Skip to main content

Labour’s technocrats are plunging Britain into disaster

Rachel Reeves and Ed Miliband are clinging to failed expert orthodoxies.

Spiked 13/01/25

Link

Two signs of impending disaster reared into view last week. On Tuesday, the cost of UK government borrowing passed the peak it reached in the autumn of 2022, in the wake of Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget. Then, on Wednesday evening, the British energy system came the closest it has been to blackouts in decades.



Worse still, this dire news is merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to energy and the economy. Britain now faces the highest industrial energy prices in the developed world, with UK businesses paying four times as much as American businesses. The UK economy, as well as facing bond-market turbulence, has stagnated, with no growth recorded in the last quarter. The heightened cost of borrowing means a fresh round of austerity measures could be on the way, involving hikes to already eye-watering tax levels or spending cuts to already strained public services.

This might seem like a strange place for a government of supposed ‘adults’ to have taken the UK. After all, in the run-up to the election and for a brief honeymoon afterwards, we were told by Labour and its cheerleaders that the new government would ‘turn the page’ on 14 years of Tory-led ‘chaos’. And it would do so by being guided by expertise, rather than ‘ideology’, putting ‘pragmatism’ over populism.

But it seems the expert ‘consensus’ was really the problem in the first place. After all, few chancellors have followed the ‘experts’ quite as rigidly as Rachel Reeves. So much so that, as one of her early defining acts, she even enshrined their role in law. Reeves’s Charter for Budget Responsibility, announced in the autumn budget and passed by parliament a month later, made it a legal requirement for all major fiscal announcements to be scrutinised by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). Ironically, Reeves saw this as essential to staving off the kind of market meltdown that is now happening. She believed that technocratic oversight would automatically bring stability. Gaining the approval of the OBR seemed to have become an end in itself – even over and above the Labour government’s putative macroeconomic goals, like spurring economic growth.

One major problem with Reeves’s obsession with the OBR is that the growth of the technocratic state is precisely what is responsible for Britain’s economic stagnation, which in turn leads to these bouts of market instability. Even before the chancellor empowered the OBR, vast amounts of economic policymaking had already been subcontracted to unelected officials in the Treasury, the Bank of England and other quangos. It was delusional to think that deepening this trend could reverse Britain’s dire economic fundamentals.

It’s a similar story for energy. For decades, energy policy has been shaped by climate bureaucrats seeking to decarbonise the grid, rather than consumers’ and industry’s need for cheap, stable power. Labour’s energy secretary, Ed Miliband, may be an especially zealous exponent of Net Zero, but he is merely accelerating and building on the state’s existing priorities.

The risks of relying too heavily on renewables ought to be obvious to everyone. Wind and solar power cannot produce electricity when the wind doesn’t blow or the Sun doesn’t shine. This creates obvious problems during cold, dark winters – as we saw last week. Yet many state-appointed experts remain in a state of denial about all this. They will even insist – contrary to all available evidence – that renewables will make electricity cheaper and more secure. It is hardly a surprise, then, that UK energy prices are so high and that blackouts may even be on the horizon.

The chaos in the bond markets and the increasing likelihood of blackouts are clear signs that Britain’s technocratic consensus is colliding with reality. Just don’t expect the likes of Rachel Reeves and Ed Miliband to sit up and take notice. Their commitment to these failed orthodoxies runs very deep indeed.


Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on Twitter: @FraserMyers.



Comments