British families are about to be hit again — and this time it's because Labour's energy strategy turned out to be no strategy at all. The Bank of England has warned that UK inflation could climb as high as 5% this summer if Middle East tensions persist, after CPI jumped to 3.3% in March on the back of fuel price surges driven by the Iran war. We told them. We warned them. Now ordinary people are paying for it at the pump and on every shelf in the supermarket.
An Inflation Spike We Imported
Brent crude has rocketed from around $70 a barrel before the conflict to brief peaks above $100. That feeds straight into petrol, diesel, heating oil, fertiliser, plastics, and food. Britain has very little protection against any of it because under Labour we have less domestic gas, less domestic oil, and a National Grid increasingly dependent on imported energy and intermittent renewables. When the world wobbles, our economy wobbles harder than it needs to.
The Bank of England's threshold judgement is telling. Their preliminary estimate is CPI between 3% and 3.5% in Q2 and Q3, peaking between 3.5% and 4% if tensions ease — and pushing toward 5% if they escalate. That is not a forecast, that is a warning. And the entire warning is conditional on global events Britain has no control over, because Labour gave away the levers of energy security.
The Real Cost of Net Zero Ideology
Ed Miliband and the Labour government keep telling the country net zero is going to lower bills. The numbers are saying the opposite. Households are still paying more for electricity than nearly anywhere in the developed world. Industry is fleeing. Steel is gone. Refineries are running on reduced output. Heating oil prices are up nearly 95% in rural Britain in twelve months. Net zero in its current form is not a climate policy — it is a cost-of-living policy, and the cost is going up.
What does Labour's response look like? More wind farms. More solar. More targets. More civil servants in DESNZ. Not a single new gas field, not a single new nuclear station coming online any time soon, not a single serious plan for energy storage. The result is the country you see today: 3.3% inflation in March, possibly 5% by August, and businesses making redundancies because their electricity bills are eating their margins.
Working People Pay Twice
Inflation does two things to British workers. First, it pushes prices up. Second, it pushes them into higher tax bands through frozen thresholds, the stealth tax fiscal drag that I have written about repeatedly. Labour engineered both. They froze the thresholds. They torpedoed our energy resilience. And when the bill arrives, they will blame Vladimir Putin, the Ayatollah, and anyone else they can find — anyone but themselves.
Constituents in Preston East are telling me the same thing every week: petrol is hurting, food is hurting, heating is hurting, and there is nothing in their pay packet to absorb it. They are not wrong. Real wages have been flat for over a year. Mortgage holders are watching rates that should be falling staying stubbornly high precisely because the Bank cannot rule out further inflation.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK would treat energy security as a serious national priority — not a virtue-signalling exercise. We would abolish DESNZ in its current form, lift the moratorium on North Sea licences, restart shale gas exploration where geology and local consent allow, build out a proper fleet of small modular reactors, and stop subsidising intermittent generation that can't keep the lights on without backup. We would scrap green levies on bills and put real downward pressure on the cost of energy.
We would also unfreeze the personal allowance and let working people keep more of what they earn. You don't fight inflation by taxing your way out of it. You fight inflation by producing more, importing less, and trusting workers and businesses with their own money.
The Bank of England's warning is not just a number. It is a verdict on five years of strategic failure. Labour inherited an economy with options. They have left it with very few. The next government will need to rebuild what this one has dismantled.