Which minister will be most responsible for the fate of Sir Keir Starmer’s government? Will it be Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, whose Budget next month will be the first indication of Labour’s strategy for the next five years, assuming it has one.
Will it be Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, who promises to reform the NHS, yet eschews the radical overhaul necessary to ensure the survival of a public health service for the next 50 years, not just the next five.
Or will it be the Prime Minister himself, whose speech to the party conference in Liverpool sought to reassert some sort of control over events after an uncertain and stumbling few weeks in charge?
Sir Keir likes to portray himself as someone without ideology, though he is happy to say he is a socialist, and relentlessly focused on what works for the country as a whole. “We are the pragmatists,” he told delegates.
But that is not entirely true. There is among his Cabinet a zealot who more than any other minister will make or break the Government. I speak of the former leader Ed Miliband. While Sir Keir believes his administration will be judged by growing the economy and repairing the NHS, its very foundations risk being undermined by a mad dash to decarbonisation within six years.
September 30 will mark another milestone on that road when the UK’s last remaining coal-fired power station at Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire shuts down. For a country that once relied so heavily on King Coal this is a poignant moment and one that has arrived remarkably quickly. As recently as 2012, coal supplied more than 40 per cent of Britain’s electricity.
The decline has been long and painful. Production peaked in 1913 when more than 1,500 pits extracted some 290 million tons. By 2015 that had fallen to under four million when the last deep pit at Kellingley in Yorkshire, closed. A small number of open cast mines remained for a few years but have all now gone. Plans to open a coking coal mine in Cumbria were quashed last week by the High Court and will not be revived by the Labour government.
That’s it. The end of an extraordinary story. As George Orwell wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier, “Our civilisation is founded on coal, more completely than one realises until one stops to think about it.” Coal fuelled the Industrial Revolution and underpinned an empire. It fuelled a mythology developed around miners and their communities that belied the dangers and wretched nature of the job.
There was nothing romantic about working down the pit. It was hard, poorly paid for a long time and responsible for the early deaths of many miners from dust-borne diseases. Disasters claimed the lives of thousands of pitmen, a death toll far greater than in the nuclear power industry.
Cheaper coal production around the world meant that pits closed throughout the 1960s and 1970s under Labour, even though that was conveniently forgotten when Mrs Thatcher’s government took on Arthur Scargill’s NUM 30 years ago. The very people demanding back then that pits be kept open are now insisting they remain shut in pursuit of a non-carbon future.
Only in Britain is the entire industry being shut down so rapidly – yet we still import huge quantities of goods manufactured from electricity generated by coal, especially from China. The People’s Republic led the world in the construction of new coal-fired power plants in the first half of this year, with work beginning on more than 41GW of new generation capacity. Germany has 25 per cent of its electricity produced by coal and even dismantled a wind farm in order to expand open-pit lignite production.
Everyone knows coal power plants were filthy. They pumped out pollutants that affected all who lived near them. The Palace of Westminster was black when I first started working there in the 1980s, as was Westminster Abbey, smeared with the soot from Bankside and Battersea stations. The former is now the Tate Modern and the latter has been converted into luxury flats, retail outlets and restaurants.
King Coal is dead, in Britain at least. The sale of traditional house coal has been banned for use in England since last year.
So what, say the greens, if renewable alternatives continue to power the economy, our homes and our cars. But will they fill the lacuna, given that Mr Miliband wants to take other carbon sources out of the mix as well by running down North Sea oil and gas.
Mind you, the unions have noticed. At the TUC conference earlier this month, they voted to oppose Miliband’s planned ban on new oil and gas licences until North Sea workers are guaranteed comparable jobs. The latter, they warned, must not become “the miners of net zero”.
It was further reported this week that the North Sea pipeline network is facing possible closure a decade earlier than planned because of the tax raid on the industry, which Labour is to step up.
These are straws in the wind. Moving to a low-carbon future is no longer a matter of debate since all parties are committed to it. What is at issue is the speed of the transition and whether it is proportionate to the problem.
Even if we account for just 2 per cent of the world’s output today, Mr Miliband believes we should be in the vanguard of fossil fuel reduction to atone for all the CO2 pumped out since the Industrial Revolution. He is off to the United Nations this week, which will press for further action on net zero even if the hectoring falls on deaf ears in Beijing and New Delhi.
“Fossil fuels simply cannot provide us with the security, or indeed the affordability, we need,” Mr Miliband said recently. But seeking to eradicate them from our electricity generation within six years risks both security and affordability as around 40 per cent of the UK’s electricity is produced with gas that will need to be imported.
The closure over the next three years of nuclear power stations still in service, delays in building new ones and rising demands for electricity will leave the UK facing a crunch point in about 2028. The chances that wind, solar and other renewables can fill the gap by then are for the birds.
Yet this is where we are headed unless Sir Keir reins in his evangelical minister. Voters will not forgive him or his government if the lights go out.
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