Ed Miliband made two grandstanding pledges during the last election. Turns out he can’t do basic maths.
Ed Miliband’s mathematical skills are going to cost the country a fortune (Image: Getty)
Keir Starmer’s energy secretary promised that his accelerated net zero crusade would deliver two things voters would absolutely love. First, it would lop £300 off our household energy bills by 2030. Second, it would create 400,000 new “green jobs” by 2030. Great. Brilliant. What’s not to like? Aside from the fact that it was fantasy then, and looks even more fantastical today. Our bills are soaring and those jobs only exist in Miliband’s head.
When Labour took power in July 2024, Ofgem’s energy price cap was £1,568 a year. Today it stands at £1,663, some £95 more. In practice, it’s higher. Starmer’s government shifted around £150 of clean-energy policy costs from energy bills onto general taxation. Most of us still pay. So that’s £245 more in practice. From October, the energy cap will rise to £1,723. So that’s £305 more.
Not all of the increase in bills is Miliband’s fault, of course. The Iran war has sent wholesale energy prices soaring. But he promised a £300 saving when he wanted our votes. Now we’re about to pay £300 more. And that pledge looks positively sensible compared with his second one. Once Miliband got into power, he really started throwing taxpayers’ money around.
He quickly unveiled £22billion of planned public support for unproven carbon capture and storage technology, which I’ve pulled apart here, and £8.3billion for his flagship Great British Energy quango.
GB Energy was supposed to cut bills, turn Britain into a “clean energy superpower” and create thousands of jobs. So far, it’s fallen well short of those grand promises.
GB Energy is headquartered in Aberdeen, presumably as a sop to local residents whose fossil-fuel wealth is being savaged by Miliband’s decision to block new North Sea drilling. But Scots aren’t fooled. They’re watching oil and gas jobs disappear. The green jobs? They’re harder to spot.
SNP energy spokesman Graham Leadbitter MP is furious, pointing out that “1,000 energy jobs are being lost a month” while bills are nearly £600 higher than Labour promised.
GB Energy responded by saying it has spent £100million on green projects that will create 1,500 jobs across the UK. So I got my calculator out. That works out at roughly £66,667 of taxpayer money per job. I’m not sure that’s a brilliant return on our money. Let’s call it Miliband mathematics.
When a private company creates a job, it pays the wages and takes the commercial risk. When the government creates jobs, taxpayers foot the bill.
So far this year, 110,000 private sector jobs have gone, while 41,000 have been created in the public sector. This leaves a shrinking number of private sector workers funding ever more public sector jobs.
Let’s assume Miliband’s pledge of 400,000 new green jobs by 2030 is doable. If his £66,667-per-job arithmetic applied across the whole programme, that would cost the UK a staggering £26.7billion.
Britain needs jobs. But we need productive jobs that make the country richer, not jobs that exist because taxpayers have been forced to fund them. Let’s hope those green jobs remain a figment of Red Ed’s overheated imagination. The country simply can’t afford 400,000 workers created by Miliband mathematics. We’d be even deeper in the red.