Author: johnredwood

Labour’s plans to phase out all gas and coal power stations by 2030 requires the UK to accelerate its build of wind farms, solar panels, nuclear power, and battery storage. It would also require a big expansion of the grid. They propose a nationalised industry to do much of this work as it would require huge subsidies and managed prices for the power. Claire Coutinho is right to highlight the huge cost of some £116 bn of trying to do this and to question the feasibility and wisdom.

It is of course totally unrealistic. Nuclear power will be considerably lower  by 2030 following the closures of existing power stations. It is not possible to decide now to put in extra nuclear power stations and have them producing power by 2030. Putting more and more windfarms in as they plan does not solve the problem of keeping the lights on on a windless day. Saying they can put in sufficient storage is more easily stated than delivered. Relying on big batteries would require a colossal programme of building them. Finding enough pump storage locations would not be likely. There is also the small matter of the grid which would need major enhancement against a background of long and complex planning procedures and many local communities wishing to protect their landscape or divert power lines from settlements and important buildings.

We need more affordable and reliable power. Balancing price and security of supply against environmental objectives is a crucial part of success in energy policy. Labour just goes for the environmental without a thought about keeping the lights on, helping business  be competitive and controlling people’s power bills. Combined cycle gas power still represents some of the cheapest and most reliable power, which is why our system needs what it has and needs some more for the transitional period,whilst nuclear, synthetic fuel, hydrogen and renewables become more affordable and practical propositions for more of our demand.

I will spare you a party political response to the Reeves Mais lecture. Various journalists have described its vacuity, verbosity and timidity. I want to set out the big issues that directly affect UK growth, productivity, jobs and incomes that she ignored or knows nothing about.

1 The big role of the Bank of England in creating the instability in inflation  and output she condemns. A Bank which buys up £845 bn of bonds to keep money too loose is bound to cause inflation. When it then goes on to hike rates and to sell £130 bn of bonds at big losses it is likely to sabotage growth. She supports this wayward conduct.

2. She rightly criticises poor UK productivity. She fails to reveal the collapse of public sector productivity since 2019 or to show UK private sector factories have competitive productivity. Not a single proposal for turning round public sector productivity.

3. The labour market is talked about with no mention of large scale migration. Will she join me in wanting to ban work permits for migrants to fill low wage vacancies? Will she back government plans to cut legal migration by 300,000 and demand they go further?

4. She sees green investment and jobs as central. How much would her accelerated net zero policies cost? How would she avoid creating many new jobs in China that has cornered the market in big batteries, turbines and solar panels? How would she keep the lights on? Is she going to make us all go electric?

Politicians of all parties have this century been in a hurry to shed responsibilities for anything difficult. There has been a rush to create more arms length bodies from government and to transfer more powers and money to the many quangos we already had. The politicians thought that this would remove them from responsibility for outcomes, and  would improve outcomes. Neither of these ideas came true.

The Bank of England is responsible for monetary policy and inflation. It has a prime aim of keeping inflation to 2%. It let it go to 11% by debauching the currency but most politicians declined to criticise or comment. The government got blamed for the inflation, and the government joined the Bank in  blaming  the Ukraine war.

NHS England with its high paid CEO and large Board and top management team is responsible for running the NHS, for recruiting, grading, rostering  and paying all the many staff. A series of strikes hit the NHS. The executives denied all responsibility for staff relations, pay and grading and said the dispute was a matter between Ministers and the Unions. It is difficult for Ministers to resolve the disputes when they cannot hire, promote, regrade, alter shift patterns or reward anyone in the NHS as all that is controlled by senior executives.Whatever goes wrong in the NHS the senior executives  always blame a lack of money, however much extra  the government provides. The government gives large sums to get the waiting lists down only to see them go up.

The arms length Post Office is regulated and monitored by UK Government Investments. They approved senior management, paid them large salaries and bonuses and just watched as they lost a stunning £1400 million as well as sending many innocent staff to prison for fraud and wrong accounting  they did not carry out. Ministers intervened to try to get criminal charges quashed and compensation paid, only to find the Post Office was still holding back in many cases.

The Rail Regulator, HS 2  and the nationalised Network Rail run by well paid senior executives have presided over a big loss of passenger numbers and revenue, and  have racked up huge losses for taxpayers .Parts of HS 2 have had to be cancelled owing to the absurdly large overruns on cost and timetable. Ministers are blamed for the results.

This could be a very long list. Many cases would reinforce the obvious points of these first three. High pay is a  reward for poor outcomes. No-one makes the senior managers responsible. Opposition parties have no interest in criticising the managers or holding them to account before they go so wrong, but delight in blaming the government when they do. Government is too cautious about intervening, fearing the Opposition would complain if they did. Both sides mouth the doctrine of independence, with the Opposition contradicting it often in the same interview by blaming Ministers for failures.  So overpaid managers get away with disaster after disaster and the taxpayer ends up with a huge bill.

