No, the energy crisis is not some unforeseeable consequence of the Ukrainian war. It is the result of years of wishful thinking, preening and short-termism. We sit on 300 years’ supply of coal. We have rich pockets of gas trapped in rocks beneath Central Scotland, Yorkshire, Lancashire and Sussex. We have as good a claim as any country to have invented civil nuclear power. Yet, incredibly, we face blackouts and energy rationing.
The calamity into which we are heading this winter represents a failure of policy under successive governments going back decades. The fact that much of Europe is in the same boat – and that poor Germany is barely in the boat at all, but is clinging by its fingertips to the gunwales – is no consolation.
Like their counterparts in other Western countries, our leaders are now scrambling to make up for past errors. More nuclear power-stations are mooted. The ban on shale gas extraction is reviewed. Sudden attention is paid to potential new sources of clean fuel, from hydrogen to fusion. All good stuff. All too late.
You can’t build a nuclear power plant in less than five years. Even fracking takes around ten months to come online – and that assumes that you have first cleared all the planning hurdles. Hydrogen has vast potential, and what Britain is doing with fusion, not least at the Atomic Energy Authority’s facility in Culham, is mind-blowing. We may well be less than two decades away from solving all our energy problems. But none of that will see us through next winter, when average household fuel bills are set to rise to over £4000.
How did we allow ourselves to become so vulnerable? It was hardly as if disruption in global energy markets was unthinkable. Most of the world’s hydrocarbons are buried under countries with nasty governments. For every Alberta, there are a dozen Irans; for every Norway, a dozen Nigerias. There is even a theory, first advanced by Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, the Venezuelan energy minister who founded OPEC, that the very fact of having oil turns a country into a dysfunctional dictatorship.
We have seen wars, blockades and revolutions across petro-dollar economies. We knew that a break in supply was always a possibility. And it was hardly as if Vladimir Putin was disguising the nature of his regime, for heaven’s sake.
No, we are in this mess because, for most of the twenty-first century, we have ignored economic reality in pursuit of theatrical decarbonisation. Actually, no, that understates our foolishness. Decarbonisation will happen eventually, as alternative energy sources become cheaper than fossil fuels. It is proper for governments to seek to speed that process up. But this goes well beyond emitting less CO2. Our intellectual and cultural leaders – TV producers, novelists, bishops, the lot – see fuel consumption itself as a problem. What they want is not green growth, but less growth.
As Amory Lovins, perhaps the most distinguished writer to have been involved in the move away from fossil fuels, put it in 1970:
“If you ask me, it’d be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it.”
The idea that cheaper energy is a positive good – that it reduces poverty and gives people more leisure time – has been almost wholly lost. We have convinced ourselves that if it isn’t hurting, it isn’t working. The reason we slip so easily into talk of banning and rationing is not just that the lockdown has left us readier to be bossed about. It is that we have come to regard the use of power as a sinful indulgence.
But raising the price of energy is not something we can do in isolation. When power becomes more expensive, so does everything else. Fuel is not simply one among many commodities; it is the enabler of exchange, the motor of efficiency, the vector of economic growth.
When did you last hear a politician admit as much? When did you hear any public figure extol cheap energy as an agent of poverty alleviation? When did you hear any historian describe how coal and later oil liberated the mass of humanity from back-breaking drudgery and led to the elimination of slavery? For ten thousand years, the primary source of energy was human muscle-power, and emperors on every continent found ways to harness and exploit their fellows. But why bother with slaves when you can use a barrel of sticky black stuff to do the work of a hundred men – and without needing to be fed or housed?
The reason no one says these things (other than Matt Ridley) is, to be blunt, that it is unfashionable. The high-status view is that we are brutalising Gaia, that politicians are in hoc to Big Oil and that we all ought to learn to get by with less – a view that it is especially easy to take if you spent the lockdown being paid to stay in your garden, and have no desire to go back to commuting.
Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain and assorted anti-capitalist frondistes are openly and unashamedly anti-growth. For them, low-cost energy has dragged humanity away from the closed, local economies that they want. As Paul Ehrlich, the father of modern greenery, put it in 1975:
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun. With cheap, abundant energy, the attempt clearly would be made to pave, develop, industrialise, and exploit every last bit of the planet”.
