The problem with nationalising energy

Is nationalisation the vote-winner which Keir Starmer believes it to be? We will find out in due course, but my hunch is that the British public as a whole care a lot less about who owns the train carriages they ride in and the power stations which generate their electricity than Labour MPs do. 

What they care about rather more, surely, is whether their trains arrive on time and whether their lights stay on. No one who remembers British Rail will be under any illusions that public ownership is a panacea for a functioning railway, and neither will anyone who remembers the three-day week be fooled into thinking a public-owned power industry guarantees keeping the lights on. 

So what to make of Labour’s plan for Great British Energy – a public-owned company which would invest in wind, solar and possibly tidal energy? There is no reason that a public-owned company cannot operate wind farms, but there is no reason, either, to suppose that Keir Starmer has even addressed, still less solved, the fundamental problem of trying to operate a national grid based on intermittent wind and solar energy.