Ed Miliband promised his net zero crusade would deliver on all three. Instead, it’s failed on every front, and we’re all paying the price. Shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho called his approach “insanity”. She’s being polite.
Miliband is forcing Britain to abandon fossil fuels faster than almost any other advanced economy, at staggering cost.
Unlike some of his critics, I don’t dismiss the threat of climate change. Temperatures are rising, and the shift to cleaner energy is essential. But Miliband’s reckless strategy is doing more harm than good.
Britain now suffers some of the highest electricity prices in the world. That’s crippling industry and hammering households.
And we’re still burning fossil fuels, just more of it from abroad. While Miliband blocks new North Sea projects, we spend a fortune importing more gas from authoritarian states, losing jobs, tax revenues and energy security in the process.
Latest official figures say it all. UK gas production fell 6.9% in the first quarter of this year. Imports surged 20%.
So we’re not switching to clean, home-grown power. We’re just replacing British gas with foreign gas,– much of it from Middle East dictatorship Qatar. He’s “bankrupting Britain”.
Miliband once warned against relying on authoritarian petrostates. His own policies are making that dependence worse.
Energy-rich Norway is drilling flat out and getting richer by the day, and it’s making tens of billions a year out of us.
Our Scandinavian allies wouldn’t give a zealot like Miliband any say over their energy policy. They’d treat him like the Vikings treated the monks at Lindisfarne.
During the election, Miliband falsely claimed his net zero plans would cut £300 off electricity bills. Today, Reform’s Richard Tice claimed they’ll add £1,000 a year to every household’s costs.
Even the weather has turned against him. The Met Office and Royal Meteorological Society recently warned that Britain is becoming less windy, meaning turbines will generate even less power.
So Miliband will have to throw even more subsidies at them to keep the lights on.
And because solar and wind can’t be stored at scale, we still need gas-fired power stations as a backup.
It’s a system so wasteful it borders on farce: two overlapping energy grids, both eye-wateringly expensive. No wonder electricity bills are through the roof.
The costs are piling up. We’re forfeiting billions in North Sea tax revenue, while losing high-paid, high-skilled jobs across the UK.
Our trade deficit is widening as imports rise. Britain is still forecast to burn up to 15 billion barrels of oil and gas by 2050, with just four billion of those from domestic reserves.
The rest will be foreign-sourced, higher-emission and far more expensive.
Donald Trump, for all his bluster, makes more sense than Miliband. Last week, he called the North Sea a “treasure chest” and slammed the refusal to drill. Starmer gave a half-hearted nod – but who knows what he really believes. He just floats with the wind.
Miliband, by contrast, is too deep in the bunker to back out. Yes, he recently did a U-turn on North Sea drilling, but that was forced on him.
The old definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.
By that measure, Miliband’s energy policy isn’t just wrong. It’s mad.