Miliband's Favourite Economist Doesn't Understand How Markets Work

Professor Mariana Mazzucato claims Net Zero is the route to cheaper energy

When Ed Miliband took the podium at the Good Growth Foundation’s National Growth Debate in Westminster last week, he did not disappoint his audience of the faithful. Flanked by the economist he has long revered, Miliband delivered a speech that could serve as a textbook case of what I have elsewhere called the economic illiteracy of UK energy policy. Yet to dismiss it as mere stupidity would be a mistake. There is a method to Miliband’s madness — one honed over years in the cloistered halls of ‘woke’ Oxford and the Fabian-inspired London School of Economics and now supercharged by the ‘mission’-obsessed theories of Professor Mariana Mazzucato of University College.

In that speech — republished by the New Statesman — Miliband declared that “the era of fossil fuel security is over, and the era of clean energy security must come of age”. He credited “the godmother of missions, Marianna Mazzucato, who’s with us,” for the intellectual scaffolding of Labour’s clean energy push.

The mission, he said, established in opposition and now in Government, has “two parts — driving to a clean electricity system but also electrifying as much as we can as we decarbonise the wider economy”. Informed by the “lessons” of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the latest crisis over the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Miliband insists Britain must “double down” on Net Zero, tax North Sea oil and gas investments punitively and “electrify everything” while rejecting any new exploration and development of domestic hydrocarbons.

Pernicious political elite

This is not ignorance born of inexperience. Miliband has been a central figure in Britain’s — and the world’s — climate movement for nearly two decades. As climate change secretary under Gordon Brown, he helped shepherd the 2008 Climate Change Act, the legislative foundation for the UK’s self-proclaimed “international climate leadership”. He has since served as shadow secretary of state for energy and climate change and, since July 2024, as the Government’s Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary.