Of all the news which has percolated through the media over the last week or so, by far the most important for the United Kingdom is the warning from Ofgem concerning the perilous state of our electricity supplies.
There are few other issues which better illustrate political failure by successive governments of all parties, than the systematic unravelling of Great Britain’s traditional energy self-sufficiency and nuclear power pre-eminence. When we look back to the early nineteen eighties we find electricity, gas and oil all in plentiful supply at reasonable cost for all, including industry and commerce as well as the elderly and those in need. There were interruptions due to industrial action, but not to failing plant.
Decisions about future energy security were called for as a matter of sensible planning, in addition to which came anxieties about the effect of fossil fuels upon the climate. This required political brains to mobilise realistic science and invest in meeting future need. What we got was ideology, flawed economics, dithering, cowardice and abdication of responsibility from one government after another.
Thatcher began the rot with the notion that the private sector could do the job better than the state, a nostrum with some validity in the right business, but taken way beyond its functionality by so called Thatcherism. This is because for capitalism to work, business must be able to fail. Indeed the majority of private businesses do fail in the end. It may even be that the attributes needed to prosper in their initial area of success will cause downfall in different conditions and not all business has the flexibility to adapt, or should even do so.
In modern culture, certain services are a matter not just of economic necessity to sustain the structure of society and its living standard, they are literally a matter of life and death. Such a service, note the term service, is the generation of electric power. The industry should never have been privatised. The outcome of near monopolistic giant corporations operating in a free energy market driven by speculators and watched over by regulators is one of the worst anyone could have conceived. Add to that the refusal of government after government to face campaigners and pressure groups of every sort and kind, and reach timely decisions about the need for modernisation and rebuilding of the nation’s capacity to meet its growing power needs and you have the required ingredients for a new economic crisis and a good deal of individual suffering.
We are now governed by a coalition full of inexperienced people with good intentions, trying to please everybody as well as each other, who have managed to on the one hand to fail to organise or entice private expertise to build new nuclear capacity and on the other to accelerate the programme to shut down coal stations before any form of replacement is in view. As a consequence of this failure of public policy for which there is absolutely no excuse whatsoever, the only solution, aside from whimsical observations about ‘wind and wave’, is to build a clutch of new gas fired stations in a hurry.
The problem with that is we have run short of our own natural gas and will therefore have to buy a high percentage of this new fuel need on international wholesale markets, where prices are predicted to rise hand over fist as economic recovery in the rest of the world speeds up. Our own economic recovery, which is still fragile and happening in spite of and not because of government policy, will be put once more at risk. This is because for it to really take root, there has to be a significant fall in the value of sterling, which has for years been far too high. That will make the energy even more expensive, impacting costs and competitiveness at every level.
Some years back an Italian commentator was interviewed on BBC radio about the relative qualities of Italian and British politicians, in the light of a new corruption scandal in her own country.
I recall her reply.
‘In Italy we are governed by knaves, but in Britain you are governed by imbeciles.’