Fuel and Power

13 per cent of households, one in eight, are already in fuel poverty, yet energy prices are set to rise by 50 per cent. Almost no household could really take that hit, but the Government has just written off £4.3 billion of the £5.8 billion that was stolen from its emergency Covid-19 schemes, so let no one say that the necessary measures were unaffordable. £4.3 billion would have been enough to have prevented the Universal Credit cut for which Christian Wakeford voted.

In fact, nothing is ever unaffordable. Like austerity and recession, inflation is always voluntary on the part of the Government. A sovereign state with its own free floating, fiat currency has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect. Those means therefore need to be under democratic political control.

On energy, we need renationalisation, a real cap, the requirement of the approval of the House of Commons before any price increase, and an all-of-the-above energy policy based around civil nuclear power, this country's vast reserves of coal, its increasingly apparent reserves of lithium, and the oil and gas fields whether the SNP liked it or not. As much as anything else, this would free us from Russian gas, and thus, even in its own bogus terms, from the military interest in Ukraine that we were being deceived into thinking that we had.

This will be "Loony Left" until the Conservatives did it. Everything always is. We just have to ensure that Boris Johnson is succeeded by Rishi Sunak rather than by Liz Truss, and that neither Keir Starmer nor the Ed Davey, who is well-remembered as he is in this field, ever gets anywhere near office. Nor the SNP in any future hung Parliament. If there might be one of those, then there need to be enough of our people in it, unbending on principle while untroubled by tribal shibboleths.