Economic commentators at The Guardian are warning Labour to beware of Nigel Farage and Reform “weaponising” its part in the cost-of-living crisis. It comes after Richard Tice, the deputy leader, said his party is preparing “to go to war with the root causes” of declining living standards. This choreography is very familiar.
The moment an insurgent political force connects SW1 policy consensus to social or economic pain, the establishment’s defenders declare bad faith and cordon off the argument. We see the same with debates on crime and immigration statistics. Of course, it is nothing more than a rhetorical firewall for a failing consensus.
But is it true? Let us look at the basics. Existential necessities such as food and energy are far too expensive in modern Britain. Ofgem’s cap currently sits at roughly £1,720 for a “typical” household, this down on the last quarter but still far above the pre-crisis world. The cap will rise again this winter. Energy UK, the trade body for retailers, has said that cuts to energy bills will not be meaningfully felt before 2030.
Food tells the same story. The Bank of England expects inflation to re-accelerate, with food and energy doing much of the pushing. Independent forecasters now see food running hotter for longer. Poorer households are already living that reality; the Resolution Foundation reports food insecurity in January 2025 at roughly double its 2021 level.
SW1 has spent fifteen years constraining reliable energy supply while expanding obligations and costs
The establishment line is that this is all exogenous, with dark references to Putin, climate change and global markets being combined with specious arguments that natural gas is inherently more expensive. Of course, if that were true, the pain would be symmetric across other countries. It is not.
Britain amplifies shocks because SW1 has spent fifteen years constraining reliable energy supply while expanding obligations and costs. The result is exposure to security of supply risks and much higher prices. As The Economist recently found, UK household energy bills are 20 per cent above the average for the major European economies, and industrial bills 90 per cent higher. The Bank of England notes that the UK’s annual food price inflation rate is 1.5 per cent higher than in the euro area.
Of course Reform will make hay; any serious party oriented towards winning would do. And in any event, that is the UK’s adversarial Parliamentary system working as intended, not “right-wing populist” dark arts.
Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat politicians may have lost sight of material reality and the factors of production, but energy sets the price of everything. Farming runs on diesel, electricity, fertiliser and cold chains. When energy is expensive and volatile, the weekly supermarket shop becomes a gut punch. Westminster has refused to internalise this. Instead it congratulates itself on being a “climate leader” while treating the UK’s productive economy as an instrument of global emissions management, not domestic prosperity. We cannot lower living costs by making the inputs to life scarce.
The next turn of the screw is set to happen later this year when Labour publishes its methane reduction plan for UK farms. The Climate Change Committee’s pathway expects agriculture to cut its emissions from today’s ~47 MtCO₂e to 26.4 MtCO₂e by 2050. How? Release land from livestock, ‘nudge” people to lower their meat and dairy consumption, and repurpose farms into carbon sinks and sites for intermittent energy sources. All this comes at a time when all categories of meat prices have risen sharply in price: mince up ~70–90 per cent, sirloin/fillet up ~50 per cent.
Call it what it is: using prices, planning and programme design to force behavioural change, then denouncing opponents as “weaponisers” when they point out the consequences. Voters are not being manipulated. They are experiencing more expensive energy, food and housing and drawing the obvious connection to choices made in Whitehall. As John Gray, the political philosopher, once put it: “‘Populism’ is a term used by centrist liberals to describe political blowback from the disruption of society produced by their policies.”
The rejoinder is that ditching Net Zero would make the poor poorer in the long run. There are two problems here. First, transitions fail when you cut supply first and hope that demand kindly adjusts. Second, Net Zero is marketed as like-for-like. In reality it cuts firm supply, repurposes food-producing farmland and rations by price. The green premium remains, whatever Ed Miliband says.
The next four years are the fork in the road. We can have prosperity and security, or we can have Net Zero by 2050. We cannot have both. The choice should be explicit and argued honestly, not smuggled through with euphemisms about “transition” and accusations of climate denial for anyone who dissents.
So what would honesty on the cost of living look like?
First, energy security must be a hard test, not a slogan. Expand reliable domestic supply, including hydrocarbons. Make the fiscal regime for the North Sea competitive again. End the ban on shale gas. End nuclear gold-plating and approve proven designs quickly. Nuclear is power we can count on. If a measure doesn’t cut costs and keep the lights on in a dark, still week, drop it.
Second, treat farms as food producers, not a land bank for Ed Miliband. Drop targets that shrink herds by stealth. Restore the inheritance tax relief for family farms. Prioritise productivity so we grow more here and food prices become normal again. Stop planning to meet energy and carbon targets by requisitioning agricultural land and cynically calling it “nature”.
Finally, end behavioural engineering by price and constraining reliable supplies of existential necessities — and no more writing off the backlash as “misinformation”, “right-wing extremism” or “culture wars”.
The only “weaponisation” that matters is the use of policy to make life harder, followed by the use of language to make criticism illegitimate. Prices are policy. Change the policy or face the consequences.