Tories don’t put it that way, of course, even to themselves. But they are still tugged by the cultural currents of the day. So they find ways to rationalise higher taxes, higher spending and anti-market measures with which they would normally have little truck.
Typically, they do so by playing up the economic opportunities that green technology will supposedly bring. Boris Johnson extols them with such gusto that he seems genuinely to have convinced himself. But it is pure hogwash. If there really were such opportunities, investors would find them without needing the the state to ban some fuel sources and subsidise others.
Green growth is a fallacy for the same reason that, as Frédéric Bastiat showed in 1850, you can’t make a city wealthier by smashing its shop windows. Doing so might immediately generate growth – nominal GDP often rises sharply in the aftermath of a natural disaster – but every penny spent by the shopkeeper on new windows (and by the glazier who now has extra income, and by the people he buys from and so on) is a penny that would have been spent more usefully without the breakages. In the same way, every penny spent on green “investment” is a penny that has been taken out of the productive economy through taxation.
None of this is to argue that governments shouldn’t seek to mitigate climate change. They should. I just wish they would admit that doing so is expensive. Green jobs are a cost, not a benefit. If you banned the use of diggers and had lines of workers with spades instead, you could argue that you had “created” jobs; but you would have made everyone worse off.
Conservatives should approach climate change in neither a masochistic nor a messianic spirit, but calmly, transactionally, hard-headedly. If there is good reason to believe that advances in technology will lead to sharply reduced costs, then let the timetable slip accordingly. If something more urgent comes along then, similarly, make a cool assessment of where your priorities lie. When the coronavirus hit, several fiscal targets were abandoned on grounds that there was a more immediate crisis. The current energy shortfall should prompt a similar reassessment.
Consider this. The transition from relatively dirty coal to relatively clean gas required very little state involvement. The Thatcher government simply withdrew subsidies and allowed the market to do its work. Carbon emissions fell and the air became cleaner.
Since then, though, we have had a much more interventionist approach, with price caps and green levies and subsidies for consumers and grants for producers and bans on new technologies (notably fracking). Result? Prices have risen and supply has fallen – to the point where, like some South American dictatorship, we are about to order our population to get by with less.
Please, ministers, stop trying to help. Stop spending and taxing and printing. Stop fining and subsidising and capping. Stop banning and rationing. Stop setting targets. We have had enough of being helped. We need time to heal.
*surprised pikachu face*
Just wait until the government start implementing additional taxes to electric, to make up for the tax shortfall of moving to electric vehicles.
>There is even a theory, first advanced by Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, the Venezuelan energy minister who founded OPEC, that the very fact of having oil turns a country into a dysfunctional dictatorship
Yeah, just look at Norway with their $1.5 trillion oil fund and ability to generate 100% of electricity from renewables.
What did North Sea Oil bring us? Millions on the dole and the loss of our ability to build nuclear power stations.
The idea that energy is anywhere close to a functioning “market” is laughable. Using that as a starting premise is wholly incorrect to me.
Agreed that cheap energy is a fantastic driver of economic growth but that has meant all these countries being held hostage by these companies.
I feel the energy companies are the new Tobacco companies.
This is just opportunist climate action obstructionism with a not so subtle promotion of gas fracking. The idea that there is a novel green technology that will solve climate change just around the corner so we should all just continue as normal (or even accelerate our use of fossil fuels) until it arrives is the new delaying tactic of what were previously climate change deniers. It’s hardly a surprising article from someone like Daniel Hannan who has long had his pay checks made out from the sort of “think tank” that gets it’s funding from the fossil fuel industry. Reading between the lines of this article there are tons of half truths, misrepresentations of positions and subtle use of language designed to lead the read to a particular conclusion.
What’s the point posting an article hidden between a pay wall?
Rising prices and, surprise surprise, massive profits for the energy companies. Those in power don’t give a fuck about it because they have interests in the energy companies and actually benefit from it
Scarcity increases value… Capitalism 101.
When The Telegraph is roasting you, you know you fucked up.
I never used to talk like this but it has to be planned. Forcefully making us addicted to the state.
Swansea,UK has repeatedly been denied the go ahead for the tidal lagoon, which would be the first of its kind in the uk, constant energy created from the tides and would last 125 years, free green energy turned down, it’s almost like the tories have a vested interest in keeping production of fosil fuels from dying out, i wonder why.
