On 5 July – after a 14-year interval – Ed Miliband returned to the Department for Energy. As secretary of state once more he has wasted no time in acting: the onshore wind ban has been lifted, the publicly-owned GB Energy has been launched and three major solar farms have been approved. Peter Mandelson – a bête noire of Miliband during his Labour leadership – has praised him as “a man with a plan” and an example to the rest of the government.
But he remains one of Labour’s most reviled frontbenchers because of the legacy of his leadership. It was notable that he was not prominent during the party’s election campaign. And is Miliband’s chosen mission of delivering clean power by 2030 achievable? How will he handle the fraught politics of the UK’s transition away from fossil fuels?
On the eve of the Labour Party conference, I met Miliband, who is 54, in his top-floor office at the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (as it has been known since 2023). He was dressed casually in navy jeans and blue Nike trainers.
“The phrase I always come back to is that we’re a government in a hurry to meet the mandate set for us by the British people,” Miliband said. “We’re a department in a hurry. Move fast and build things rather than move fast and break things” – an inversion of the Silicon Valley cliché.
We were speaking at the end of a troubled week for the government marked by hostile briefings against No 10 chief of staff Sue Gray, plummeting approval ratings for the party and the Prime Minister and continued divisions over winter fuel payment cuts (which will affect around 10 million pensioners).
“The thing that sustains you in government is the cause,” Miliband said. “[Harold] Macmillan said ‘events, dear boy events’, well what sustains you against that is a sense of direction and momentum. It’s like the Mario Kart video game. You’re driving along, things fly at you and you’ve got to just keep going.”
Does he believe Keir Starmer was wrong to accept £100,000 of free tickets and gifts?
“Keir is somebody who’s in this for public service,” Miliband said. “This is somebody of the utmost integrity and decency. I’ve been around a long time, in the 1997 to 2010 period it was not all plain sailing”. (Back then, Miliband was known as “the emissary from Planet Fuck” by Blairites who found him more genial than Gordon Brown’s other aides.)
“There were many, many stories which even I can’t remember. Those were not the issues that decided elections. What matters to Keir is delivering for the British people, whether he goes to an Arsenal game is not the issue.”
More strikingly, Miliband offered the strongest defence made by any cabinet minister of Gray, who some in Labour believe will soon resign as Starmer’s chief of staff.
“If you take Sue Gray, she played an incredibly important and positive role when she joined while we were in opposition and she’s playing an incredibly positive role in government. If you talk to cabinet ministers and mayors, they can testify to the way that Sue is helping to deliver the government’s agenda and the difference she is making.”
Miliband’s agenda is defined by the 2030 clean power target. The government has vowed to decarbonise the UK’s electricity grid by working with the private sector to double onshore wind, triple solar power and quadruple offshore wind. But can this be achieved without greater public investment? Until February of this year, Labour was committed to £28bn of green investment per year – an amount that was later halved (a decision Miliband fought against).
“The 2030 clean power [target] was always mainly about private investment, to be honest,” he responded. “Can you unlock the investment that has been blocked by planning, supply chains and skills? That’s the single biggest challenge.”
At the TUC Congress earlier this month, unions voted for a motion opposing Miliband’s planned ban on new oil and gas licences until North Sea workers are guaranteed comparable jobs. The latter, they warned, must not become “the miners of net zero”. Will Miliband offer this guarantee?
“We absolutely are going to deliver a just transition, we know we will be judged on the fairness of this and rightly so… The truth is that the North Sea workforce has fallen by something like a third in the last 10 years with no plan to replace the jobs, no plan for carbon capture and storage, no plan for offshore wind jobs, no plan for hydrogen. And we’re going to keep existing oil and gas fields open for their lifetime.”
One of the institutions through which Miliband aims to deliver a just transition is GB Energy – which will invest in renewables and own and manage clean power projects.
“Ideas are the most underrated commodity in politics,” said Miliband who sees the company as proof of the return of the active state. “We thought a lot in opposition about why the Danes have four times as many renewable jobs per capita as the UK. Part of the answer is Ørsted, a publicly-owned energy generating company. If we’re going to be serious about industrial strategy, if we’re going to be serious about political economy, public ownership is a key lever. It’s a lever for accelerating the clean energy transition and it’s a lever for generating wealth as well.”
Miliband added: “I often cite the fact the mayor of Munich owns more of our offshore wind than the British state… Industrial policy is firmly back and we want GB Energy to show that public ownership can work.”
The company’s first partnership was with the Crown Estate, which has a £16bn portfolio of land and seabed and was granted new borrowing powers to help deliver thousands of offshore wind turbines (“socialist monarchism” quipped the theologian John Milbank).
Miliband praised King Charles as an “incredible asset” to the UK on environmental issues. “He really cares about this, I know that from my conversations. He has a deep knowledge of these issues. We worked together in 2008-10 and he cares passionately.”
During the election campaign, Labour argued that its climate plans would reduce household energy bills by around £300 a year – a figure notably absent from Miliband’s first major speech in office.
“We stand by that figure, which came from an independent consultancy,” Miliband insisted. “The key thing is that the recent renewable auctions show that they are the cheapest source of power to build and operate, cheaper than fossil fuels. Second, they give you a degree of price protection that fossil fuels never can.”
Awkwardly for Miliband, £300 is the amount that most pensioners aged over 80 will this year lose through the means-testing of winter fuel payment. Did he oppose the decision? (As some in Labour have suggested.)
“I support Rachel’s decisions,” he replied. “I think it’s really important to say this is a whole government effort to deal with inheritance we had from the Tories. As Rachel herself has said, this isn’t a decision she wanted to make. It was a decision that was necessitated by the inheritance that we have.”
Miatta Fahnbulleh, the new Labour MP for Peckham and a junior minister in Miliband’s department, recently met energy firms to discuss the introduction of a “social tariff” – a discounted rate for low-income households. Will Miliband pursue this idea?
“We’re looking at all of these issues. At the moment you have something called the Warm Home Discount, which is a sort of quasi-social tariff, it’s £150. But Rachel, me and Keir constantly look at ways to do everything we can to help those in fuel poverty.”
Miliband, who first entered Westminster in 1993 as a researcher to Harriet Harman (then shadow chief secretary to the Treasury), served as a political mentor to both Reeves and Starmer. Today, as they grapple with the perils of power, he speaks of them with paternal fondness.
“Rachel is somebody that I promoted onto the front bench [in 2011],” Miliband recalled. “She is a genuine mould-breaker: the first female chancellor in 800 years. She cares deeply about addressing the social and economic problems of the country. She recognises that Labour’s Achilles heel has always been fiscal responsibility.”
It was under Miliband that Starmer entered Westminster politics. He co-chaired a victims’ taskforce for Labour and was selected as the parliamentary candidate for Holborn and St Pancras in 2014 (a process to which Miliband was “instrumental”, MPs say). Starmer, in turn, restored his north London neighbour to the shadow cabinet in 2020 and later handed him ownership of one of the government’s five missions.
Now, as Labour MPs warn that the Prime Minister is already squandering the goodwill of voters, Ed Miliband defends his old friend.
“Keir’s a progressive problem solver,” he said. “He doesn’t look at problems in a dogmatic way but in a very values-based way. I absolutely believe he’s going to be a great Prime Minister and he’s not going to be distracted by the noise.”
[See also: Rachel Reeves casts herself as the anti-Osborne]
Content from our partners
Related
