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This is a guest post by Maurice Cousins, Campaign Director at Net Zero Watch …
Reform Member of Parliament Richard Tice has just done what no other politician in the United Kingdom is prepared to do.
He has told the green energy industry that the era of blank-cheque subsidies and guaranteed profits is over, and that the renewables agenda “no longer enjoys cross-party support” in British politics.
A Reform-led government, Tice says, would cancel billions in contracts and scrap green energy subsidies, marking a fundamental break from the status-quo.
Predictably, this has caused outrage amongst green industry bosses and NGOs.
Critics say it will deter investment, while the BBC’s Faisal Islam has said it will “drive a coach and horses” through Ed Miliband’s green energy plans.
But pause. If simply questioning a contract causes markets to wobble then to what extent, if at all, was the underlying model ever sustainable to begin with?
Richard Tice’s intervention doesn’t destabilise the system. On the contrary, it reveals just how unstable the United Kingdom’s energy system has truly become.
In any functional market, investors weigh commercial, technological, and political risk. What makes the UK’s energy market different is that it’s been shielded from serious, rigorous debate for years, with both Left and Right singing the same tune.
Instead, it’s been propped up by a cosy, Uniparty consensus in Westminster, vast subsidies, which have imposed the highest energy prices in the world on the British people, and a general conspiracy of silence among the elite class (even as voters themselves have started to become more sceptical about this consensus).
Some technocrats have slowly been catching up, however.
In its latest report, the Office for Budget Responsibility, the OBR, quietly confirms the consequences of nearly two decades of disastrous energy policy.
Not deliberately, of course. The report itself is written in the typically passive, data-heavy, and overly technocratic language of economic forecasters.
But read carefully, read between the lines, and the truth becomes clear. Britain’s leaders, the Uniparty, have created an energy system that is directly contributing to our failing economy, is imposing enormous bills on British families, and, at the same time as all this, is undermining our country’s energy security.
And now, the entire architecture is buckling under the strain.
For years now, British policymakers tried to convince themselves that energy was only a secondary concern. Their goal was to hit climate targets, appease activist lobbies, and align with international norms.
Real-world questions – such as how to ensure a firm energy supply, keep people’s energy bills down, or support industry – were treated as inconvenient side-notes.
Affordability became someone else’s problem. And firm, dispatchable energy – the stuff that actually powers modern economies – was quietly pushed out of the mix.
Even as the cost of living crisis overtook climate change, immigration, and the NHS as the British people’s top priority, Westminster persisted with this insanity.
But now the bill for all this has arrived.
While the OBR does not say much about it, the numbers speak for themselves.
Dire rates of growth. Stubborn inflation. Interest payments on our national debt that are rising faster and higher than in comparable economies. And the Treasury having to spend tens of billions on crisis response, with less and less fiscal room each time. What connects all these trends?
Our short-sighted energy policy.
This is why, when the global energy shock hit, in 2022, the UK was uniquely exposed. The government was forced to spend £40 billion to keep households and businesses afloat — not because of market failure, but because successive governments had spent much of the previous decade dismantling our domestic energy resilience.
They shut down coal, side-lined gas, ignored nuclear, blocked onshore development, and deepened our dependence on intermittent power with no serious backup plan.
That £40 billion was not an unavoidable cost. It was the price of political decisions – decisions that have made the UK the least resilient energy market in the G7.
And yet, still, the government hasn’t changed course.
Labour’s Clean Power 2030 plan doubles down on the same vulnerabilities. As Professor Dieter Helm has warned, it will accelerate costs, deter investment in firm generation, and make the national grid more fragile, not less.
The OBR estimates Net Zero mitigation will cost the UK government some £803 billion over 25 years, or £30 billion every year. That’s 0.8 per cent of GDP every year.
And that’s just the fiscal share.
The figure excludes household and business costs, which could be several times higher. It assumes no delays, no overruns, no interest rate shocks. It’s based on data from the Climate Change Committee, which recently revised its cost estimates down by 65% – not because the task got cheaper, but because the modelling changed.
So, no, the problem isn’t that the number is too high.
It’s that it’s almost certainly too low.
Britain has pursued an energy model that is physically fragile, economically inefficient, and politically untouchable. And this model is now being exposed.
And unfortunately, it’s about to get worse.
Every structural weakness the OBR highlights in its report —low growth, stubborn inflation, high debt, persistent deficits— will be compounded by an energy system that demands ever more subsidy and delivers ever less reliability.
For years, critics were told the debate was over. But the reality couldn’t be suppressed forever. When industry insiders now admit that political risk needs to be priced into subsidy auctions, that’s not radical - it’s market correction.
When investors get nervous about long-term contracts, that’s not reckless - it’s overdue realism. When Reform’s Richard Tice says these deals are unaffordable, he’s not being ideological - he’s saying what millions of voters already know.
Britain, as we all know, is in deep trouble. And our idiotic energy policy is a big reason why. The OBR spreadsheets speak volumes. The fiscal state is weakening. The resilience is not there. And the British people, rightly, are starting to ask questions.
The question is not whether the current energy model has failed. Because it very clearly has. No, the right question we should all be asking is whether anybody in power, anybody in the Uniparty, is prepared to admit it and build something better before the next crisis makes that completely impossible.
Richard Tice and Reform have taken the first step. Now others will have to follow.
"Climate Change" was one of the major planks of Blair's project to alter our governance model from one where the people are sovereign to one where the elites cement their position of power through deception, gaslighting, and, when they fail, outright lies and coercion.
Any policy based upon the premise co2 is the problem will in the end fail.
The science going back millennia simply does not support the narrative and indeed the gulf between projections and reality steadily grows.
I have no doubt the climate is changing, I can see such, but it has done since God was a boy and the link to co2 simply wrong.
That the MSM and others refuses to debate such is a sign of a very weak argument.
What is however very clear is that the U.K. is now well down a road to economic ruin through power shortages.