The new Labour leader picks up Miliband’s big idea.
BEN PILE
On Thursday, the Prime Minister, Andy Burnham wrote in the Guardian, “British people understand the climate crisis threat. Today I’m empowering them to tackle it.”
That word “empower” is intolerable, at this point. Green policy is always framed in this way — as if taking away your car is “empowering” you to walk.
October’s Ofgem price cap has gone up 4%, though, as I pointed out earlier this month, if you use consistent methods, then it’s significantly more than that. We’re paying nearly £600 more than we were when Labour came to power on the promise of “lower bills”. This week, analysts have been predicting 25% increases in the cap for January 2027. Energy retailer Eon Next are predicting a £408 increase.
So all this talk of “empowerment” to “tackle climate change” is just obnoxious.
“On the day I became prime minister, I pledged to bring power to every postcode”, he explains. “Today, we begin to make good on that promise in the most literal sense.”
You see what he did, the cheeky northern chappie, eh, power, eh? It’s got two meanings, you see!
“With nearly £30m of funding for People’s Power projects, communities across every nation of the UK will soon have the chance to build and control their own clean energy supply.”
Even if you have not yet felt offended by the Prime Minister, he nonetheless insulted your intelligence. He requires you to think that a project with a budget of less than 50 pence per person has changed your life, despite the fact that your bill has gone up nearly 1,200 times that amount.
The idea is not his own. It was Ed Miliband’s. I wrote about it here back in February.
Says Burnham:
This investment means villages, towns and cities can harness the natural resources around them with solar panels on libraries, publicly owned windfarms, hydro schemes in their rivers, or whatever else works for them. The purpose is to put money back in people’s pockets while giving them a direct role in tackling the climate crisis.
It’s a complete fantasy. And it comes with no economic analysis whatsoever. There is a reason that larger companies exist. And there is a reason that power stations were made larger and larger into the 20th Century. It turns out that centralising energy production plant, capital, expertise, and so on produces a better and cheaper product than can be managed by thousands of amateur appointees of “community energy” projects.
But what are the economics and politics of Burnham’s Green Leap Forward — a solar farm in every “community”?
How much will a “community energy” project return for its “community”? What happens when a “community energy” project requires maintenance it cannot afford? What happens if it becomes insolvent? Who becomes liable for its debts? And so on…
On Twitter, the PM seemed to think it wise to draw more attention to his Guardian article.
There are serious shortcomings with this claim. A “community” which produces its own energy is not “empowered”. There is no evidence or even theory that could support the claim that it would be good for that “community” or anyone else, in terms of bills or “local economy”, or that it would make any difference to the “climate crisis” — if there even were such a thing.
I would not be “empowered” by having to resort to having a well sunk in my garden. I would not be “empowered” by having to draw it myself by hand, to bring it into my home. I would not be “empowered” by having to then figure out what to do with the grey and black water. Utilities are just that — I am actually empowered by pipes and wires coming into my home, bringing (and taking) water, gas and electricity, produced by someone else at a fraction of the time cost, for a fraction of the effective price of my labour. A society that divides labour in that way, such that I can do something other than what is necessary, is actually empowering.
It is some extraordinary spin. Or perhaps he doesn’t know that bills are rising. Perhaps he has no grasp of basic finances. Perhaps he has no basic grasp of society and its functioning. But what is message appears to me to be implying is that the government intends to oversee the dissolution of society. It cannot devise an energy policy, it cannot attract capital to invest in energy infrastructure, and it cannot permit a market in energy production and transmission. So a community must supply itself.
Perhaps this appeals to preppers and other Armageddonists. But beneath the roll-your-own energy policy is a wholly unnecessary destruction of what was good, and what was mastered and pioneered in this country.
I spoke to Ian Collins about it yesterday on his Talk TV show.
The other thing I mentioned was the House of Commons Committee on Energy Security and Net Zero, which reported this week:
For decades the UK has been on a journey reducing its carbon emissions and it has also made significant international commitments to address the threat of climate change. The political consensus that enabled the UK to be a world leader in tackling climate change and transitioning to clean energy has broken down. It broke because a gas price shock and the acute cost of living pressures contributed to a shift of sentiment and scapegoating of the transition rather than the fossil fuel dependence that had caused the crisis. That has had consequences for public trust which this Report examines.
These people fool themselves. I believe they are idiots. But colleagues and associates say that’s possibly wrong. These are smart people led astray by something…
What the MPs have convinced themselves of, however, is that we are idiots.
The Department should drop ‘net zero’ from its name as a start to making its communications less technocratic and reduce its use in regular communications and public statements, instead focussing on wider societal benefits.
As I pointed out to Ian Collins, the MPs believe that the problem is that “Net Zero” as a term is insufficient to convince you of its virtues.
But the problem for them is that there are no “wider societal benefits”. And, despite their claims, it is not gas prices that have led to the price explosion. It is energy and environmental policy in general, and the subsidies for green power in particular.
The report — which I am sure I will return to — is evidence of a Parliament that is located in a different universe, and utterly removed from ordinary people’s day-to-day life.
Finally, in her attempt to explain high energy prices, and excuse the government’s failures and fibs, Miliband’s successor, Miatta Fahnbulleh, during an insufficient interrogation by “money saving expert” tycoon Martin Lewis, claimed that “you can’t factor a war in Ukraine.”
But the war in Ukraine (in its current form) started in February 2022. The tensions had been building since at least 2014, after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and if not longer, in the form of civil conflicts in the Donbas region, which countless experts, both hawkish and dovish recognised could be a flashpoint. The Labour government did not come to power until July 2024 — 2.5 years later. And this was their offering:
They promised “lower bills”. They certainly didn’t come to power offering a resolution between the West and Russia. So how could the Labour government have not “factored in” the Russia-Ukraine war?
And as others have observed, though the US-Iran conflict is new, the region in dispute is a historic chokepoint, and Iran the locus of energy crises since the 1950s, no thanks to Britain’s earlier governments. Moreover, though it may be beyond her power to do much to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, she does have the power to reopen and expand North Sea oil and gas production. Yet she clings to her claim that “clean power” is “cheaper”, despite all evidence to the contrary, even at today’s high gas prices.
Miatta Fahnbulleh is a liar. Her boss is an idiot. And her colleagues are zombies. And perhaps that makes “community energy” seem like a good idea. The UK government is more hostile to the interests of British people than Russia, China, Iran and all the gods and monsters that dwell in the green movement’s collective imagination. However, I think it better to aim towards replacing the British establishment than reinventing myself as an artisanal energy producer.
••••
••••
••••
••••
(UKR)
