As British voters on July 4 gave a large parliamentary majority to a new New Labour party, they were given immediate grounds for wondering what they’d gotten themselves into. News stories promptly erupted about the government having cancelled, or not cancelled, or recancelled a project to drill for oil and a coal mine. And it’s one thing to wage a consistent war on the essential bases of prosperity in your nation but quite another to wage an inconsistent one, so investors cannot count on any particular disaster occurring but can be very sure you’ll manage one somehow and blindside them.

As these things will, this story kept getting worse. Partly because it wasn’t the incoming Labour administration that took this step, but the outgoing Tories, who had held power for 14 years by continually promising to do conservative things then lost it crushingly by failing, with the exception of Brexit, even to try. High on their list of statist follies was their enthusiastic embrace of the supposed green energy transition driven, as much as anything, by formerly libertarian Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s enthusiastic embrace of a quarter-century-younger climate zealot who became his third wife and mother of three of his possibly nine but actually unclear number of children by four or more women.

Not to be outdone, at least on the energy front, the incoming Labour ministerial retread Ed Miliband, “Minister for the Third Sector” under Tony Blair then “Minister for the Cabinet Office and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster” and later “Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change” under Gordon Brown, party leader in the 2015 electoral defeat and now “Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero”, promptly lifted a ban on offshore wind power development while cancelling, or seeming to cancel, all applications for offshore oil and gas drilling, defying departmental officials, throwing the industry into chaos, then denying he’d done it.

It was bad enough that the outgoing Tories’ decision to give Britain’s energy industry one more vicious kick on their way out the door was driven by court rulings, one of which may prove exceptionally destructive and hard to deal with via the political process. According to Reuters, “The Supreme Court ruled that planning authorities must consider the impact of burning, rather than just extracting, fossil fuels when deciding whether to approve projects.”

Mind you in a sense it makes sense. If the idea here is to get rid of carbon emissions it’s silly only to look at what you emit getting the stuff out of the ground or the seabed and sending it to customers you know perfectly well are then going to burn it in their automobiles, factory boilers, “gas boilers” (hot water heaters outside Britain and a few other places that use English in weird ways), furnaces, stoves and so on. And indeed in an email celebrating this outcome Reuters “Sustainable Switch”, which still has not learned how to post its email newsletters online in this year of grace 2024, chortled that:

“‘The writing is on the wall for the fossil fuel industry,’ said Jamie Peters, climate coordinator at Friends of the Earth.”

Yup. It actually is. In letters so large even that industry, and its customers, should be able to get the main drift.

Mind you, speaking of judges, the Guardian frets that Labour:

“swept to power last week with the pledge to end new North Sea exploration licences but its plans have been cast into doubt by the timing of an ongoing licensing round. The new government will need to decide whether or not to cancel the process, which could end up granting a small number of new North Sea licences in breach of its pledge to end new oil and gas exploration. But cancelling the mechanism, which is run by the industry regulator, the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), could leave the new government vulnerable to a volley of legal actions from the companies, which may have spent millions preparing their bids.”

All litigation all the time. But you can’t cook food with it, now can you?

Whether Labour bigwigs actually saw this problem coming, or have the typical modern attitude that if they want it, it must be easy to do and have no downside, is hard to determine. And it’s not encouraging that the whole business was so slapdash, confusing and demoralizing. As the Guardian explained:

“The government was forced to deny reports that the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, had defied his own officials by ordering an immediate ban on new licences, including those still being considered by the regulator. The spokesperson said the report, published in the Daily Telegraph, was a ‘complete fabrication’ which ‘invents meetings and decisions that have not taken place’.”

Well, maybe. But when a politician puts their foot in it then denies having a foot, it is best to check their dental work anyway. And as the Telegraph editorialized, after that Guardian story so apparently standing by their own:

“During the election campaign, Rishi Sunak warned that the Labour Party could not be trusted with the future of the North Sea. Barely a week into Sir Keir Starmer’s tenure in Downing Street, he has been proved correct. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband’s decision to overrule his own officials and order an immediate ban on drilling in new North Sea oilfields is a serious misstep. Much has been made of the supposed certainty and stability a Labour government would bring to the British economy, and the confidence this would give potential investors. Mr Miliband’s decision is all but calculated to undermine this, tossing out with the stroke of a pen bids that have cost companies millions of pounds to prepare. They may now take legal action as a consequence. The full costs of this decision will fall much more broadly. As the Climate Change Committee has acknowledged, oil and gas will play a role in our economy for decades to come.”

