If I had a tenner for every time Sir Keir Starmer and his ministers assured us that a Labour government would lower energy bills, we could probably afford to put the heating on when winter arrives.
A common party refrain over the last five years has been that by putting money into building green energy infrastructure and setting up a state-owned energy company, consumer bills would come down.
When I tapped the postcode for my corner of southwest London into the Great British Energy website earlier this week, it promised not only to create a slightly implausible 68,000 jobs in the local area, but also to cut my “energy bills for good”.
That’s nice to know. But to put it politely, it does not seem very accurate right now, given that my bills will actually be going up by 10pc instead.
Miliband was predictably quick to blame everyone else for the price increases.
On X he argued that “the announcement from Ofgem will be worrying news for families across the country” and that “the expected rise in the price cap is yet another consequence of the toxic legacy left by the previous government”, while adding that “we are moving at pace to deliver on our mission for clean power, by lifting the onshore wind ban, consenting solar and getting more renewable projects built”.
The lower bills Labour promised might not arrive straight away, but if we simply leave it to Miliband then costs will come down.
It is possible that Miliband is fooling himself, but it is hard to believe that anyone else is going to be taken in. In reality, there are two big problems with this claim.
The first is that the Government is making decisions that will increase prices, not lower them.
It has banned new developments in the North Sea; imposed windfall taxes that punish companies foolish enough to invest in the sector; won’t even contemplate fracking, even though the shale oil boom in the US is the reason energy costs in North America are less than half those in Europe; and is pressing ahead with solar and wind systems, which, although they certainly have a place in any modern energy policy, are still unreliable.