Labour's announcement on offshore wind is a fascinating case study in how the party isn't even pretending to care about fiscal discipline or prudent economics any more (1/?)
Last January, we totted up independent estimates of Labour's renationalisation plans and came up with a lowest-bound figure of £176 billion. cps.org.uk/research/the-c…
McDonnell went tonto. Said we should be ignored as a bunch of Thatcherites, refused to engage on any of the detail (no one from Labour has challenged a single figure). Insisted that it would cost taxpayer nothing, cos 'Parliament would set the price' & you'd have the assets
(Though as we pointed out, that line only worked if you were using the assets to repay borrowing - rather than simultaneously promising to cut bills, invest hugely more, raise salaries, reward unions and so on and on...)
BUT ANYWAY. It was clear at that point that Labour regarded the idea of £176 billion in extra borrowing - the equivalent of 10% on the national debt, or £6.5k per household - as electorally toxic. They needed to push back as hard as they could
Now, today, we have the party airily promising to invest £83 billion in wind power alone. This will, we are told, come from a mix of public and private sources - but no explanation of the balance theguardian.com/environment/20…
Or, indeed, of why private investors would be attracted to the brilliant opportunity to own 49% of a Corbyn-built and Corbyn-run wind farm
The report tells us that 20% of the profits would go to coastal communities, and 80% to decarbonising the economy. But is there any estimate of how much those profits would be, given construction and borrowing costs and the chunk for private investors? Not that I can see.
Remember: the amounts we're talking about here are very substantial indeed - £3k+ per household, or 5% on national debt, to use same rule of thumb.
BUT ANYWAY. The incredibly weird thing here is that offshore wind is absolutely the last sector where there is a case for massive government investment/ownership.
Thanks to subsidies and incentives already in existence, offshore wind has surged within a decade from basically zero to 20% of UK generating capacity en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_powe… 
In the process, Britain has become the unquestioned world leader in the field. We have a third of the global capacity - between us and Germany, it's three fifths (Wiki says two thirds, but that's 2016) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore_…
Corbyn says he wants to increase our offshore wind capacity 'fivefold'. Assuming constant energy use, that's literally all of it! So would we just shut down all the other power stations? (And what about intermittent capacity to cover the gaps?)
On top of all of this, there's the fact that - thanks to those earlier incentives, and free-market innovation responding to this new market - offshore wind has reached the point where it doesn't actually need any subsidy at all. The cost has fallen 30% in just two years!
In fact, at the most recent auction, the Govt set aside £65m to encourage new offshore wind - only to find it didn't need to spend the cash, because people were queuing up to build it anyway. The eventual bids were enough to cover 7 million more homes independent.co.uk/news/business/…
In other words, offshore wind is a brilliant example of how the free market (plus govt incentives) really can help save the planet.
But it also prompts the question of why Labour wants to spend Literally All the Money to fix (and of course own) something that emphatically isn't broken...
One clarification: energy use will of course not be constant due to electrification of transport grid. But it still isn’t clear why we should change an approach which is delivering soaring amounts of clean energy, at plunging cost, at a fraction of the price of Labour’s plan.
Update: have collated all this into a piece for @CapX capx.co/what-is-the-po…