One finds oneself scanning the room for adults in growing dismay. And here it is pertinent to note, and not as the setup for a rant against “First Past the Post”, Labour actually staggered rather than swept to power in early July.

Yes, it won a massive 411 seats, a gain of 211 in Britain’s 650-seat House of Commons. But it did so with the lowest share of the popular vote (33.7%) for a victorious party since at least the First World War. Which doesn’t mean that it lacks a legitimate mandate. But it means it emerged from a divided and volatile electorate and must be very wary of the concept that any particular policy it put forward, or the entire suite, enjoys broad support or that it enjoys the confidence of the people in a technical or broad sense.

In the election the Tories managed to lose 251 seats net and end up with just 121 with 23.7% of the vote, down very nearly 20 from its 2019 tally, more or less throwing the victory to Labour. But while the centre-left Liberal Democrats were the big seat winners as support for both mainstream parties continued to decline, gaining 64 to hold 72, they had only 12.2% of the vote. The big winner in the popular vote was the populist Reform party led by the outcast Nigel Farage, held to 5 seats by distribution of its support but outpolling the Liberal Democrats, getting 14.3% of the popular vote or one in seven ballots cast.

If therefore Labour proceeds to act as if it has a strong mandate to plunge the nation into chaotic energy policy, the possibility of another darn “backlash” is enormous with Reform poised for an electoral breakthrough. So even if the new administration are really committed to exterminating fossil fuels and hoping it works better than it has so far there or anywhere, or could rationally be expected to, they’d better try to provide some policy stability, including telling the courts where their authority ends.

Instead, Telegraph columnist Jamie Blackett warned:

“Fears that a Labour ‘super-majority’ might turn our parliamentary democracy into a parliamentary dictatorship are fast being realised. Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, has ignored the recommendations of the Planning Inspectorate and ridden roughshod over local democracy by granting development consent to a massive solar ‘park’ that will swallow thousands of acres in Cambridgeshire and Suffolk. Other schemes in Lincolnshire have also been approved. And this is likely to be just the start of Labour’s assault on the countryside as other solar industrial complexes, battery “farms” and their connecting scars of pylons wait in the wings, as well as onshore wind. We may look back on it as the opening barrage of a doctrinaire campaign to hit unrealistic net-zero targets, notably the absurd aim of decarbonising the grid by 2030.”

Britain’s famously once-green-and-pleasant land is also small, just 244,376 square kilometres or 94,354 square miles. And many people are concerned that it depends on its lush but limited countryside both for its food security and its culture. To forbid oil and gas drilling, and coal mines, with their small footprint and reliable output, and then to fill the place with light Satanic windmills and solar panels, and to do so in an atmosphere of administrative chaos and eroding legislative authority, is asking for serious trouble.

P.S. As always the question lurks as to what the whole policy is even for. Another Telegraph columnist, Neil Record, points out that:

“Net Zero has become a mantra emphasised and repeated by UK politicians of all hues, Reform UK excepted. It is changing the way we invest in infrastructure, changing our manufacturing base and our manufacturing opportunities, and will, if pursued, change our own lives beyond recognition, particularly in our use of transport, travel, building and heating. It will restrict our freedom, and is likely to be eye-wateringly expensive. We are still in the very early stages of this planned revolution, so little of this is visible yet.”

But regardless:

“The UK emits less than 1 per cent of global CO2 emissions, and forcing that down to zero will have an immaterial effect on global emissions. According to the International Energy Agency, the increase in global emissions in 2023 was 410 million tonnes (MT), 107MT higher than the entire annual UK CO2 emissions of 303MT. So our reducing ours to zero is signalling commitment, rather than actually making a material difference.”

So all that turmoil for nothing? Britons did not vote for such a thing.