ED MILIBAND is like Japanese knotweed. You think you’ve got rid of him, then up he pops through the drains and before you know it he has destroyed the foundations of your house.
Eleven years ago, voters comprehensively rejected the then-Labour leader’s efforts to become Prime Minister.
It wasn’t that his opponents, David Cameron and Nick Clegg, were wildly popular, yet still the good sense of the British public shone through.
They could see that Miliband would destroy economic recovery and clobber us with tax rises, especially on anyone who had committed that most dreadful of crimes in Labour’s eyes: aspiration.
Fast-forward to 2026, however, and it seems we could end up with Ed at the helm after all.
With Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership likely to be killed off after the local elections in May, Net Zero Secretary Miliband is looking a good bet to replace him.
READ MORE FROM ROSS CLARK
Sheer destruction
While few outside the Labour Party can understand it, he consistently leads polls of the most popular Cabinet minister among party members — the constituency which will really matter if Starmer is forced out mid-term.
With Andy Burnham neutralised by the decision of Labour’s National Executive Committee to bar him from standing in a by-election, Miliband could easily sneak through.
If Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves between them have done their best to ruin the economy, they have wrought nothing like the damage Miliband would do were he given the keys to Downing Street.
The sheer destruction that is being caused by his climate policies is brought to light this morning in a report by the Jobs Foundation.
Estimates by Robert Gordon University suggest that employment in Aberdeen — the heart of our oil industry — could fall from 115,000 now to 57,000 by the 2030s.
That would amount to about 200 job losses a week — roughly the equivalent of losing a Grangemouth oil refinery every fortnight for the next five years.
Grangemouth, needless to say, is already one of Miliband’s victims. It is being reduced to a mere facility for importing fuels which have been refined elsewhere.
Miliband refuses to grant any new licences, and oil companies are being taxed to the tune of 78 per cent.
Ross Clark
The main reason for the coming collapse of Britain’s fossil fuel output is not natural exhaustion of the North Sea.
Even in its depleted state, in 2024 the industry still managed to produce more than half as much oil and gas as is consumed here.
According to the North Sea Transition Authority, the amount of oil and gas known or estimated to exist beneath the North Sea still stretches to the equivalent of 25billion barrels of oil.
To put this into context, the North Sea has so far produced 47billion barrels’ worth since the 1960s.
New discoveries are — or were — being made all the time. In 2024, an additional 1.1billion barrels’ worth of prospective resources were discovered.
I say were being made, because last year no new wells were drilled in the North Sea for the first time since the 1960s.
Why? Because the industry decided that it is no longer worth the money and effort.
Miliband refuses to grant any new licences, and oil companies are being taxed to the tune of 78 per cent.
How bizarre that Hunting, a FTSE company which provides services to the oil and gas sector, has said that it is looking to invest in Nigeria rather than the North Sea because it finds the economic and regulatory environment there “more stable”.
Miliband is an economic vandal who has inflicted damage which Just Stop Oil protesters could only dream about.
Miliband needs to be dragged away from the levers of Britain’s energy policy before he can do any more damage.
Ross Clark
It is as if he were permanently perched on every gantry above every UK motorway, stopping the economy in its tracks.
Even the unions can see it.
Louise Gilmour of the GMB yesterday called the Government “delusional” and described the running down of our oil industry as “the most destructive industrial calamity in our nation’s history”.
However much we invest in green energy, we will still need oil and gas for decades to come — it is just that under Ed’s plans we would be importing it instead of producing it.
And it isn’t just the oil industry. We are also losing our primary steel industry and our chemical companies, as a result of Britain having the highest industrial energy prices of any country measured by the International Energy Agency.
Quango jobs
Our remaining manufacturing, too, is being driven abroad, much of it to China.
Meanwhile, Miliband is gaslighting us with promises of saving households £300 a year on bills, of generating “green jobs” and promoting national energy security.
How is he doing?
Since Labour came to power, the average household bill under Ofgem’s price cap has risen £190 from £1,568 to £1,758 a year.
We are relying on more than a tenth of our electricity from imports via sub-sea cables.
As for those “green jobs”, the best that Miliband can offer the people of Aberdeen is 1,000 jobs at his quango Great British Energy, which has been set up in the city — hardly compensation for what is being lost.
Miliband needs to be dragged away from the levers of Britain’s energy policy before he can do any more damage.
Unfortunately, it looks as if the Labour Party could be about to deliver him even more power.
