Sir John Redwood is a former MP for Wokingham and a former Secretary of State for Wales.

Remember Ed Miliband promising us £300 off our power bills? Have you heard him endlessly repeat that switching us over to renewable electricity from gas will make things cheaper? How is that going?

It is either  a gross misunderstanding, or a lie. Since Labour came to power our energy bills under the price cap are up by 12 per cent. According to the British Gas forecast, that will be 17.6 per cent by next spring. Last week we got the bad news that there will be another small rise in the price cap average bill in the first quarter of 2026, after bigger rises since the government came to power. There is now more wind and solar power available when the weather allows, but it has not brought prices down.

Nor was it ever likely to. The current unit price (one kilowatt hour of energy) for burning gas at home is 6.29p whilst that of electricity is 26.35p, four times as dear. In this latest price change the price of gas comes down 5.7 per cent in the new year, whilst the price of electricity goes up by 5 per cent.

I am glad I am still using gas for my heating; in January 2026 electricity will be 4.7 times as dear as gas per unit of energy used. That’s a big move the wrong way for Mr Miliband’s policy of getting us to rip out the gas boiler and put in electric heating.

The government argument goes that wholesale electricity is only so dear because the price reflects the gas price, as the system they use for pricing often means the price of electricity generated from gas is the one they use for the whole system. This is very misleading.

Much of the wind and solar power is under long term contracts with guaranteed prices. These prices are often higher than the average wholesale price charged for electricity. The price of gas generated electricity is dearer than it need be because the system only allows the gas stations to run and to sell power when there is not enough renewable. That makes it dearer as the owners of all the plant and employers of the staff need a higher price to cover all their costs of when they are not allowed to run.

Renewables are also dearer because they need more grid to handle their unreliability and to get power down from places like Scotland where there is more wind and space for the turbines, to the south where there is more demand. The government had to offer subsidies to get people to put in renewables, and some of these costs are added to electricity bills. As a result of putting in too much renewable and writing off or idling too much fossil fuel plant the UK has ended up with the dearest electricity in the advanced world.

Miliband’s extreme version of the damaging net zero policies the UK has been adopting is destroying British industry. Industrial output is down by one per cent over the last year. That conceals a spate of closures and bankruptcies that have hit our industrial base.

Domestic energy prices make many industries uncompetitive; the government bans on new oil and gas output in the UK, and on all diesel and petrol car making from 2030 are hitting especially hard. As our North Sea output declines, so the British petrochemical industry loses access to what used to be affordable UK energy. Lumbered as well with carbon taxes and an emissions trading scheme, industry buckles under the excessive costs.

We have seen over the last year two oil refineries close down. We have witnessed the closure of the Grangemouth and Teesside olefins plants, the Mossmoran ethylene plant, the largest glass fibre plant in the country, the last Port Talbot blast furnace, an Armitage Shanks tunnel kiln, a St Gobain foundry, Royal Stafford, Heraldic and Moorcroft potteries, three window manufacturers and a Glasgow Aggregates Industry site amongst others. Jaguar cars have pulled out of making any petrol and diesel vehicles and are waiting to get into place an electric car line up instead, so their output has crashed.

This is a rout. Labour Ministers say soothing things and find sums of money to handle redundancies but allow the closures to go ahead.

Only in the case of steel did they decide they wanted to keep the underlying business and jobs. In South Wales this meant a £500m grant to help set up (in two years’ time) an electric arc furnace to replace the closed blast furnaces. This still means the jobs have gone and the new plant will need only a small number compared to the past employment levels. Government is paying for large running  losses at Scunthorpe to keep the blast furnaces and the jobs; it seems likely they will give up on that and do to Scunthorpe what is being done to Port Talbot, which will mean big job losses.

Britain is suffering badly from very high energy taxes and from a net zero policy which destroys our industry and forces us to import instead – with all the extra marine diesel and energy used to bring in the imports and liquify gas adding to the world CO2 gas output. The final irony for a policy claiming to bring down carbon emissions.

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