Romance over Realism

From energy to migration our naivety is fuelling national decline

Towering Columns

In The Telegraph, Kemi Badenoch says that our obsession with Net Zero is undermining our attempts to deal with climate change.

Climate change is real. We can see its effects all over the world, not least the current spate of heatwaves here in Britain. Conservatives have always understood that we have a duty to protect our natural inheritance. We should preserve our countryside, encourage biodiversity, invest in flood defences and ensure that Britain is resilient in the face of a changing climate.

The question isn’t whether we should act. The question is whether the policies imposed in the name of climate action are effective, affordable and honest. Too many people cannot tell the difference between talking about climate change and dealing with it. They have accepted that the Left’s chosen policies are the only practicable policies, and that anyone who questions them must secretly want the planet to burn. This is intellectually lazy. It’s also dangerous.

Net zero has become a slogan where Britain needs a plan. It allows politicians to announce a virtuous destination without explaining how we will reach it, what it will cost, who will pay, which industries will survive, or whether it will reduce global emissions at all.

For UnHerd, Mary Harrington argues that we must not over sentimentalise our history.

Periodically, when Elon Musk decides, in his wisdom, to intervene in British politics, he likes to imagine all of Britain and her inhabitants as basically hobbits: bucolic, small-minded denizens of rural Arcadia, desperately vulnerable to predators. But this is both wrong and unhelpful. Yes, Tolkien’s Shire is one of the most famous evocations of that pastoral idyll. But historically, Britons were the despoilers of the Shire as well as its hobbit inhabitants. The Romantic spirit of Wordsworth, and the Arts and Crafts movement led by John Ruskin, harked back to a mythic, rural deep England; meanwhile, technologists and visionaries in the real-world 19th-century Britain had little compunction about driving roads and railways through those fields of green in pursuit of “improvement”.

This people produced Cecil Rhodes as well as John Ruskin. They invented steam engines, sterilisation, and vaccination, not to mention a host of lethal weapons. They imposed law and order on Britain, routinely resorting to corporal punishment, hanging, or deportation. They did the same to a great many other geographies besides — some of which retain the bones of our common law to this day, even while agitating for reparations. Even education was delivered with unembarrassed, righteous ferocity: the tyrannical, pedantic Mr Gradgrind, in Dickens’s novel Hard Times, vividly illustrates the methods used to impose knowledge and manners on the children of Victorian Britain.

By contrast, since the two wars Britain has seemed determined to hold fast to our legacy of wartime solidarity, order, and peace, built on those brusque Victorian foundations — only now, without ever needing to be tough. It’s as though we want Elon to be right; as if, were everyone only to play by the rules, all of England might be forever Arcadia. But instead, it’s allowed that culture of order and common purpose to soften, by degrees, to the point where its goods are rapidly evaporating. We congratulate ourselves on having abandoned “Gradgrindian” teaching, while teachers collapse under the stress of bad behaviour in the classrooms and kids learn nothing. Local policing is nonexistent. Rules are only for suckers. Our border enforcers hand out visa-sponsorship licences to vape shops, or Islamic centres allegedly linked to the Iranian state.

In The Times, Juliet Samuel writes that our lack of gas storage is putting our economic security at risk.

Here’s a peculiarity of British energy policy. Oil and gas each supply about a third of the country’s energy. In case of emergency, we keep on hand 90 days’ worth of oil imports. But for gas it’s different. For gas, we store enough to last just two to three days. Not weeks. Days. Germany can store 90 days’ gas; France, over 100; Italy, somewhere in between; and the Netherlands, about 60.

The discrepancy is a mystery until you realise that the International Energy Agency (IEA) mandates that its members keep 90-day oil stockpiles but says nothing about gas. And there is nothing the civil service reveres more than an edict from an international body, not even the duty to secure our most basic needs.

This ought to be a considerable source of worry. The Hormuz blockade is finally taking its toll and people have noticed that Europe’s gas stores are about half as full as usual for summer, creating the most precarious energy position since Putin cut us off. Come winter, we will be scrambling for supplies from a limited pool of tankers scanning the world for the best price. If Andy Burnham can think as far ahead as winter, he should be fretting about painful bills, for households and industry alike.

In The Spectator, Madeline Grant critiques progressives that hide behind generic statements about ‘hate’ rather than confronting radical ideologies.

Deep down, I suspect progressives know that they are imperilling their traditional voting coalitions. Their responses often reflect this. There is a particularly invidious form of weasel words which play minority rights against each other (something, ironically, which those in power routinely accuse the right of doing). Sadiq Khan reacted to the Berlin attack by saying that it showed ‘why Pride matters’. Actually, it shows why we need stronger immigration controls and a more intense and targeted deradicalisation strategy for young Muslim males.

Khan knows that, most gay people know that, anyone with half a brain knows that. So the reasons for putting out such a statement are necessarily political rather than providing a practical solution. Khan’s inference is obviously that all gay people should get behind the state-approved line that what’s needed is more public displays of diversity, not any action against the specific ideology which commits these crimes again and again.

It will keep happening, and progressive leaders will keep minimising the threat by labelling it ‘hate’. But hate isn’t generic. Hate is horribly targeted. These attacks don’t happen because of an impossible-to-define misanthropy, they happen because their perpetrators believe we should live in a caliphate and it is their duty to bring this about using violence. It’s important to keep pointing that out, even if our leaders refuse to do so.

