, baby, drill’ for fossil fuels, is greatly outperforming the UK, which has banned new offshore drilling and all onshore fracking? America, Miliband conceded, has ‘an abundance of gas’, which helps to keep prices low.

Predictably, what Miliband then refused to admit is that Britain could also have access to an abundance of oil and gas. A new field of shale gas was discovered beneath Lincolnshire earlier this year, with enough gas to supply the UK for five to 10 years. The North Sea still has an estimated 10 to 15 billion barrels worth of oil and gas that are waiting to be exploited. Yet Miliband has turned his back on both opportunities. He has refused new drilling licences to North Sea oil and gas firms. And he has gone as far as to order that concrete be poured into Britain’s last two fracking wells, ensuring that gas can never be extracted from there ever again in the future – even if he is replaced by someone infinitely saner. Miliband’s monomaniacal focus on Net Zero and decarbonising energy supplies has denied Britain the energy abundance it deserves.

When pushed on why Britain couldn’t simply follow America’s path, Miliband tried to argue that the law of supply and demand – one of the few iron laws of economics – ceases to operate within the UK’s borders, for some unintelligible reason. Worse, he genuinely seems to believe that producing less energy will lead prices to fall. After all, beneath Miliband’s blather about turning Britain into a ‘clean-energy superpower’, what Net Zero really means is transitioning from energy abundance to energy poverty. Renewables, which are intermittent and dependent on the vagaries of the weather, are not a like-for-like replacement with the gas and coal plants that Miliband is blithely demolishing. Indeed, since the 2000s, when climate change became the focus of UK energy policy, the total amount of electricity available has slumped by as much as 21 per cent. It is no wonder that prices have soared in that period, too. And under Miliband, it’s only going to get worse.

The impact of Britain’s staggering energy prices is nothing short of catastrophic. Household energy bills have risen, on average, by £281 since Miliband became energy secretary – an almost exact reversal of his pre-election pledge to cut bills for every household by £300. Even worse has been the impact on manufacturing. Sky-high energy prices and other Net Zero diktats have been a major factor in the recent struggles of the car industry, the steel industry and the chemicals industry. The UK is deindustrialising at an alarming rate, thanks to the impossible demands of decarbonisation.

Yet still Ed Miliband refuses to acknowledge the damage he is doing. His zealotry remains undimmed by the failures of his green experiment. Left unchecked, his delusions will bankrupt Britain.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.