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In a time of fear, heroes must rise. There’s a gathering storm rattling at the windows, tearing through the family WhatsApp groups. Use your air fryer instead of the oven. Book your summer holiday now to avoid spiralling flight costs. Colin, a caller on LBC, has heard a rumour (the radio phone-in equivalent of “forwarded many times”) that there are abundant oil and gas reserves off the Falkland Islands and wants the government to fund an expedition to go and get them.
Meanwhile, Ed Miliband has been on TikTok, patiently explaining to his 26,800 followers what the government is doing to protect you from the coming war-flavoured price shock. Energy bills are coming down in April. There’s a £50m heating oil fund for poorer households. Fuel duty is being frozen until September. There are unspecified “measures to advance our plans for clean power”. And, of course, the government is “working with our allies to bring this conflict to an end”, which definitely seems to be doing the trick so far.
Naturally, Labour’s cost-of-living tsar, Richard Walker, has been front and centre during the early weeks of this crisis. Much like an actual tsar, the executive chair of Iceland (the supermarket chain, not the country) is a multimillionaire, inherited much of his immense wealth from the family dynasty and enjoys a position of significant political influence despite never having been elected. Nevertheless, Walker has been using his platform to argue that “government needs to listen to business more”, while also warning that the energy price cap proposed by Green party leader Zack Polanski “could lead to disastrous consequences, such as rationing”. So let’s not accuse him of shirking the hard choices.
If there is a common thread to all this, it is the intent to show intent, a focus on focus, in the absence of anything more tangible. Above all, Labour wants you to know just how hard it is thinking about all this. Steve Reed is “monitoring this hour by hour”. Keir Starmer says “the cost of living is always top of my mind”, a preoccupation verging on debilitating obsession.
In a sense, this has been the defining motif of the current government: missions for the sake of missions, empty bromides deployed for the sole purpose of finding their way into watery centrist think-pieces. We’ve already had “deliverism” and “securonomics”. For future news cycles, I would also suggest “growthball” and “trustarchy”, with “Make Britain cheaper again” as a handy change-up. “Quiet bat people”, alas, has already been claimed.
There are perhaps three linked fallacies at work here. The first is that any isolated medium-sized state can realistically micromanage people’s bills in an age of global shocks and exemplary atrocity. You can throw pots of money at energy bills and fuel duty, but how do you mitigate the after-effects on food prices, mortgage rates, travel costs, phones and laptops that rely on semiconductors that rely on helium and bromine? Do we now need a helium tsar? A cereals and baked goods tsar? A Jet2holidays tsar?
The second is that any piecemeal measures of restitution will even register among a distracted, sceptical public. Take the fuel duty freeze, a £3bn expenditure that by its very nature is designed not to be noticed. Or the heating oil support, aimed at the roughly 3.6% of British households that rely on it and which has already been described by the first minister of Northern Ireland, where two-thirds of households use heating oil, as a “slap in the face”. It’s not nothing. But against the scale of the coming problem, you’d also be hard-pressed to describe it as something either.
The third is that the government will actually be able to claim any credit for the stuff people do notice. Here, of course, the blame is merely partial, the upshot of operating in a deliberately hostile information environment, mediated by platforms that actively want to extinguish it and have long since given up even the pretence of acting in good faith. Last week, Nigel Farage earned glowing coverage for promising to pay the energy bills for one lucky British street for a whole year. Had Starmer unveiled a similar scheme, the headlines would probably read something like: “Fury as 790,000 streets excluded from Starmer energy giveaway.”
For all this, a government remotely capable of meeting the moment for which it was elected would surely be doing a better job of explaining itself. Anyone remember Great British Energy, the clean energy investment vehicle that was the set piece of Starmer’s 2022 conference speech and that polls spectacularly whenever people are asked about it? It’s there. It exists. You might imagine that at a time when energy security is high on the agenda, Labour might want to shout about it a little. But like NFTs, girl dinner and Rosena Allin-Khan, it appears to have been one of those things that was a thing for a while and then entirely disappeared from view.
In its stead, we have government by cut-out coupon, an entire economy being run in Asda-pocket mode: handing out fistfuls of change, telling pubs to switch off their fridges at night, shaking a weary fist at energy companies in the hope of looking busy. Perhaps the real failure here is in treating the household budget crisis as if it is literally a household budget crisis, rather than the inheritance of a toxic economic settlement, one in need of systemic reform rather than money-off vouchers.
This is a time for radical ideas, disruptive ideas, ideas that shift the window. In my lifetime, there has never been a greater thirst for moving quickly and breaking things. Why not go hard on wealth taxes? Why not use this moment to start painting the net zero sceptics on the right as a national security threat? Why not point to the example of Spain – where energy prices are 32% below the European average thanks to an unprecedented investment in wind and solar power – and aggressively accelerate the pivot to renewables? Why not decouple the price of electricity from the volatile wholesale gas market, as proposed by the Common Wealth thinktank?
Instead, Labour offers up its book of coupons, an ill-formed lattice of sticking-plaster solutions that nobody will feel the benefit of and for which nobody will thank it, coupled with a raft of promises it cannot remotely keep. And of course, the net effect is not zero. Rather, it maintains the dangerous fallacy that household expenditure is not simply an imperfect function of a lucid economy but a kind of lever to be pulled and yanked by politicians, tying this and every subsequent government to the tyranny of the monthly bill.
In the meantime, the real noise is being made at the fringes. Already, amid its cunning stunts, Reform is capitalising on the crisis by promising new oil and gas exploitation in the North Sea, accompanied by an immediate abandonment of net zero targets. Its deputy leader, Richard Tice, who blames the climate crisis on “the power of the sun” and “volcanoes”, has pledged to lift the ban on fracking. The royal drilling expedition to the Falklands is surely only a matter of months away. After all, this is a moment for grand schemes and big ideas, and if the party of government can’t think of any, there are plenty of others happy to do it for them.
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Jonathan Liew is a Guardian columnist
