For years we were promised that net zero would deliver cheap, secure, home-grown energy. This summer the real world delivered its verdict. Conflict in the Gulf, attacks on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and a collapse in oil exports have sent prices surging — and British families are paying for it at the pump and on the doormat.
The figures are stark. Average petrol prices are running 20% above their pre-war levels and diesel 36% higher. Brent crude jumped from around $70 a barrel to peaks above $100. The forecast for the July energy price cap has climbed towards £1,973 for a typical household, roughly a fifth higher than in April. That is not an abstraction. That is the cost of every school run, every delivery van and every weekly shop going up.
Exposed by Events
None of this is Britain's fault. But our vulnerability to it absolutely is the result of choices made in Westminster. We sit on substantial reserves of oil and gas in the North Sea. We have coal under our feet and the engineering heritage to lead on nuclear. Instead, successive governments have run down our own production, made ourselves dependent on volatile global markets, and called it progress.
Energy security is national security. A country that cannot keep its own lights on and its own lorries moving has handed a veto over its economy to events thousands of miles away. The Gulf crisis is a brutal demonstration of what that dependency costs the moment the world turns nasty.
The Net Zero Gamble
The honest debate Britain needs is not whether we care about the environment. It is whether it is sane to dismantle our own reliable energy supply faster than we can replace it, and to pile green levies onto bills while we do it. Every winter that gamble looks more reckless. When prices spike because of a war we did not start, the families who can least afford it are the ones left cold and out of pocket.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK would put British energy security first. That means backing the North Sea instead of taxing it into retreat, fast-tracking new nuclear and gas capacity, and stripping the ideological levies off household bills. The goal is simple: reliable, affordable power generated here, so that the next conflict in some far-off strait does not show up as a £300 jump on a Lancashire pensioner's energy bill.
The Iran oil shock should be a wake-up call. A serious country secures its own energy before it lectures the world about everyone else's. We can argue about the pace of change. What we cannot afford is to keep leaving ourselves this exposed.