Politics: madder than a mad hatter’s tea party

By Richard North - September 26, 2022

Labour is on course for a comfortable majority at the next election, according to the latest poll carried out by Savanta ComRes for LabourList.

The poll gives Labour a 12-point lead over the Conservatives, with 45 percent against 33 percent. The Lib-Dems take 10 percent. The Greens get 4 percent and Reform trails at a mere 3 percent. If the results were repeated at the next general election, due in 2024 at the latest, Labour would secure a comfortable 56-seat majority.

The poll relies on sophisticated multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) techniques, creating a model which suggests that Labour would regain many so-called “Red Wall” seats, including Ashfield, Bassetlaw, Blyth Valley, Sedgefield and Workington. The Tories could sink to just 211 seats – a fall of 146 on where they are now, one of the most prominent casualties being the Oaf, who loses his seat.

Whether or not these results stand any chance of being repeated at a general election is, of course, the million-dollar question, and there is much campaigning to come, before any votes are cast. And even though The Replacement has the potential to destroy much of the Tory core vote, Starmer seems also seems bent on committing electoral suicide.

The suicide note comes labelled as a “green growth plan”, supposedly to counter The Replacement’s tax cuts. It is hailed as a revolution in green energy to “boost jobs and slash emissions” and is to be formally unveiled at the Labour Party Conference this week.

Through this deadly instrument, Starmer believes he will be able to deliver a new era of economic growth and permanently lower energy bills by turning the UK into an independent green “superpower” before 2030, through a massive expansion of wind and solar energy.

He is expected to tell the conference that, if Labour is elected, he will double the amount of onshore wind, triple solar and more than quadruple offshore wind power, “re-industrialising” the country “to create a zero carbon, self-sufficient electricity system, by the end of this decade”.

This is even madder than the Oaf’s commitment to “net zero” by 2050, basically bringing the agenda forward for completion by 2030, turning the ruinously impossible into the insanely delusional, in a bid – or so Starmer believes – to release the British people from the mercy of “dictators” such as Putin over energy bills.

It would also, he says, cut hundreds of pounds off annual household energy bills “for good”, create up to half a million UK jobs, and make this country the first to have a zero-emission power system.

For all the rhetoric about Putin though, this mad plan predates the current war in Ukraine, dating back to a plan published in October 2019 under the leadership of Tom Bailey, who had previously touted his particular brand of delusion as a key part of Labour’s bid to win office in December 2019.

Now repurposed as a catch-all bid to deal with the energy crisis, Starmer justifies the re-hash with expressions of faux sympathy for hard-pressed plebs, telling us: “The British people are sick and tired of rocketing energy bills and our energy system being exposed to dictators”.

Acknowledging that the plebs “want long-term solutions to cut bills for good”, he has decided that a “central mission” of his government – should that ever come to pass – would be “to turn the UK into a clean energy superpower”, with an all-singing, all-dancing plan “that will drive jobs, tackle the cost of living, and protect our homes for future generations by tackling the climate crisis”.

Interestingly, Starmer – along with Ed Miliband, the shadow secretary of state for climate change – claims only to have been working on this “cunning plan” for just months – even though the ideas are clearly recognisable from Bailey’s work published in 2019.

The idea at its core, we are told, is to build a self-sufficient power system run entirely by cheap, homegrown renewables and nuclear, by the end of the decade. This, the Starmer-Miliband axis argue, would also allow the country to become a major energy exporter.

The immediate fatuity of this claim can be readily appreciated if one understands that all but one of the UK’s current nuclear plants is scheduled for closure before 2030, leaving Sizewell B in place only for a further five years, with little prospect of any new plants taking up the slack.

Given that any large-scale expansion to the offshore wind-fleet will be held back until National Grid has implemented its £50 billion upgrade to the grid – for which no financial provision has yet been made – the chances of the UK even meeting domestic demand by 2030 is remote. That it should become a major power exporter in a mere eight years (or at all) is simply delusional.

Starmer, however, must be hoping that no-one (and especially legacy media pundits) will take the trouble to explore Bailey’s work, as delusion is written through it like a stick of Blackpool rock.

For instance, while the emphasis is on nuclear providing the base load, it is assumed that the UK’s nuclear generating capacity in 2030 will be maintained at its current level, which will not be the case.

That will leave both part of the base load and the peak load to be drawn from intermittent renewables, yet Bailey and his friends are confident that the lights will stay on and supply and demand can be balanced, “with the right updates to infrastructure and the development of whole energy-system approach”.

This miracle, it seems, will be secured by “taking an optimistic view of what can be achieved based on available and ready-to-be-deployed technologies, current deployment levels, faster than historical development rates, an appreciation of current UK industrial and workforce capacity and the uncertainties around crucial new technologies”.

In terms of detail, this requires a rapid and extensive update of the grid (which isn’t going to happen) and implantation (sic) of demand side response, “preceded by a suitable investigation into the right balance of solutions, delivering a revolutionised system within a decade”.

Meanwhile, it seems, the lights would stay on by maintaining current backup gas generation capacity in the 2020s; expanding power storage to at least 20GW; and investing in grid enhancements. This, says the Bailey clique, demonstrates that there are definitely workable solutions.

Technologies to be employed include: demand side management; back-up/peaking generators; power storage (pumped hydro, batteries, pressurized air etc); interconnectors; digitisation and smart meters; short term heat storage; EV smart charging and vehicle to grid (V2G) – all within the space of eight years.

Much depends on the unwilling plebs being bullied into buying heat pumps for domestic heating, although even Bailey and his friends seem to recognise that these are not up to the job. They thus advance the solution of “hybrid heat pumps”, a combination of gas burner and heat pump which can subsequently be converted to burn green hydrogen – purchased at more than twice the price of a conventional boiler.

With that, there should be an immediate end to new coal extraction, phasing out coal electricity generation as soon as possible, an immediate end to fracking for gas; end electricity generation from oil anywhere in the UK. This, to the original timetable, was supposed to end in 2022.

By 2030, the plan is also to reduce the annual operation of gas-fired electricity generation from 130 TWh today to 36 TWh – a 72 percent reduction. The only form of fossil fuel use permitted, whether for power generation or production of hydrogen, would be that coupled with 100 percent carbon capture and storage, despite no commercial-scale plant yet having been successfully operated.

Sadly, though, relatively few people will be delving into the details of the Starmer plan, doubtless allowing him to gloss over the inconvenient problems which make his scheme madder than a mad hatter’s tea party. But when the roar of the standing ovation has died down, there is still the reality to confront. Would that they knew it, Starmer has just given the Tories an open goal.