The fairy tale of Labour’s Brothers Grim
Labour’s energy plans are best described as ‘utterly puerile’. Their very own Brothers Grim – Mr Starmer and Mr Miliband – have come out with a set of ideas that would be quite at home in the pages of a fairy story.
This is clear from the off, the party’s manifesto discussing what it calls ‘the climate and nature crisis’ and the ‘opportunity for growth’ represented by ‘clean energy’, which it says will help tackle the cost of living crisis. It’s hard to know how to respond to such delusions. As NZW readers know, the ‘climate emergency’ is a superstition. And growth in renewables has, of course, been accompanied by a steady rise in electricity prices; the two moved in lockstep from 2002 to 2020, the eve of the Ukraine war. If insanity is doing the same thing again and again, and expecting different results, then the Brothers Grim need straitjackets as soon as humanly possible.
The manifesto as a whole is entirely lacking in any meaningful detail. We learn that it will create 650,000 skilled jobs. So that is an extra £25 billion or so that we need to find. And where are these people coming from? The North Sea oil and gas industry doesn’t employ anything like that many.
We are also told that Labour will “double onshore wind, triple solar power, and quadruple offshore wind by 2030”. The idea that this much capacity could be delivered in the space of six years is utterly absurd. And even the Brothers Grim believe that Harry Potter will come to his rescue, conjuring all those turbines and panels into existence with a wave of his wand, they still wouldn’t deliver a carbon-free grid – the need for some generation capacity when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining appears to be a problem to be swept under the carpet, with the Labour team only making vague allusions to ‘hydrogen’ and ‘carbon capture’, two technologies that are not yet off the drawing board. If the Brothers Grim are going to make them a reality by 2030, they are certainly going to need Mr Potter to come to their rescue a second time.
As with the other energy manifestos so far, Labour’s effort is a fairy tale, entirely devoid of any connection to engineering or economic realities. It is best handled with ridicule.