Why Ed Miliband is the most dangerous British politician

There are plenty of candidates, but my vote would without a doubt go to Ed Miliband. As Minister of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, he is in a powerful position and seemingly operates unchecked. When his leader Keir Starmer tried to reshuffle him a few months ago, he simply dug in and said ‘no’. He liked his job too much.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that but my problem is that he is something of a zealot when it comes to net zero. Zealots are dangerous because by definition they have targets which they will not deviate from.

As a north London intellectual he has, as far as I can see, no practical ability or experience in the big world. Do you remember the infamous picture of him trying to eat a bacon roll?

The most obvious manifestation of his zeal is his absolute refusal to countenance new licences for North Sea oil and gas. This makes no sense when we clearly have a need for both commodities. I have a relative who works offshore but no longer from Aberdeen. Instead, he works out of Stavanger on rigs operating just a few miles inside Norwegian waters.

Most of the oil he and his mates produce ends up in Britain to make up for our deficit, and consequently our balance of payments suffers. Where is the sense in that?

It leaves everyone in the UK struggling to live with the highest energy costs in the world. But there is something else specific to farming. Miliband now has a huge degree of control over the fate of our farmland, far more, I would suggest, than Defra Secretary of State Emma Reynolds.

He has already apparently approved 131 renewable energy projects which, if they are developed as planned, will swallow up 100,000 hectares (250,000 acres) of farmland.

Most of it will be for solar farms and in the arable east because that is where the sunlight is most intense. Some of the schemes are huge.

The Springwell Solar Farm between Lincoln and Sleaford will take in 1280 hectares (3200 acres) of some of the best arable land in the country.

Scotland won’t escape either. It is hard to keep up with the number of applications at various stages of approval. There are 200 acres near me at Dundee about to be lost to a giant electricity substation and we are now beginning to hear of plans for unbelievably large data centres.

The one being proposed for Auchtertool in Fife will consume 20% of Scotland’s electricity apparently.

Frankly, I find all of this a horrendous prospect. Land covered in solar panels will be locked up for at least 40 years and even then there is no guarantee that it will ever come back into agricultural production. Developers sometimes try to argue that the land can still be used for grazing sheep, but I cannot see herding them on any sort of scale being a practical proposition.

Veterinary surgeries up and down the country would be full of collie dogs concussed after running flat out into a support pole of which there are hundreds per acre.

And, land disappearing under a substation or data centre will be lost permanently.

The central question is: What effect is this going to have on national food security?

It’s not one that Miliband will consider, though. I am sure he will be well schooled in the Westminster orthodoxy that doesn’t equate national food security with what we can produce on the 17 million hectares classified in as Utilisable Agricultural Area.

That land currently produces only about 60% of the food eaten in the UK. And that figure has declined steadily since the late 1970s when it was about 75%.

In an uncertain world, where Russian naval forces are constantly probing our defences, that 60% figure looks far too small.

Even narrowing it down to the indigenous foods that can be produced in our climate, the figure only goes up to 75%. If I was a Prime Minister responsible for feeding 70 million people, I would find that worrying.

Political thinking in Westminster will, without doubt, be guided by a document known as the UK Food Security Index.

Although the devolved administrations are consulted, there should be no doubt this is a Defra publication. The latest edition dates from 2024 and looks at nine key indicators, and assesses each of these on a scale which starts with ‘broad reduction in risks’ and ends with ‘broad increase in risks’.

Right in the middle sits ‘broadly stable’.

To my surprise, nearly every category, despite the shocks from the Covid pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, is assessed as ‘broadly stable’. Only one indicator, Agricultural Total Factor Productivity, is assessed as ‘broadly reducing risk’.

In other words, farmers are doing their bit by becoming increasingly efficient, mostly by using less fertiliser to produce the same yields.

The text says: “We can assume that the UK has a high degree of food security due largely to sustained healthy production and positive trends in global output growth.” It adds: “Imports from diverse sources make a positive contribution to UK food security as they support the UK’s ability to respond flexibly to supply shocks both domestically and internationally.”

One of the key indicators looks at global food production which – you have guessed it – is assessed as ‘broadly stable’. I find that startlingly complacent.

It’s the sort of thinking that landed Britain in near terminal trouble in the years leading up to the First World War and the Second World War. And yes, history does repeat itself.

The situation with the Strait of Hormuz amply demonstrates how vulnerable supply chains are and we should not delude ourselves about the threat from Russia. Some commentators think we are already in a phoney war without sufficient defences in place.

There are certain areas of food production we need to look at urgently. Astonishingly, for a country that can grow potatoes better than anywhere else, we are only 63% self-sufficient. The same is true with pigmeat where Britain was only 69% self-sufficient in 2024. If the present calamitous price collapse continues, there might not be many pigs left – and this in a country ideally suited for rearing them.

I think it is a crisis and so I am very glad to see that Alistair Carmichael, chairman of the House of Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee, has secured a debate on food security. He is the MP for Orkney and, thank goodness, a politician of a very different stripe to Ed Miliband. I hope he can make it a landmark debate.