Miliband's Favorite Economist Doesn't Understand How Markets Work

When Ed Miliband took the podium at the Good Growth Foundation’s National Growth Debate in Westminster last week, he did not disappoint his audience of the converted. Flanked by the economist he has long revered, Miliband delivered a speech that could serve as a textbook case of what I have elsewhere called the “economic illiteracy of UK energy policy”.

Yet to dismiss it as mere stupidity would be a mistake. There is a method to Miliband’s madness—one honed over years in the cloistered halls of “woke” Oxford and the Fabian-inspired London School of Economics and now supercharged by the “mission”-obsessed theories of Professor Mariana Mazzucato of University College London.

In that speech—republished by the New Statesman—Miliband declared that “the era of fossil fuel security is over, and the era of clean energy security must come of age.” He credited “the godmother of missions, Marianna Mazzucato, who’s with us,” for the intellectual scaffolding of Labour’s clean energy push.

The mission, he said, established in opposition and now in government, has “two parts—driving to a clean electricity system but also electrifying as much as we can, as we decarbonise the wider economy.” Informed by the “lessons” of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the latest crisis over the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Miliband insists Britain must “double down” on net zero, tax North Sea oil and gas investments punitively, and “electrify everything” while rejecting any new exploration and development of domestic hydrocarbons.