UK Election: what kind of disillusion is brewing?

Maybe none at all.  Maybe the electorate views all politicians as liars, and has merely formed the view that the Tories just have to go, simple as that.  These things happen: ask Callaghan / Thatcher / Major / Brown / Johnson / Truss.

But here’s the thing.  Needing to say very little at all, Starmer lies freely in all directions: a liar in a league of his own. Blair and BJ aren’t even in the running, bad as they are.  Does Starmer feel he’s in lawyer-in-courtroom territory, where the whole court knows the barrister will say anything to get his client off, and that’s just fine & dandy?**   

Energy being my thing, I focus on what Miliband has been saying.  It’s almost as bad.  We’ll have 100% zero carbon electricity by 2030 AND it will cost us all less.  Seriously.  Oh, and 650,000 new Green Jobs will be created in the process (though to be fair, he doesn’t say which country they’ll be created in).  The Graun even writes that, as regards the oil & gas sector which is to be phased out, Labour have declared that “not a single job will be lost” in the transition, though fairness again prompts me to say that I can’t source that anywhere in Labour’s output.  

It’s hard to guess how, in 2030, they’ll explain why this has all come to grief, as indubitably it will: they won’t get within spitting distance of any of zero-carbon electricity, cheaper electricity, or the 650k new green jobs.  The usual trick is: “we didn’t know how bad things were until we saw the books” – but that doesn’t wash with electricity generation because the entire sector is comprised of very big units that can’t be hidden: every analyst modelling the UK power sector has a complete list of them all.  (Likewise, the roll-out of the small stuff like heat pumps, solar panels, electric vehicles etc is pretty exactly monitored – not least because policy-makers are so keen to.)  And “bills going up, not down” is pretty easy to track, too.  

“Didn’t realise the extent of inflation in raw materials“?  That’s pretty well known.  “Didn’t know there was a skills shortage“?  Ditto.  “Didn’t realise CCUS / hydrogen / new nukes wouild be so badly delayed / wouldn’t work as advertised“?  Not that either: we’ve recently had a judge rule that it’s “irrational” to assume anything else.  

Nope: I can’t quite see how they are going to hide.  The question is: will it be held against them?

ND

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** I was once on the jury for a high-profile murder trial, and the case made on behalf of one of the perps – whom we’d watched carrying out the murder on CCTV from several angles - was essentially that a Man from Mars came down, swapped clothes with the perp a couple of minutes beforehand, did the deed, and then swapped back & flew off again.  All this under the coded formulation: “The suggestion is …”.  The judge didn’t seem to feel the need to reprimand this line of argumentation.