It’s like the end game of capitalism. With extreme, unrestrained capitalism, you end up with the money all in the hands of the few it seems. So companies chew up other companies. They become bigger and bigger and choice becomes less. This goes on and on I suspect until you literally have just a few people owning everything and everyone else paying them.
They say politics is a circle. If you end up with everything being owned by a few private individuals then what is the difference between that and everything being owned by the state?
Energy companies are collapsing. How long will it be till there is just a few?
It kind of seems like they are just going to let the economy crash at this point and people are making out while they can. That could be a sensible decision given the choice of that or managing spiraling inflation.
Said a newspaper that pushes Tory agenda constantly.
No cheap energy until the pension funds find another stable industry to get into, without collapsing the profits of the energy companies they need to get out of, by getting out of them.
Keep making the money for the 1% is most countries moto. No money in actually doing the right thing. Yep it’s 2022 and it’s still fucking like this.
Make the shit show end lol
Our leaders only want the wealthy to survive, they don’t give a shit about anyone else. And soon there will be laws to stop you even talking about it!
Because all those in charge get large kickbacks or ‘donations’ not too.
I’m sure the elites at the top don’t want cheap anything.
The more we pay for energy, the more we pay for everything else, which means we have to work more, and so generate value for them.
For us thats less free time, later retirement, multiple jobs, longer hours, just to be where we were a decade ago.
Sunak hates the poor on principle.
Truss has no principles, but will say anything to one-up Sunak.
It’s a competition to see who can shit more on the peasants.
And when those peasants die, both Sunak and Truss will blame someone else.
We have the best conditions for wind and tidal in the world. And we could have had tax-payer funded clean energy megaprojects, any time this century. Clean, free energy, and enough for everyone.
But Westminster doesn’t want to. After all, where’s the profit in that? Who would that help, except the poor?
>Typically, they do so by playing up the economic opportunities that
green technology will supposedly bring. Boris Johnson extols them with
such gusto that he seems genuinely to have convinced himself. But it is
pure hogwash. If there really were such opportunities, investors would
find them without needing the the state to ban some fuel sources and
subsidise others.
Funny how that logic is never applied to oil and gas. For every pound of investment oil and gas companies make they get a tax rebate of 91p.
Step 1: Enable energy companies to fuck the poor
Step 2: Your friends in the energy companies make profit
Step 3: The middle class becomes the working class (and less of a threat to the rich). The working class becomes destitute.
Step 4: When the working class is forced to resist in order to live, you can brand them enemies of the state, and take measures to crush them fully into subservience.
Step 5: Welcome to a snazzy new corporatocracy.
> Politicians, in hoc to eco-extremists
Well this writer’s either a blithering idiot or (more likely) intentionally lying to his audience.
Is there a reason we don’t just funnel masses of money into going 100% renewable… and beyond to sell it to other countries? Would actually improve all of our lives massively…
If you look at China’s renewable capacity it’s insane, why can’t we just build absolutely tons of it as well?
well of course not, the upper classes(who can afford it) want to keep the plebs in their place
Tories enjoy it when others go without. So much so that they are willing to win a little less as long as someone else is hurting much more.
What absolute hogwash. Is anyone falling for his argument that green, cheap energy will make the world worse?
He’s for fracking and deregulation and I understand how you could argue for that. But to portray green energy and investment in green energy as a bad thing is just bonkers. I’m not sure I’ve ever read an opinion piece I agree with in the Telegraph
Taxes levied on North Sea oil and gas was spent by both Labour and Conservative governments on normal government commitments ie NHS Defence Pensions Education State Benefits etc etc. Don’t think there was ever a plan to build a Norway style fund. Norway has a population of 5.4 million. UK population of 67 million. There is no real equivalence. If the taxes raised had not been spent people would have complained the NHS Defence Education Pensions etc etc were being starved of funding. Just like today. Seems like it’s a no win situation for any government
“500 words by 3pm- and try and stir up some anger, please Daniel”.
