The new Dodgy Dossier

Tony Blair’s new report contains nothing new. And calling for a slowdown in green energy to keep energy bills down is perfectly wrongheaded.

Our bills are high not because of green energy but because of fossil fuels.

More precisely because we let the global price of gas dictate what we pay for our own wind and sun.

Absurd, but true.

Tony Blair is giving support to the very recent right-wing narrative that we can’t afford the green energy transition and need to slow down.

It’s entirely false and that’s not to be unexpected perhaps of politicians desperately seeking power or at least relevance – like Farage or Badenoch. From an ex-politician and one who did do much for green energy it is unexpected.

But Tony Blair is also the Prime Minister behind the ‘dodgy dossier’ that saw us launch an illegal war on Iraq. He has form.

The real problem is our defective energy market, some say it’s broken – I say rigged, because we allow the price of gas to set the price we pay for our own wind and sun and it’s costing us a fortune. In 2023 alone it added £13billion to household bills – that’s £400 each and a whopping £30billion to business energy bills.

All of this jacked up the rate of inflation that year, pushing up Bank of England lending rates, and therefore mortgages, pay bargaining and our general cost of living. Our energy bills did this.

But we have a choice, we can ‘break the link’ and allow our homegrown green energy to deliver us lower bills, inflation and all the knock-on impacts above. Allow green energy to do its thing.

Blaming it for our high energy bills is simply counterfactual.

Fossil fuels are the new dodgy dossier. Britain is once bitten.