Parliament and Ministers need to go back to accepting responsibility. They need to monitor, influence and if necessary change these top managers before disaster strikes. If someone wants private sector levels of CEO pay to run  the railways or the Post office they should expect private sector levels of surveillance and should expect no bonus or the sack if they make big errors. Ministers need to institute regular review meetings and proper reporting to them as shareholders or leading stakeholders in these bodies, so they see problems as they develop and require fixes before they get out of hand. Those few of us who warned of the likely inflation or sided with the sub post masters were ignored.

Conservative briefers are saying the party needs to be united to win the election. I have good news for them. Parties with plenty of internal rows  and disagreements always win, as the two main parties who usually win always  have MPs who disagree with the leadership. Today’s Labour party is badly split over Israel and the Middle East , over a faster move to net zero and over Rachel Reeves OBR austerity  economics but that has not stopped them doing well in opinion polls.

In the  last 50 years there have been two leaders who have won three elections in a row, a remarkable achievement. Margaret Thatcher did so despite facing continuous opposition from a significant group of MPs called the Wets. They regularly briefed disobliging comments about her personally as well as attacking her policies. They rebelled in Parliament on various measures. They put up a stalking horse candidate against her for leadership. They backed Heseltine as a replacement.He resigned from government to promote himself. She kept winning because she set out and enacted a clear vision of UK revival, economic growth and wider ownership.

Tony Blair kept winning despite facing many media stories of  his Chancellor’s disagreements and briefings from pro Brown people that wanted the  Chancellor to take over. He had to deal with a left wing group of MPs who thought he was not nearly  socialist enough. He persevered with the low tax rates the Conservatives left him and avoided recession . Eventually he was persuaded out before his Chancellor’s policies put us into a banking crash and deep recession.

If an election were a contest of who is the more united party Labour would be discovered as very split. The truth is millions of former Conservative voters are  undecided or currently saying they may stay at home or spoil their ballot paper or vote for someone who cannot win. They do not want a Labour government and see that Labour government would double up on those  very policies of this government that they do not like.

To win the Conservative leadership needs to do more things this group likes and voted for. Start with getting migration well down as now promised and cut back the woke state  to free money for more tax cuts. Let people make more of their own choices. Champion the big Conservative success of halving unemployment  and allowing so much job growth.

The Bank of England forecast inflation at 2% when it was going on to hit 11%. So clearly it does not understand inflation and has little ability to forecast it accurately as it is required to do. It tells us the inflation was caused by the Ukraine war and energy prices which it could not predict. So how come inflation was already 3 times target before the invasion? That main part of the inflation was not caused by the war. How come Japan and China kept inflation down to around 2% despite having to import much dearer energy as a result of the war?

N ow we are told they cannot risk lower rates because there could be more trouble in  the Red Sea. Freight rates and insurance rates are already well up and much shipping has been diverted to the long route, so markets know all about that pressure on prices. Meanwhile the money supply has been squeezed, credit is dear and scarcer, mortgage demand has fallen and the Bank ignores all these obvious signs that inflation will come down.

Worst of all is the gross distortion of its balance sheet. They bought far too many bonds at crazy prices in 2021 only now to want to sell them at huge losses and send the taxpayer the bill. Why? The ECB that made the same inflationary mistake is not doubling the error by selling bonds in the market. The Fed is not getting reimbursement from its Treasury. Only the Bank insists on double austerity with squeezed money and less public spending or tax cuts as the taxpayer picks up the bill of the UK’s uniquely bad bond investor, the Bank of England. Never has the Bank lost so much money so quickly for no good purpose.

We need an urgent change of Bank policy, Stop selling the bonds. Cut the base rate by 25 bp. Switzerland, Poland, Hungary, Brazil, China have started cutting their rates.

National Grid recognises that it needs a major expansion of grid capacity to carry  all the extra electrical power that will be needed as people switch heating and transport to electrical methods. They also see they need more capacity to handle more intermittent renewable power on the system, as they seek to make more connections available to the mushrooming solar and windfarms seeking access and long distance transport for the power they hope to generate.

National Grid is talking about an increase in electricity volume of 50% by 2035. This is well short of what would be needed for net zero. We will need increased power to handle a growing population, as well as increased power per head when people switch more of their activities to electrical means. They talk of an investment of a large £54 bn. which may well be an understatement. They need to put in subsea cables to offshore wind to get the power to land, and pylon mounted cables to route the renewable power long distances from generation to use. There will also need to be a complementary investment in local power cables street by street and house by house as more people want supplies beyond the capacity of their current installations.

This poses a  number of planning and environmental issues. Many people object to pylons strutting across the valleys and landscapes of England, and few want to live under powerful electrical lines where they need to cross urban areas. There will be a lot of pressure to put more of this underground which greatly increases the costs. All this extra capital will need rewarding, so electricity prices will need to reflect the need for so much money to  be committed to expanding the grid as well as all the extra cost of additional and different generating systems. More renewables also means more back up generation which is costly to provide, or means the construction of expensive large battery farms, pump storage systems or conversion into hydrogen and synthetic fuels using the renewable power.

Given planning  delays and the long enquiries used by those against all this is going to take many years to accomplish. What are your thoughts on the feasibility and practicality of this approach?