Yesterday lunchtime I was happily beavering away at the wordface, banging out a column about the criminal stupidity of Britain’s suicidal energy policy, when I happened to look up at the TV news, flickering away silently in the background while I listened to Squeeze on the stereo.
Scrolling along the bottom of the screen was a banner announcing that the National Grid was considering paying households not to use energy tonight due to ‘concerns over supply’.
Eh? It’s not even that cold.
Had I fallen asleep and woken up, Life On Mars-style, in the 1970s?
Was Arthur Scargill back in business, shutting the coal mines and bringing the power stations out in sympathy?
The last time I came across any kind of warning like this, I was working at a provincial news agency in Lincoln in 1973, knocking out copy by candlelight on a sit-up-and-beg typewriter during Grocer Heath’s Three-Day Week.
Back then, we were given notice of power cuts daily, as a result of coal shortages caused by the miners’ strike.
RICHARD LITTLEJOHN:Â Had I fallen asleep and woken up, Life On Mars-style, in the 1970s?
This was the first time round, not the Big One in 1984. Barmy Arthur was still a young firebrand regional official from Yorkshire, organising flying pickets and dreaming of world domination.
We also had to contend with an oil price shock courtesy of OPEC, the petro-producing syndicate led by Saudi Arabia’s Sheikh Rattle’n’Roll.
Fortunately, along came the North Sea oil and gas bonanza, which appeared to be our long-term salvation.
A decade later, when Mrs Thatcher roundly defeated by-then NUM President Scargill’s undemocratic, year-long attempt to bring down the government by violent means, we thought we’d left the last of 1970s-style energy insecurity madness behind us.
We should have been so lucky. We hadn’t bargained with the narcissistic, virtue-signalling onanism of a future generation of politicians who would be prepared to plunge us all into darkness just so they could feel good about themselves.
Not so long ago, Boris Johnson was rubbishing onshore wind turbines on the grounds that the electricity they produced couldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding.
He called them ‘white satanic mills’ desecrating the landscape of the North of England and beyond.
Apparently, Shapps is now Energy Secretary. Of course he is. Last week he was Home Secretary and the week before that, Transport Secretary
Boris wasn’t wrong then, so what’s changed? He’s now one of the movers and shakers behind a Tory revolt aimed at lifting the moratorium on carpeting our green and pleasant with hideous War Of The Worlds windmills.
So, too, is Liz Truss. You must remember her. She was Prime Minister for five minutes fairly recently. Little blonde job, voice like a blow lamp. Ring any bells?
Nope. Never mind. It was a Tuesday. Anyway, back in the day, as they say, she was big on fracking.
Drill, baby, drill, and all that. Britain’s answer to Sarah Palin. Now she’s come over all Greta Wossname.
Michael Gove’s another recent convert to the wind farm racket. He’s a huge fan of levelling up — provided, presumably, these mile-high eyesores get stuck up as far away as possible from his Surrey Heath constituency.
Somehow I can’t see the good people of what we used to call the ‘Gin-and-Jag Belt’ warming to the prospect of the North Downs being littered with hundreds of giant Catherine Wheels, even in pursuit of powering up their new eco-friendly, all-electric Jaguar I-Paces.
My guess is the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England wouldn’t be best pleased either.
So what the hell is going on here? Why do so-called Conservatives not want to conserve what’s left of one of the world’s finest bucolic landscapes?
They’d have us believe that it’s all down to Putin’s war in Ukraine, which has disrupted global energy supplies.
Well, that’s their excuse and they’re sticking to it.
The truth is that the crisis we are now facing is the result of decades of neglect and inaction by successive governments.
Agreed, the Ukraine crisis hasn’t helped. But that doesn’t in any way excuse the woeful lack of planning and investment dating back 30-odd years.
After Labour’s failure to modernise Britain’s energy infrastructure, we at least had the right to expect that an incoming Conservative Government would put things right.
Instead, we ended up with posturing posh boys on pushbikes, in coalition with brain-dead Lib Dems determined to put the kibosh on a new generation of nuclear power stations.
Call Me Dave even stuck a windmill on his roof in Notting Hill, while no doubt heating his Cotswold pile with the finest, filthiest four-star from Qatar. Vote Blue, Go Green, was the fashionable slogan. Go Dark, Go Broke has proven to be the grim reality.
After hooking up with millennial pin-up Carrie Antoinette, Boris went from eco-sceptic to full-on Swampy. Influenced by Carrie’s super-rich green svengali Zac Goldsmith, who has so much money he could afford his own Saharan wind farm to power his top-of- the-range Tesla, BoJo bottled it.
The fatuous, insincere Cop Whatever-number-they’re-up-to-these-days nonsense went to his head, and will pay dividends on the international speaking circuit, bankrolled by energy-hungry, pretend-woke corporations such as Facebook — sorry, Meta — which now employs Dave’s former deputy, anti-nuclear Nick Clegg, on a trebles-all-round, multi-million-dollar deal. I don’t suppose his lights will be going out any time soon.
As for Fizzie Lizzie’s new-found enthusiasm for onshore wind, your guess is as good as mine. It’s got nothing to do with what’s best for Britain, just a way of putting the boot into Rishi Sunak.
I’d have thought she’d have taken one look at that ghastly windmill next to the supermarket in Swaffham, part of her Norfolk constituency, and run a mile.
Gove? Go figure. He used to be wary of ‘experts’. Yet now he swallows their advocacy of onshore wind turbines with apparent enthusiasm. Then again, it wouldn’t be the first time he’d looped the loop.
Yesterday, XR poster boy Grant Shapps, another alleged Tory, declared his support for onshore windmills. That should go down a bundle in his Hertfordshire constituency. On a clear day, from Welwyn Garden City, if you stand on top of what used to be John Lewis, you can see the wind farm as far away as Biggleswade.
Scrolling along the bottom of the screen was a banner announcing that the National Grid was considering paying households not to use energy tonight due to ‘concerns over supply’
Apparently, Shapps is now Energy Secretary. Of course he is. Last week he was Home Secretary and the week before that, Transport Secretary — responsible for giving anti-car Left-wing councils £250 million to turn streets into LTN crazy-golf courses. Where do they find these clowns? I’m A Celeb beckons.
Their latest stroke of genius is spaffing £25 million we haven’t got on an intelligence-insulting ad campaign telling us to wear a string vest and turn the heating down to 60c, whatever that is in old money. All because they have failed miserably to make adequate provision for our energy needs just so they can preen themselves on the BBC and at international ‘climate summits’ before flying home on a private jet.
Laydees and gennulmen, I refer you yet again to a speech made by the late Labour minister Nye Bevan in 1945 about Tory ministerial incompetence.
‘This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organising genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time.’
As I wrote back in March, today our island is sitting on half a century’s reserves of shale gas and billions of barrels of untapped oil and natural gas in the North Sea.
Yet our modern political geniuses have managed to produce a home-grown shortage of both gas and oil, purely out of short-sighted political vanity.
They reject cheap, cheerful fracking out of hand, in favour of useless, bird-shredding, landscape-destroying, foreign-manufactured windmills.
And, as of today, their only other answer is to agonise over whether to pay us to turn off the lights, turn down the heating and turn off the TV during the England v Wales World Cup game.
You’ll have to forgive me now, before I spontaneously combust. Squeeze have just come back round on shuffle.
We’re really Up The Junction.
