September 23, 2025 - 7:00am
We should probably whisper it, but Ed Miliband, Britain’s Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, appears to be displaying the first signs of qualities he has so far seemingly lacked: realism and common sense.
This week, Miliband’s department, which is also committed to building the much bigger Sizewell C reactor in Suffolk, indicated it might overrule local opposition to the construction of nuclear waste dumps — projects that legally require local public approval. The announcement follows Keir Starmer’s agreement with Donald Trump last week to develop a new fleet of small modular nuclear reactors, even though they won’t produce electricity for many years.
Perhaps more surprisingly, Miliband is also reportedly planning to water down the ban he introduced last year on drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea. He intends to do this by allowing so-called “tie backs” — the development of new fields via existing, adjacent ones, using their infrastructure. If this is followed through, it cannot be a moment too soon. Fossil fuel extraction is currently responsible for some 120,000 jobs, but the industry body Offshore Energies UK claimed three weeks ago that 1,000 are being lost every month.
Of course, Miliband remains wedded to his Clean Power 2030 plan, a pledge to reduce electricity generation derived from fossil fuel to almost nothing by tripling offshore and doubling onshore wind capacity, along with the tripling of solar. Many experts think the necessary turbines, solar panels and supporting infrastructure simply cannot be installed in the time frame he has set, while Labour’s 2024 election promise —that the policy would shrink consumers’ energy bills by £300 a year — was fantasy.
As UnHerd revealed in March, a sophisticated computer model developed by Professor Gordon Hughes, suggests that the subsidies, levies and other hidden costs embedded in Miliband’s proposals will see not a reduction but an 80% increase in the cost of electricity by his 2030 target date — and this in a country where industrial users already pay the highest prices of G7 states.
Nevertheless, the reason for Miliband’s newfound realism isn’t hard to spot. Two of Labour’s biggest union paymasters, Unite and the GMB, which both backed Miliband as Labour leader when he won a leadership election in 2010, have declared themselves vehemently opposed to his Net Zero policies. According to the GMB’s general secretary Gary Smith, their success will be “measured in redundancies”, while his Unite counterpart Sharon Graham has said it is a “disgrace” that the government “has no plan to transition oil and gas workers into green jobs”.
However, as with the Starmer government’s tough talk on migration, there is a further source of pressure for a change of course: Reform UK, whose deputy leader Richard Tice is determined to make scrapping Net Zero a key political battleground. He has declared that, under a Reform government, there would not only be new offshore drilling licences, but large-scale onshore fracking, to extract natural gas trapped in shale which he claims will be worth hundreds of billions of pounds.
Miliband, who usually tops ministerial popularity polls among Labour Party members, loves posting social media videos highlighting the supposed benefits of his policies. One notable example was his rendition of Blowing in the Wind, filmed next to wind turbines while he strummed a ukulele.
He may not yet have sung a song about the virtues of nuclear waste dumps or fossil fuel tie-backs, but as with any sinner, many will welcome these glimmers of repentance.
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