“Sure”
I don’t know why we don’t invest more in nuclear. Its basically like making a cup of tea. It’s the most British energy out there
When you object to every windfarm that is near you, or.every plan for a nuclear plant – then of course it is the ‘leaders’ fault. Which is not to say that they aren’t all in the pockets of the oil and gas industry – but I think we have to share some of the blame
33 comments
No, the energy crisis is not some unforeseeable consequence of the Ukrainian war. It is the result of years of wishful thinking, preening and short-termism. We sit on 300 years’ supply of coal. We have rich pockets of gas trapped in rocks beneath Central Scotland, Yorkshire, Lancashire and Sussex. We have as good a claim as any country to have invented civil nuclear power. Yet, incredibly, we face blackouts and energy rationing.
The calamity into which we are heading this winter represents a failure of policy under successive governments going back decades. The fact that much of Europe is in the same boat – and that poor Germany is barely in the boat at all, but is clinging by its fingertips to the gunwales – is no consolation.
Like their counterparts in other Western countries, our leaders are now scrambling to make up for past errors. More nuclear power-stations are mooted. The ban on shale gas extraction is reviewed. Sudden attention is paid to potential new sources of clean fuel, from hydrogen to fusion. All good stuff. All too late.
You can’t build a nuclear power plant in less than five years. Even fracking takes around ten months to come online – and that assumes that you have first cleared all the planning hurdles. Hydrogen has vast potential, and what Britain is doing with fusion, not least at the Atomic Energy Authority’s facility in Culham, is mind-blowing. We may well be less than two decades away from solving all our energy problems. But none of that will see us through next winter, when average household fuel bills are set to rise to over £4000.
How did we allow ourselves to become so vulnerable? It was hardly as if disruption in global energy markets was unthinkable. Most of the world’s hydrocarbons are buried under countries with nasty governments. For every Alberta, there are a dozen Irans; for every Norway, a dozen Nigerias. There is even a theory, first advanced by Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, the Venezuelan energy minister who founded OPEC, that the very fact of having oil turns a country into a dysfunctional dictatorship.
We have seen wars, blockades and revolutions across petro-dollar economies. We knew that a break in supply was always a possibility. And it was hardly as if Vladimir Putin was disguising the nature of his regime, for heaven’s sake.
No, we are in this mess because, for most of the twenty-first century, we have ignored economic reality in pursuit of theatrical decarbonisation. Actually, no, that understates our foolishness. Decarbonisation will happen eventually, as alternative energy sources become cheaper than fossil fuels. It is proper for governments to seek to speed that process up. But this goes well beyond emitting less CO2. Our intellectual and cultural leaders – TV producers, novelists, bishops, the lot – see fuel consumption itself as a problem. What they want is not green growth, but less growth.
As Amory Lovins, perhaps the most distinguished writer to have been involved in the move away from fossil fuels, put it in 1970:
“If you ask me, it’d be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it.”
The idea that cheaper energy is a positive good – that it reduces poverty and gives people more leisure time – has been almost wholly lost. We have convinced ourselves that if it isn’t hurting, it isn’t working. The reason we slip so easily into talk of banning and rationing is not just that the lockdown has left us readier to be bossed about. It is that we have come to regard the use of power as a sinful indulgence.
But raising the price of energy is not something we can do in isolation. When power becomes more expensive, so does everything else. Fuel is not simply one among many commodities; it is the enabler of exchange, the motor of efficiency, the vector of economic growth.
When did you last hear a politician admit as much? When did you hear any public figure extol cheap energy as an agent of poverty alleviation? When did you hear any historian describe how coal and later oil liberated the mass of humanity from back-breaking drudgery and led to the elimination of slavery? For ten thousand years, the primary source of energy was human muscle-power, and emperors on every continent found ways to harness and exploit their fellows. But why bother with slaves when you can use a barrel of sticky black stuff to do the work of a hundred men – and without needing to be fed or housed?
The reason no one says these things (other than Matt Ridley) is, to be blunt, that it is unfashionable. The high-status view is that we are brutalising Gaia, that politicians are in hoc to Big Oil and that we all ought to learn to get by with less – a view that it is especially easy to take if you spent the lockdown being paid to stay in your garden, and have no desire to go back to commuting.
Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain and assorted anti-capitalist frondistes are openly and unashamedly anti-growth. For them, low-cost energy has dragged humanity away from the closed, local economies that they want. As Paul Ehrlich, the father of modern greenery, put it in 1975:
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun. With cheap, abundant energy, the attempt clearly would be made to pave, develop, industrialise, and exploit every last bit of the planet”.
