Even if the Iran war ended this second, oil and gas prices will rocket. If there’s no peace deal, and I can’t see one, we could soon face shortages and rationing. Right now, we’re in the lull before the storm. This is when politicians should step up and show their mettle, offering reassurance and taking charge. Instead we have chancellor Rachel Reeves, who’s useless, and energy secretary Ed Miliband, who’s worse than useless. He’s actively dangerous. This cannot end well.
I haven’t even mentioned Keir Starmer. While he’s nominally prime minister, he has abdicated from power in practice. He drives Labour cabinet ministers mad by spending his days buried in policy papers, and never coming to a decision about anything. There’s a war going on, and he’s wading through the fine print of a defence review that may never see the light of day. He’s no kind of leader at all.
Don’t panic though, we have Rachel Reeves. She stood up in Parliament yesterday, with great fanfare beforehand, to tell us how she would protect us from the looming crisis. It was her moment to rise to the occasion. And of course she completely fluffed it. As she fluffs everything.
Instead of setting out what she was going to do, she started banging on about Liz Truss again. Who was PM for just 49 days in 2022. More than three years ago. Reeves will soon have been in power for 10 times as long, yet still blames all of problems on Truss. This was the moment for Reeves to stand up for the country, but like the small-minded person she is, she preferred to engage in petty party name calling.
She also moaned about “profit-gougers”, forgetting she’s the biggest gouger of the lot thanks to her repeated tax raids. Then she droned on, as she always does, about Labour’s supposed achievements. Free childcare, breakfast clubs, scrapping the two-child benefit cap, and the state pension triple lock increase None of which has anything to do with the crisis staring us in the face.
Eventually she mentioned energy and assured us that bills are capped until June. Excuse me, but we know that. Ofgem set the energy price cap weeks ago. Nobody is worried about summer bills. It’s winter that terrifies people, and there she has nothing to offer us at all. Unless you’re on welfare. The welfare bill now rivals the UK’s income tax take, and taxes will rise again to fund this latest act of largesse. So more money transferred from those with jobs to those without.
In truth, Reeves is trapped. Her tax and spend splurge has driven borrowing and debt so high that she cannot raise more on the bond market. She’s snookered herself. But this isn’t the worst of it.
Ed Miliband is the very worst of Labour. His decision to block all North Sea oil and gas drilling was ridiculous when he first announced it 20 months ago. Today, it’s pure insanity. He keeps defending himself by claiming that drilling won’t drive down energy prices as they’re set globally, but he’s gaslighting us.
What it will do is bring in some valuable tax revenues on the oil we sell at today’s inflated market prices, while cutting our reliance on gas piped in from Norway or liquefied natural gas transported from the US and Qatar, with far greater global emissions.
He’s also destroyed tens if not hundreds of thousands of jobs by killing off our domestic oil and gas industry with his 78% windfall tax, originally introduced by the equally useless Tories.
The more gas produced at home, the more secure supply becomes, especially in a crisis like the one we’re in ow. Britain now relies heavily on imported liquefied natural gas, leaving it exposed just as the world becomes more dangerous. Storage is pitiful, nuclear remains years away, and renewables cannot deliver constant power. Gas is still essential to the green transition.
Reeves and Miliband are the worst possible combination at the worst possible moment. One cannot act. The other acts against our economic and security interests. And when the crisis hits, in a week or two, we’re all going to be snookered.
