There are moments in a columnist’s life when you simply have to jump off the high diving board and hope for the best. Today is one of those days because it’s inevitable that, if it weren’t for my incognito, I would be the subject of a Bateman cartoon identifying me as, ye Gods, The Man Who Defended Ed Miliband.
This is partly stubbornness on my part. It would be far, far easier to duff Miliband and his record up. And this column has taken up that challenge on many occasions – there’s so much to dislike about what Miliband is doing and how he is going about it. Freed from the fear of political failure by his dismal five years as leader of the opposition, he’s able to treat triumph and disaster just the same and, boy, don’t we know it. He has targets he’s never going to meet; he has faith in technologies that will never bear the weight of his belief (yes, that’s you, carbon capture); he’s created the most misguided quango of recent times and yet, pause for a moment. Lots of people are beating up Ed Miliband as his pledge to cut energy prices looks increasingly daft but what if he’s right? What if Miliband is, and I know it’s unlikely, this generation’s Roy Jenkins?
The first plank in Miliband’s defence is the climate crisis. If you don’t think there’s a climate crisis, then there’s little point in reading much further. The year 2024 will be the hottest on record and the signs of climate change are all around us. From European ski resorts to the recent terrifying events in Valencia, our climate is changing and yet the best examples are often the most humdrum: I recently enjoyed watching Hamish Martin from Tombane Farm in Perthshire eloquently explaining his disbelief to his many Instagram viewers in finding a glorious mullein flower, a harbinger of summer, in full flower in….November. So this column fully believes in the climate crisis and thinks Miliband right to do something about it and do it urgently.
The second plank in Miliband’s defence is the resources that we have in the United Kingdom: almost limitless access to wind and, though this may surprise many, plenty of irradiance too. It doesn’t feel irrational to make the most of those resources. At this point, those who delight in pointing out Dunkelflaute to Ed Miliband will jump up from their armchairs ready to ask “but what about when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow” which is a fair point but doesn’t obviate the rationale that we should make as much as we can from those many more days when the wind does howls and the sun does shine. And this, by the way, is the reality; in the last 12 months, fossil fuels have provided just 27% of the UK’s energy.
The third plank in Miliband’s defence is that this is the way the world is going. The climate deniers have missed the bus. India, China and southern states in the US are all investing in renewable energy – 1 GW of renewable power added every day in China right now. Are they all wrong about this?
The fourth plank in Miliband’s defence is that as the first country to go through the Industrial Revolution why shouldn’t the UK be the first to go through the Green Revolution. We remain a country of innovators, of science, of engineers – but we’re not a country of industrial production. Perhaps then it’s easier to lead the world by showing how we can transform ourselves into a post-industrial economy. That means we offshore our emissions and we rely on other countries perhaps more than we should but at least we can be honest about knowing what we’re doing? Admittedly, the argument for Miliband is at its flimsiest here; if part of his argument is about energy security, there’s no way that Miliband should be shuttering the North Sea. Even so, he’s not wrong to say that North Sea producers need to think more carefully about their post-fossil fuel future.
There’s not a lot to love about Ed Miliband. Zealotry is never appealing; it’s particularly unappealing when it comes up hard against inconvenient facts: the revolution that Miliband is wreaking is going to cost us all – energy prices are going up, come what may, as he looks to do what he thinks is the right thing for future generations. His lack of honesty about the cost of his plans and how the system doesn’t work for consumers right now is Miliband’s most egregious error but it doesn’t mean that his overall vision is wrong. Our world is warming with potentially catastrophic consequences – at least Ed Miliband, for all his faults, is prepared to use his sixty seconds’ worth of distance run to do something about it.