Tories don’t put it that way, of course, even to themselves. But they are still tugged by the cultural currents of the day. So they find ways to rationalise higher taxes, higher spending and anti-market measures with which they would normally have little truck.
Typically, they do so by playing up the economic opportunities that green technology will supposedly bring. Boris Johnson extols them with such gusto that he seems genuinely to have convinced himself. But it is pure hogwash. If there really were such opportunities, investors would find them without needing the the state to ban some fuel sources and subsidise others.
Green growth is a fallacy for the same reason that, as Frédéric Bastiat showed in 1850, you can’t make a city wealthier by smashing its shop windows. Doing so might immediately generate growth – nominal GDP often rises sharply in the aftermath of a natural disaster – but every penny spent by the shopkeeper on new windows (and by the glazier who now has extra income, and by the people he buys from and so on) is a penny that would have been spent more usefully without the breakages. In the same way, every penny spent on green “investment” is a penny that has been taken out of the productive economy through taxation.
None of this is to argue that governments shouldn’t seek to mitigate climate change. They should. I just wish they would admit that doing so is expensive. Green jobs are a cost, not a benefit. If you banned the use of diggers and had lines of workers with spades instead, you could argue that you had “created” jobs; but you would have made everyone worse off.
Conservatives should approach climate change in neither a masochistic nor a messianic spirit, but calmly, transactionally, hard-headedly. If there is good reason to believe that advances in technology will lead to sharply reduced costs, then let the timetable slip accordingly. If something more urgent comes along then, similarly, make a cool assessment of where your priorities lie. When the coronavirus hit, several fiscal targets were abandoned on grounds that there was a more immediate crisis. The current energy shortfall should prompt a similar reassessment.
Consider this. The transition from relatively dirty coal to relatively clean gas required very little state involvement. The Thatcher government simply withdrew subsidies and allowed the market to do its work. Carbon emissions fell and the air became cleaner.
Since then, though, we have had a much more interventionist approach, with price caps and green levies and subsidies for consumers and grants for producers and bans on new technologies (notably fracking). Result? Prices have risen and supply has fallen – to the point where, like some South American dictatorship, we are about to order our population to get by with less.
Please, ministers, stop trying to help. Stop spending and taxing and printing. Stop fining and subsidising and capping. Stop banning and rationing. Stop setting targets. We have had enough of being helped. We need time to heal.
*surprised pikachu face*
Just wait until the government start implementing additional taxes to electric, to make up for the tax shortfall of moving to electric vehicles.
>There is even a theory, first advanced by Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, the Venezuelan energy minister who founded OPEC, that the very fact of having oil turns a country into a dysfunctional dictatorship
Yeah, just look at Norway with their $1.5 trillion oil fund and ability to generate 100% of electricity from renewables.
What did North Sea Oil bring us? Millions on the dole and the loss of our ability to build nuclear power stations.
The idea that energy is anywhere close to a functioning “market” is laughable. Using that as a starting premise is wholly incorrect to me.
Agreed that cheap energy is a fantastic driver of economic growth but that has meant all these countries being held hostage by these companies.
I feel the energy companies are the new Tobacco companies.
This is just opportunist climate action obstructionism with a not so subtle promotion of gas fracking. The idea that there is a novel green technology that will solve climate change just around the corner so we should all just continue as normal (or even accelerate our use of fossil fuels) until it arrives is the new delaying tactic of what were previously climate change deniers. It’s hardly a surprising article from someone like Daniel Hannan who has long had his pay checks made out from the sort of “think tank” that gets it’s funding from the fossil fuel industry. Reading between the lines of this article there are tons of half truths, misrepresentations of positions and subtle use of language designed to lead the read to a particular conclusion.
What’s the point posting an article hidden between a pay wall?
Rising prices and, surprise surprise, massive profits for the energy companies. Those in power don’t give a fuck about it because they have interests in the energy companies and actually benefit from it
Scarcity increases value… Capitalism 101.
When The Telegraph is roasting you, you know you fucked up.
I never used to talk like this but it has to be planned. Forcefully making us addicted to the state.
Swansea,UK has repeatedly been denied the go ahead for the tidal lagoon, which would be the first of its kind in the uk, constant energy created from the tides and would last 125 years, free green energy turned down, it’s almost like the tories have a vested interest in keeping production of fosil fuels from dying out, i wonder why.
