Resilience demands Labour ends its energy idiocy

Perhaps only Britain could discover it was sitting on vast oil and gas fields, and then waste years during an energy crisis agonising over whether it was allowed to use them. Finally, the Government came to its senses this week and approved the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea. But, ever-wedded to the dangerous fantasy of net zero, Miatta Fahnbulleh, the Energy Secretary, has said she is minded to withhold approval of the arguably more important Rosebank oil field .

She cites “climate obligations”. This is absurd. Labour must abandon its self-harming pathologies, and give Rosebank the green-light at the Budget. Rosebank is the largest untapped oil field in the North Sea, containing up to 500 million barrels. Together with Jackdaw, it could account for around 10 per cent of UK oil output at peak. That means increased investment, increased tax revenues, and increased energy security. The Government rightly warns that we need to become more resilient.

Wes Streeting, the Defence Secretary, even says in this paper we need to prepare for war . What kind of preparation is it to kneecap your domestic energy industry in order to make no discernible impact on the climate? Some ministers dismiss the field because it will primarily produce exports. That is truly blinkered. Not only do exports increase the Treasury’s coffers, every barrel of oil sold from Britain is a barrel that Europe won’t buy from Vladimir Putin.

Cheap, abundant energy has been the foundation of every prosperous economy in the past, and will continue to be so in the future. Today, John Healey, the Chancellor, confirmed that he will commit hundreds of millions of pounds on various AI initiatives at the Budget. Kanishka Narayan, the AI minister , has spoken of the need for Britain to “assert power rather than leave it to tech bros and oligarchs”. But it is incoherent to talk of Britain building a sovereign capability in AI while simultaneously refusing to extract the energy upon which it depends.

Data centres are essential to AI and are very energy intensive. But our net zero laws have led to Britain having the highest industrial power costs in the developed world, deterring investment in this frontier technology. If Mr Burnham is serious about resilience, the first step is to give Rosebank the go-ahead. The next is to tear up the net zero laws that make us so fragile in the first place.