I still think rushing Brexit was a mistake, and the inadequacy of our trade deal with the EU has yet to be fully realised. It is little wonder now that farmers would so readily give up farming to plaster the countryside with solar panels. They can make more out of subsidies than producing food. That said, I still have no regrets about leaving the EU, save for one. That we didn’t leave ten years sooner.



I’ve said it before but it’s only in recent days has the enormity of it sunk in: The legacy costs of EU energy policy will dwarf the losses of Brexit. The damage is already done and soon ordinary people will have to make hard choices. Many households have just enjoyed their last winter in a properly heated home. The focus on renewable energy instead of nuclear has left us dangerously exposed, and even if you could say wind energy was cheaper than gas, we’re now having to buy it at peak demand at peak prices.

Meanwhile, all the clever little boys and girls in the green blob think that rising gas prices makes the case for Net Zero. There’s one small problem though. If the price of gas is going up then the price of everything is going up. There is no longer a cheap option. Moreover, if the switch to renewables is going to work then they need their switch to EV’s which has just been made even less viable by the price of nickel skyrocketing to an all time high.

That said, it’s a stretch to blame all of this on the EU. The Conservatives went green under David Cameron in 2005 and was the most active advocate for carbon policies in Europe and sought ‘greater ambition’ at COP26 once we’d left the EU. One is then not terribly sympathetic to Iain Duncan Smith taking to Twitter to complain that we have “moved from a country which only a few years ago was a net exporter of gas with large strategic storage, to a net importer with next to no storage at all. This wasn’t an accident, it was government policy”.

More specifically, it was Conservative Party policy, ramped up by the very man IDS and his ERG comrades installed as leader. This is why Brexit of itself, was never going to achieve very much. The problem is, and always was, the British establishment. EU membership was a symptom of our non-democracy.

If I could point a single dysfunction in our politics it is that when politicians and activists find a hobby horse they’re comfortable with, they’ll keep pushing it regardless of the circumstances. The cumulative effects of Brexit, Covid and Ukraine, haven’t influenced their thinking even slightly. They’re still determined to inflict their green ideology on us and damn the costs.

Boris Johnson has announced he’s going to be “setting out at new energy supply strategy” in coming days but it won’t meaningfully deviate from the Net Zero script. Ministers are looking to relax rules on onshore wind turbines which were effectively outlawed by Cameron after a massive public campaign against them. Democracy seemingly has an expiry date.

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, bills going up by hundreds of pounds is not just another crisis. It’s a national energy *emergency* and politicians need to be speaking and thinking in those terms.

Of late we’ve heard a great deal from politicians about our “moral responsibility” to refugees and our moral responsibility to intervene in wars that aren’t anything to do with us. Never though does it register with them that they have a moral duty to us as our servants – and that their first priority is maintaining our basic standard of living. Instead they’ve picked the worst time imaginable to put the pedal to the metal on a reckless energy policy that will see the biggest drop in living standards since the Second World War.

Britons will pay a heavy price for eco-virtue signalling, only now it’s going to get worse. Virtue signalling is now the basis of all policy including foreign policy. Britain and the EU have brainlessly escalated tensions with Russia by adopting Ukraine as their proxy. Consequently the price of oil is skyrocketing too. For reasons best known to our political class, we are terminating purchases of of oil and gas from Russia in the name of democracy and human rights, but not Saudi Arabia. All of a sudden we have a conscience.

Prolonging conflict with Russia is in the interests of nobody. It is possible that forecourt petrol prices could double, with knock-on effects throughout the whole economy, pushing the price of commuting high enough to make jobs unviable. The effect on food and fuel prices will be as though we’d placed sanctions on ourselves. But it suits the narcissism of Europe’s political class to believe that Ukraine is and wants to be a western style democracy, and even more useful to them to cast Russia as the cause of our economic decline. It is certainly true that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has broken the camel’s back, but we’ve been beating and overloading the camel for the last twenty years.

By pumping Ukraine full of weapons so that Zelensky can prolong this war, will only cause Putin to intensify his bombardments, causing amore displacement of people, and will push the economies of Europe to the brink. It looks like Putin is looking or a way to back down, and the West could facilitate that by committing to Ukrainian neutrality. Instead the NATO option is left dangling in ambiguity and the EU is making positive noises about accelerating Ukrainian membership. In all probability that will ensure this turns into a long and bloody conflict, sucking in fighters from every trouble spot in the northern hemisphere. So much for keeping the peace in Europe.

Zelensky has has lodged himself in the eyes of our media as Ukraine’s Churchill, and our political class are swooning over him. This is the best political PR campaign of modern times. In their rush to show solidarity with a man they know nothing about, over a country they know even less about, in what is a murky political landscape, they have again shown scant regard for our wealth and prosperity, all so that they can parade credentials as righteous warriors of democracy (despite having spent the last few years trying to overturn it).

The one thing our political class will never do is act in accordance with the needs and wishes of the public. They could scrap green taxes that add a third to our energy bills – but they won’t. They could get a grip on immigration and deport illegals – but they won’t. They could throw everything at new nuclear power stations, but they’ll build subsidy harvesting windmills. It’s not going to change until there is a broader realisation that our political class simply doesn’t care about us, and for as long as they are politically and financially insulated from the consequences of their choices, they will continue to fleece us and run the country into the ground.