Doom is postponed

Tony Blair’s still in the game! The man who once proclaimed the UK’s leadership role in tackling climate change now appears to be harbouring doubts, all because voters won’t stand for anything which smacks of sacrifice to save their grandkids. This is typical Blair—talk the grand talk, but never push things too far (lest it upsets the ’coalition’ of voters in the middle ground). The media love a volte face, and now we’re being told, yet again thanks to Blair, that our energy costs are higher because of ‘green’ subsidies (green in quotation marks thanks to the inclusion of nuclear, which is never mentioned in the right-wing press). A headline figure that is now being bandied about is that energy is taxed at 78% and consumers of right-wing fake news are led to believe that this is all because of green subsidies. Nothing is further from the truth. What (any) government takes from energy revenues in taxation goes straight into  HM Treasury’s unhypothicated chest and is spent willy-nilly. What did those North Sea oil bonanza tax revenues fund in the 1980s? Thatcher’s deindustrialisation of the UK economy (aka unemployment). Now it seems the knives are out for Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary. Poor old Ed, he is increasingly fighting a lonely battle as the realities of being in a right-wing government become clear. I suspect he may be shuffled elsewhere.