Blackout Britain: how the lights are going out on Rishi’s election chances

The latest instalment in Rishi Sunak’s plan to frighten people into voting Conservative is to warn of power cuts if we don’t build new gas power stations.

Thugs have taken over our streets. Strikes have rendered the rail network unusable. More strikes mean we can’t rely on the NHS. We aren’t spending enough on defence. We are letting people out of prison two months early because the jails are full.

And now we can’t be sure the lights will stay on. But vote Conservative, because the plan is working and it would be worse if Labour “took us back to square one”.

It cannot be long now before the prime minister, who wasn’t even born in the Seventies, orders a three-day week to save energy and issues advice on how to brush your teeth in the dark.

The announcement of new gas power stations was confirmed by Claire Coutinho, the energy secretary, in her speech today, accompanied by more warnings of the country being plunged into darkness unless urgent action is taken.

What is most striking about the plan for new power stations, though, is that Labour supports it. Ed Miliband, the shadow energy secretary, tried to sound as if he opposed it. He put out a statement saying: “Today, the energy secretary has confirmed that, after 14 years of failed Conservative energy policy, under the Tories, Britain would face at least another 10 years of high energy bills and energy insecurity.”

But then he said: “Of course, we need to replace retiring gas-fired stations as part of a decarbonised power system.” The only difference between government and opposition is that the Labour Party pretends that new gas power stations can be carbon-free, by capturing the carbon from burning gas and storing it – a technology that does not yet work on the scale of a whole power station.

The Conservatives, on the other hand, pretend that building new power stations – “unabated”, in the jargon – is compatible with decarbonised electricity generation by 2035, which will be less than 10 years away by the time they are built.

Voters at the election are going to be asked to choose their fantasy: an unproven carbon capture and storage technology at a magically low price from Labour, or a “build it now and worry about the carbon later” imaginary target from the Tories.

In practice, there will not be much difference between the two parties. Since Labour ditched its £28bn-a-year green investment plan, the main distinction has been rhetorical. Sunak and Coutinho have been playing to a gallery that is sceptical about the cost of net zero. “When the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing, this is how we will keep your lights on and your bills down,” Sunak said in his article this morning. “We will deliver net zero, but not by piling thousands of pounds worth of costs onto households.”

Miliband is playing to a gallery that believes in cheap, abundant carbon-free energy for all.

This means both main parties are locked into the same fantasy destination: they both claim that net zero is achievable at no cost to consumers. But they differ on the path towards that destination. Labour’s path depends on hoping that technological fixes can be magicked into existence by ministerial decree; the Conservative path depends on hoping that the fixes will spontaneously self-generate later on.

Meanwhile, both parties offer the dream of energy independence – although building new gas power stations, even with carbon capture, will require the import of gas from somewhere because there isn’t enough in the North Sea.

Miliband is still promising to “deliver clean power by 2030, taking billions off energy bills for families and boosting Britain’s energy independence”.

There is an important technical debate about the practical measures needed to cut carbon emissions and keep the lights on, but the proximity of an election means that the political parties are not going to engage in it honestly. They are selling impossible promises dressed up in confidence and optimism.

The problem for the Tories, though, is that Sunak is not very good at confidence and optimism. His “realism” about net zero comes across as a warning of electricity blackouts. His realism about HS2 comes across as a “no can do” mentality. His warnings about the threat of extremism sound as if he is complaining that the country is going to the dogs and that the government ought to do something about it, without realising that he is the government.