The madness of Ed Miliband

This is the script from our latest video polemic. Watch it here.

Ed Miliband – the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero in the UK’s new Labour government – would probably strike most people as a hapless, gaffe-prone, cringeworthy politician.

After all, here is a man who struggles to eat a bacon sandwich without being weird. A man who, when Labour leader, had his party’s pledges literally carved in stone, in easily the most ridiculous stunt of the 2015 election.

But what if he’s much worse than just useless? In fact, you could easily argue that he is the most dangerous man in British politics today, wedded to an ideology that will leave us poorer, colder and less free.

Miliband says he wants to make the UK a ‘clean-energy superpower’. He wants to make our electricity supply carbon-free by 2030. He says a rapid ‘green transition’ will make energy cheaper, provide thousands of jobs and wean us off our dependence on foreign powers. Renewable energy, like wind and solar, is the solution to all our woes, he says.

Next stop on my #GBEnergyTour🇬🇧 – Mansfield!

The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind 🎸 pic.twitter.com/QfHYT5xbzL

— Ed Miliband (@Ed_Miliband) March 2, 2023

There’s just one small snag with Miliband’s pitch. Those sunlit, wind-powered uplands he likes to sing about about are a complete and utter fantasy. Getting rid of fossil fuels will actually jack up the cost of living, kill off what’s left of our industry and curtail our freedoms. And we know this because green policies have already done enormous economic damage both here and abroad.

Let’s start with the cost of electricity. Labour’s aim is to decarbonise the entire electricity grid by 2030 – five years ahead of the target set by the Conservatives, and just six years’ on from Labour taking office.

Miliband says he will do this by eliminating natural gas – currently the largest source of UK electricity – and by expanding wind and solar power. Nuclear power is also carbon-free, but no new reactors are expected to come online until 2031. So, his plan relies entirely on renewables. And as we now know from bitter experience, reliance on renewables means sky-high energy prices.

Before the General Election, Miliband repeatedly promised that the rollout of wind and solar would help families save £300 per year on their energy bills. But whenever a country turns to wind and solar, bills only go in one direction. And that’s up.

In the 1990s, renewables accounted for just two per cent of Britain’s electricity. In 2022, a record year for renewables, they produced a third of Britain’s electricity.

According to Miliband’s logic, our energy bills should therefore already be substantially lower. Instead, they have more than doubled in the past 30 years, leaving Britain with some of the highest electricity prices in the developed world.

This is not just a problem in Britain. Everywhere you look, wherever wind and solar are used to replace fossil fuels, the price of electricity soars.

Take Germany. It has invested more in wind and solar than any other country on Earth, as part of its so-called Energiewende policy to phase out fossil fuels and nuclear energy. As a result, electricity prices rose by 50 per cent in Germany between 2006 and 2017.

Then there’s California, the renewables capital of the United States. Between 2011 and 2017, electricity prices there surged at a rate five times faster than the rest of the US, thanks largely to California’s embrace of solar power and its abandonment of nuclear.

So why are renewables so expensive? The answer is simple. Wind and solar are intermittent. How much they produce depends entirely on the weather. Wind farms can’t produce energy when the wind doesn’t blow, and solar farms can’t produce energy when the sun doesn’t shine.

Right now, we get around this by having fossil-fuel power plants on standby as backup. We also import far more energy than we used to. This adds considerably to our bills, but at least we can still keep the lights on.

Naturally, Miliband wants to crack down on these essential, emergency sources of energy as well. Under his 2030 target, gas will be phased out almost entirely from the grid, even as backup. Coal, another potential backup, will also be off the table. In fact, Britain’s last coal-fired power plant was closed for good this week.

But what about batteries? Can’t we just produce energy while the Sun shines and the wind blows and store it for later? That’s no good either, with current technology.

A Royal Society report last year made clear that a wind-powered grid would need storage facilities a thousand times larger than those we currently have. Even so, the storage we’d need could not ‘conceivably be provided by conventional batteries’.

