Britain Is Committing “National Economic Suicide”

The birthplace of the Industrial Revolution is hurtling toward net-zero oblivion.

Photo by author.

If you want to know what’s happening in a place, ask a cab driver.

On Sunday afternoon, during a short ride to the British Museum, I asked our cabbie about his energy bills and what he thinks of the British government. For the next 12 minutes, we got an earful. Our driver, Adrian, who was in his 50s, ranted about the British government and its climate policies.

He explained that over the past four years, his energy bill has gone “from three hundred pounds a month to now a thousand pounds a month...Yeah, a thousand pounds a month just to keep the lights on in my house.” When I asked why the prices were increasing, he replied, “It’s the energy policy on green renewables right? It's not letting the market dictate things. We've got, I think, we've got the most expensive energy in the world now. It’s a suicide policy.”

Sign proclaiming net zero inside the ExCel, a vast conference center in East London.

Adrian isn’t far off. As Matt Ridley pointed out last month on Twitter/X, Britain now has the most expensive electricity in the OECD. “That’s what happens,” Ridley said, “if you try to rely on using the landscape to try to extract useful energy from the thin, weak, dispersed and unreliable source that is wind.”

Adrian, the cab driver, isn’t the only Briton talking about suicide. At the ARC conference on Tuesday, Sir Paul Marshall delivered a scathing assessment of Europe’s infatuation with alt-energy. He said Britain’s push for net zero -- and the staggering energy costs that have come with it -- are “acts of national economic suicide.”

After spending a week in London, the signs of the country’s decline and the frustration of Britain’s citizens are apparent.