The Emperor's New Clothes is a story familiar to everyone. The crowd, fearing the embarrassment of being the only one too stupid to be able to see the clothes, says nothing, nor do the courtiers or indeed the king himself. Vanity prevents them from stating the obvious.
It is a powerful story because it is so often true. To avoid looking foolish, people will not challenge the consensus, for fear of being laughed at.
It takes a brave soul to stand up to this, and Kemi Badenoch has dared to be so regarding net zero. This is the boldest and best thing she has done as leader of the opposition so far.
It is often the case that consensus in politics is wrong. This is for the simple, practical reason that in the United Kingdom, politics is adversarial, so ideas need to be challenged.
As Lord Derby, Disraeli's contemporary, put it, “the duty of an opposition [is] very simple… to oppose everything”. This is vital, because through challenge mistakes may be discovered and decisions markedly improved. A minister who knows that his proposals will be attacked will prepare his arguments and consider the detail much more carefully than one who is confident that they will be applauded on all sides.
Theresa May's lunatic decision to go for net zero by 2050, in a last gasp effort to leave a legacy, is a case in point. Ed Miliband supported it so strongly that he wanted to go even further and achieve net zero by 2040.
Yet the environmental argument was a cross-party effort well before the fateful decision in 2019. The Climate Change Act 2008 only had five votes cast against it, and David Cameron called for people to vote blue to go green.
The policy in those early days was all virtue and no cost. The idea that Britain could lead the world, although always fanciful in the exaggeration of the nation's influence, could not yet have been shown to be fallacious.
Now the true costs are becoming clear, and people are being made cold and poor. A new report for the EY Item Club, a respected body under the auspices of the accountants who are better known as Ernst and Young, has forecast three years of falling employment for British manufacturing, because of high energy costs. As you may remember from previous articles, industrial electricity is four times more expensive in the UK than in America.
EY warns that the North and Scotland will be worst affected, especially Aberdeen. In addition, green jobs, contrary to the propaganda, will probably never replace those that are about to go, and certainly will not do so in the near future.
The high cost of energy, the weakness of the economy and the loss of manufacturing jobs have been clear for some time. In my brief stint as Energy Secretary, I wanted to remove the ETS on steel companies who were asking for subsidies as the high cost of energy was ruining them. I was not successful, and our steel industry is now in the process of closing down.
Kemi is the first Tory leader to acknowledge these difficulties, and she has done so at a time when Reform is absorbed with internal squabbles.
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