Labour Lies About Net Zero. Again.

Falsely inflating load factors won't make electricity cheaper. It will snuff out the economy though.

Ed Miliband has already misrepresented a report by the electrical grid operator (NESO) as saying that his aspiration for a net zero grid is possible. (It said no such thing, the caveats being damning). Now one of his minions is falsely claiming that it will make electricity cheaper, using the modelling of the same report, which is littered with dodgy data to get the answers Milliband demanded.

One egregious example is the “offshore load factor.” This percentage is applied to the nominal capacity of a wind turbine to predict how much electricity it will produce, accounting for those times when either the wind doesn’t blow or there is no demand. The higher the load factor the more electricity is produced. The report’s model used 61% rising to 69% over a decade. That’s simply pie in the sky, or, more bluntly, a blatant lie.

The chart below comes from the government’s own latest figures, (DUKES Table 6.3). It shows the true figure is around 40%. There is no way on earth that can increase to 60% in January.

The Civil Servants in the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) who advise Mad Ed seem incapable of confronting him with the engineering reality, or correcting him when he makes wild assertions. They’re not doing their job and someone needs to take Jeremy Pocklington, the Permanent Secretary, to task. Pocklington is already under pressure for his conflicts of interest (his brother runs an energy company). This failure to do his job is worse.

Knowingly publishing incorrect information is a very long way from good government. Politicians rightly find themselves in deep mire if they mislead the House of Commons, yet it seems that the modern Civil Service is at liberty to mislead the public – that is the people who pay their wages. That’s not right. Surely a civil servant has a responsibility to deliver reality to their ministers, even if the latter find it unpalatable? Speaking truth to power is surely a fundamental duty of every civil servant? If it ins’t it jolly well should be.

Clare Couthino, the Shadow Secretary for DENZ should know all this, yet she is making little noise. She needs to land punches on Mad Ed day in, day out. Perhaps her relative inexperience (first elected in 2019) make this hard. It’s also possible that she believes in net zero, which is Tory party policy. That’s a shame, because the real impacts of the Miliband monstrosity are starting to become clear.

Miliband’s plans to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030. This folly, first introduced by Johnson, pushed back to 2035 by Sunak and now heading back to 2030 under Mad Ed. He’s using a Stalinist quota system which fines car manufacturers if we, the consumers, don’t buy electric cars. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that the British public don’t want them. That in turn means that manufacturing petrol and diesel cars in the UK is not viable (because of the fines for us not buying cars we don’t want) and so Vauxhall is shutting its Luton plant.

That’s another 1,100 jobs destroyed on the altar of net zero, along with cuts at Ford (800 jobs) and Port Talbot (2.500 jobs). Nissan is considering leaving the UK, putting another 6,000 jobs under threat.

The business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds announced a review of the electric vehicle targets last Tuesday https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/11/26/britain-poised-to-water-down-electric-vehicle-rules/ - that is he kicked the can down the road, presumably fearful of standing in the way of Mad Ed (the man who stabbed his own brother in the back). Yet on Wednesday he told the House of Commons that all was fine because there is no long term market for the internal combustion engine.

Mr Toyota, who knows a bit more about the car industry than Mr Reynolds, is investing heavily in making internal combustion engines. Like his cabinet colleagues, Reynolds exists in a parallel universe; his delusions are costing people their livelihoods.

Of course, the business secretary has never run a business. He trained as a lawyer and spent his time in the Labour Party until becoming an MP in 2010. Perhaps he, like Mad Ed, believes that a politician can dictate to consumers what they will buy. That didn’t even work in Stalin’s USSR – and he had the KGB to help him. It can’t work in the UK unless we become a command economy. Perhaps that is Starmer’s ambition; it’s certainly the only way that the self-harm of Net Zero can be imposed.

We didn’t knowingly vote to become a European Cuba or Venezuela, but then the Labour manifesto was very light on specifics. The Reeves master plan of delivering growth through increasing the tax burden has simply delivered more expensive money and inflation. She may have created some space by manipulating the government’s borrowing calculations, but the deficit is growing to a staggering £127 billion for 2024-25. Growth is down to 0.1%.

All economic activity can be broken down to labour and energy. The National Insurance increase put up labour costs, net zero has done the same to energy costs. Brace for incoming inflation which will force higher interest rates (again) and stifle such growth as exists. That in turn means lower tax receipts, a bigger deficit and even more expensive borrowing.

The Labour party’s majority may mean that it’s politically secure. Economically it’s a different story; the UK depends on the bond market, whose members are the sole arbiter of the UK’s debt cost. We already spend £89 billion a year on debt interest, that’s £1 of every £13 the government spends. As the debt increases, as it will unless government spending diminishes to less than the tax take, the interest bill will rise. If the bond markets demand higher returns, as they are, then the interest bill will rise. If both happen, as is likely, the UK is descending into a debt crisis.

Should the International Monetary Fund (IMF) become concerned about a UK default it will step in, Labour will lose economic power and the UK will get a taste of what austerity really feels like While the UK’s last encounter with the IMF in 1976 led eventually to the Thatcher boom years, there was huge economic and social pain on that journey to solvency. Starmer’s government is sewing the seeds of despair.

The Conservative party also believes in net zero. The deluded Theresa May enacted it and the sclerotic Johnson expanded it. While Kemi Badenoch seems more sensible, whether she can bring her party with her, abolish the Climate Change Committee and abandon this lunatic policy is an open question – as is the stance of her cabinet.

The one party that has committed to abandon net zero is Reform, which therefore means that it is the only party with a credible economic policy. The electorate will have found that out the hard way by 2029.

It’s going to be miserable until then.

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