Ed Miliband Must Stop Blaming Putin for Britain's Energy Woes

Stop the lies. It's lockdowns and Net Zero that made Britain poor

In the Telegraph last week, Secretary of State for Energy Security (or so he claims) and Net Zero (of which we can be much more certain) Ed Miliband writes that ‘Small nuclear reactors will help end our reliance on dictators like Putin‘. It’s a very obvious and deeply patronising framing, characteristic of politicians who think that policy agenda ‘A’ can be made more popular with group ‘B’ by aligning it with resonant issue ‘C’. Hawks to greens. But this ABC-approach to political comms looks more like an attempt to convince himself that he has convinced Telegraph readers than an attempt to address Net Zero scepticism.

The Telegraph, it should be stated, is on Miliband’s case, not his side. The broader Tory fold lost its commitment to the green agenda in the wake of the Johnson cake coup when several then-recently former ministers began breaking ranks on what had been a government consensus of all parties. The Truss and then Sunak regimes began slightly winding down their Net Zero commitments, though very far from what was necessary or could reasonably be called ‘Net Zero scepticism’. In the year before the premature election, followers of the climate debate (such as it was) observed a sea change in news media commentary. The Telegraph has latterly reflected this change of mood, at last committing journalistic resources to investigations of the green agenda’s excesses. And that is why Miliband’s missive is published in that paper, not in the Guardian.