Tony Blair's Call for Net Zero Levies to Be Abandoned is Hugely Damaging for Ed Miliband

The ex-PM is trying to salvage the fast-sinking green agenda

Things could not get any worse for Ed Miliband. No sooner than he had recycled his 2009 promise to create “400,000 green jobs” to distract us from his earlier promise of “lower bills” being trashed by energy CEOs, the unflushable face of Tony Blair came rearing over the ailing policy agenda. In a wordy, nerdy, disoriented and conflicted (if not wholly inaccurate) report, Blair’s underlings in his Institute for Global Change poured a lot of cold water over Miliband’s ambition to secure ‘Clean Power by 2030’.

There was a brief signal from the news media in the hours ahead of the report’s publication (clearly under embargo) on Thursday morning. At 9pm on Wednesday, the Guardian reported that ‘Keir Starmer prepares to miss key green target in effort to keep energy bills down’, and that the ‘Promise to remove almost all fossil fuels from UK’s electricity supply by 2030 may be quietly abandoned over cost’. How odd, a few sceptic murmured in our caves: the Graun is extremely reluctant to give any credence to the claim that the green agenda is in any way related high prices, preferring instead claims such as “wind is nine times cheaper than gas” and that anyone who says otherwise is a Putin shill.