Ed Miliband doesn’t understand how energy pricing works

Are we about to find out the full foolishness of Ed Miliband’s policy of blocking licences for new oil and gas extraction in the North Sea?

While it may come as a surprise to some, until New Year’s Eve Europe was still receiving gas supplies from Russia – not through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline which was sabotaged in 2022, but via an unlikely route through Ukraine. These taps have now been turned off, after an agreement for Russia to supply gas to Europe came to an end. That leaves the continent facing a similar situation, if less acute, to that which it faced in 2022. It must look elsewhere to make up for lost Russian gas.

In 2022, the first year of the war in Ukraine, there was a huge spike in gas prices as Germany and other countries scrambled to secure enough gas to get them through the winter.