It’s like the end game of capitalism. With extreme, unrestrained capitalism, you end up with the money all in the hands of the few it seems. So companies chew up other companies. They become bigger and bigger and choice becomes less. This goes on and on I suspect until you literally have just a few people owning everything and everyone else paying them.
They say politics is a circle. If you end up with everything being owned by a few private individuals then what is the difference between that and everything being owned by the state?
Energy companies are collapsing. How long will it be till there is just a few?
It kind of seems like they are just going to let the economy crash at this point and people are making out while they can. That could be a sensible decision given the choice of that or managing spiraling inflation.
Said a newspaper that pushes Tory agenda constantly.
No cheap energy until the pension funds find another stable industry to get into, without collapsing the profits of the energy companies they need to get out of, by getting out of them.
Keep making the money for the 1% is most countries moto. No money in actually doing the right thing. Yep it’s 2022 and it’s still fucking like this.
Make the shit show end lol
Our leaders only want the wealthy to survive, they don’t give a shit about anyone else. And soon there will be laws to stop you even talking about it!
Because all those in charge get large kickbacks or ‘donations’ not too.
I’m sure the elites at the top don’t want cheap anything.
The more we pay for energy, the more we pay for everything else, which means we have to work more, and so generate value for them.
For us thats less free time, later retirement, multiple jobs, longer hours, just to be where we were a decade ago.
Sunak hates the poor on principle.
Truss has no principles, but will say anything to one-up Sunak.
It’s a competition to see who can shit more on the peasants.
And when those peasants die, both Sunak and Truss will blame someone else.
We have the best conditions for wind and tidal in the world. And we could have had tax-payer funded clean energy megaprojects, any time this century. Clean, free energy, and enough for everyone.
But Westminster doesn’t want to. After all, where’s the profit in that? Who would that help, except the poor?
>Typically, they do so by playing up the economic opportunities that
green technology will supposedly bring. Boris Johnson extols them with
such gusto that he seems genuinely to have convinced himself. But it is
pure hogwash. If there really were such opportunities, investors would
find them without needing the the state to ban some fuel sources and
subsidise others.
Funny how that logic is never applied to oil and gas. For every pound of investment oil and gas companies make they get a tax rebate of 91p.
Step 1: Enable energy companies to fuck the poor
Step 2: Your friends in the energy companies make profit
Step 3: The middle class becomes the working class (and less of a threat to the rich). The working class becomes destitute.
Step 4: When the working class is forced to resist in order to live, you can brand them enemies of the state, and take measures to crush them fully into subservience.
Step 5: Welcome to a snazzy new corporatocracy.
> Politicians, in hoc to eco-extremists
Well this writer’s either a blithering idiot or (more likely) intentionally lying to his audience.
Is there a reason we don’t just funnel masses of money into going 100% renewable… and beyond to sell it to other countries? Would actually improve all of our lives massively…
If you look at China’s renewable capacity it’s insane, why can’t we just build absolutely tons of it as well?
well of course not, the upper classes(who can afford it) want to keep the plebs in their place
Tories enjoy it when others go without. So much so that they are willing to win a little less as long as someone else is hurting much more.
What absolute hogwash. Is anyone falling for his argument that green, cheap energy will make the world worse?
He’s for fracking and deregulation and I understand how you could argue for that. But to portray green energy and investment in green energy as a bad thing is just bonkers. I’m not sure I’ve ever read an opinion piece I agree with in the Telegraph
Taxes levied on North Sea oil and gas was spent by both Labour and Conservative governments on normal government commitments ie NHS Defence Pensions Education State Benefits etc etc. Don’t think there was ever a plan to build a Norway style fund. Norway has a population of 5.4 million. UK population of 67 million. There is no real equivalence. If the taxes raised had not been spent people would have complained the NHS Defence Education Pensions etc etc were being starved of funding. Just like today. Seems like it’s a no win situation for any government
“500 words by 3pm- and try and stir up some anger, please Daniel”.
“Sure”
I don’t know why we don’t invest more in nuclear. Its basically like making a cup of tea. It’s the most British energy out there
When you object to every windfarm that is near you, or.every plan for a nuclear plant – then of course it is the ‘leaders’ fault. Which is not to say that they aren’t all in the pockets of the oil and gas industry – but I think we have to share some of the blame