For The Critic, James Hodgkinson says that we will come to regret the flight of millionaires from the country.

Our disdain for aspiration has made Britain a harder place to do business. And this malaise is reflected in our tax system. In a move that will cost businesses up to £25 billion a year, the Government hiked national insurance contributions and slashed the threshold at which they can be paid. Combined with minimum wage increases and cuts to capital allowances, margins are now heavily squeezed. Faced with this burden, it is unsurprising that businesses are buckling under the pressure. The rate of enterprise insolvency is 20 per cent higher than a decade ago, as entrepreneurs are forced to take ever-higher risks in pursuit of rapidly diminishing returns.

But domestic dynamism is not the only thing to suffer in modern Britain. The attack on Britain’s 200-year old non-dom scheme, commenced by the Conservatives and gleefully egged on by Labour has seen Britain’s attractiveness to overseas investment plummet. While the world’s increasingly mobile wealth creators simply move to a country that welcomes their contributions, it is the countries they leave which end up bearing the brunt. Research from the Adam Smith Institute estimates that the end of the non-dom regime will cost Britain £111 billion in lost investment, employment and consumption in the next decade alone. With unemployment at its highest rate in five years, this is something Britain can ill-afford. A policy enacted in pursuit of equity has had ramifications far beyond its original intentions. And it is ordinary Brits, not wealthy elites, who will shoulder the biggest burden.

Perhaps the most revealing choice this government has made is its decision to raise a levy on independent education. The pernicious policy taxed one thing: ambition. While the wealthiest families and the largest institutions will weather the storm, the story for small independents and working families who make true sacrifices to give their children the best start in life is quite different. Over 100 schools have closed, and the education of thousands of students has been disrupted. When a government discourages self-reliance and arbitrates its political grudges against children, it becomes clear that Britain’s aspirational élan is at breaking point.

Wonky Thinking

The Prosperity Institute has published new research on energy transition and how we are building up huge costs through an excessive reliance on renewable energy which have large subsidies attached to them, undermining our future competitiveness and driving up bills.

Britain currently has the highest industrial electricity prices and the fourth-highest domestic electricity prices in Europe. While high gas prices contribute to wholesale costs, this paper argues that the dominant driver of elevated electricity bills is the cumulative impact of policies designed to accelerate renewables deployment and achieve Net Zero.

Electricity subsidies (Renewables Obligation Certificates (ROCs), Contracts for Difference (CfDs), Feed-in Tariffs (FiTs), and the Sizewell C Regulated Asset Base (RAB) levy) have risen from £0.5bn in 2010/11 to £11.8bn in 2024/25 and are forecast to reach £14.9bn by 2030/31. Grid integration costs—covering transmission network charges, balancing services, and the Capacity Market—have increased from £2.8bn to £8.0bn over the same period and are projected to rise sharply to £25.3bn by 2030/31. Combined, these subsidy and grid integration costs have grown six-fold since 2010/11 to £19.8bn in 2024/25 and are forecast to exceed £40bn annually by 2030/31. This will be equivalent to more than £1,400 per household.

Additional policy-driven costs from Carbon Capture and Storage (£21.7bn committed over 25 years), green hydrogen support (potentially £16bn over 15 years for the first two allocation rounds), the Green Gas Levy, and the Sustainable Aviation Fuel mandate will add further billions per year, largely recovered through energy bills or higher consumer prices.

The paper contends that these costs stem primarily from the large-scale integration of intermittent renewables (wind, solar, and biomass). Their full cost and intermittent nature make renewables uncompetitive in a free market, so they need to be subsidised. Their intermittency drives substantial additional expenditure on grid expansion, balancing services, curtailment payments, and backup capacity. In contrast, the direct fuel cost of gas-fired generation remains relatively modest by comparison.

Any incoming market-driven government committed to lowering energy prices and restoring national prosperity will need to treat these costs as a “Day One” matter and begin pursuing cuts immediately.

The Adam Smith Institute has published a paper on how we can support our fishing industry and prevent the loss of native species through strengthening property rights and encouraging greater transparency on the quota system.

• Britain’s fishermen work one of the country’s most dangerous and worst-paid trades, yet the stocks they depend on are being steadily depleted. These two realities should not be possible simultaneously. Britain regained control of her waters after Brexit, but we have failed to fundamentally change how they are managed. The Government has left both EU vessel access and the allocation and governance of fisheries access for British vessels substantially unreformed.

• Despite repeated aims to increase the sustainability of British fisheries, half of Britain’s ‘top 10’ fish species, selected primarily on the basis of landings, are either ‘overfished with critically low population sizes, currently being overexploited, or both’. According to one study, just two in ten of these total allowable catches were set in line with scientific advice.

• This failure is now reaching the supermarket shelf. In 2026, Waitrose became the first British supermarket to stop selling a fish species due to sustainability concerns. The British fishing fleet comprises 5,232 vessels. 79% of these are under 10 metre craft, although they account for just 8% of the fleet’s total capacity.

Podcast of the Week

In this week’s Econoclasts podcast, Yanis Varoufakis and Wolfgang Munchau discuss how China’s financial repression is interacting with an asset bubble in the United States and the long term impact it could have on the global economy.

Quick Links

BP plans to sell off its UK North Sea Oil business.

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