This is why executives from the National Grid have been privately warning that our electricity system won’t be able to cope with Miliband’s mad target. The south-east of England could even face blackouts by 2028, they say.

We don’t need to wait until 2028 or 2030 to see that Miliband’s green agenda will take a wrecking ball to the economy. The casualties of Net Zero are already starting to mount. In September alone, we witnessed the closure of the UK’s last blast furnace at the Port Talbot steelworks in Wales, and the closure of the Grangemouth oil refinery in Scotland.

At Port Talbot, 2,800 workers are being made redundant under plans to ‘decarbonise’ the plant. Its traditional coal-fired blast furnaces will be replaced by eco-friendly ‘electric-arc’ furnaces. This will cost more than just jobs. Overnight, Britain, the home of the Industrial Revolution, will become the only nation in the G20 with no capacity to make its own virgin steel, the kind that’s needed for the vast majority of manufacturing.

Grangemouth, Scotland’s last remaining oil refinery, will be closed down next year. This single refinery produces 80 per cent of Scotland’s fuel, and provides four per cent of Scotland’s GDP. Seemingly, this is a sacrifice that Miliband is all too willing to make.

And this is just the beginning. One of Miliband’s first acts in office was to block all new licences for oil and gas drilling in the North Sea. This alone could cost tens of thousands of jobs.

No wonder workers and unions are up in arms. At this year’s TUC Congress, delegates backed a motion opposing Miliband’s sweeping, thoughtless ban.

Cliff Bowen, of the Unite union, warns oil and gas workers risk becoming the ‘miners of Net Zero’ – alluding to the hundreds of thousands of coal miners who lost their jobs thanks to Thatcher’s war on coal.

Gary Smith, general secretary of the GMB union, has similarly warned that ‘we’ve cut carbon emissions by decimating working-class communities’. He’s right. Britain’s reductions in carbon emissions so far have come at the cost of sweeping deindustrialisation. So much for Labour being the party of the workers.

Even for those of us not in industrial jobs, the cost of Net Zero is about to hit home. From April 2025, new gas boilers are to be slapped with a boiler tax, to encourage us to heat our homes with costly, ineffective heat pumps.

Petrol and diesel cars will also be phased out, with new sales banned from 2030 – five years earlier than our neighbours in the EU. Never mind that electric cars are much more expensive to purchase and run, and have far less range than conventional vehicles.

The hard truth that Miliband seems desperate to hide is that all of these ‘clean’ technologies are more expensive and less efficient than the supposedly ‘dirty’ technologies they seek to replace. After all, if going green really was so cheap and easy, we wouldn’t need the government to cajole us into doing so.

Now, why single out Ed Miliband, you might ask? Our political class has been obsessed with climate, and blasé about our living standards, for decades now. Wasn’t it the Tories who introduced the Net Zero target? Isn’t every Western nation, with some noble exceptions, singing from the same eco-extremist hymn sheet?

Sadly, that’s all very true. But Ed Miliband is more responsible than most for bringing eco-ideology to the mainstream. He served in Gordon Brown’s New Labour government in 2008. And as energy secretary he passed the landmark Climate Change Act, which set the world’s first legally binding decarbonisation targets. Miliband even pushed for them to be more stringent than the government had first intended, mandating emissions cuts of 80 per cent, rather than 60 per cent, despite having no idea or plan how to get us there.

Nothing that’s happened since has made him pause for thought or reconsider. He only wants to go further and faster down the road of eco-austerity, doubling down on the same failing policies. There is nothing he won’t sacrifice at the altar of Net Zero.

Even as energy prices go up, he insists that more renewables can bring them down. Even as factories are shuttered, he insists that a boom in green jobs is just around the corner.

Miliband is blind to the disaster that is unfolding before us. And blind to his own role in bringing it about.

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

Watch the video version below: