When Ed Miliband took the podium at the Good Growth Foundation’s National Growth Debate in Westminster last week, he did not disappoint his audience of the converted. Flanked by the economist he has long revered, Miliband delivered a speech that could serve as a textbook case of what I have elsewhere called the “economic illiteracy of UK energy policy”.
Yet to dismiss it as mere stupidity would be a mistake. There is a method to Miliband’s madness—one honed over years in the cloistered halls of “woke” Oxford and the Fabian-inspired London School of Economics and now supercharged by the “mission”-obsessed theories of Professor Mariana Mazzucato of University College London.
In that speech—republished by the New Statesman—Miliband declared that “the era of fossil fuel security is over, and the era of clean energy security must come of age.” He credited “the godmother of missions, Marianna Mazzucato, who’s with us,” for the intellectual scaffolding of Labour’s clean energy push.
The mission, he said, established in opposition and now in government, has “two parts—driving to a clean electricity system but also electrifying as much as we can, as we decarbonise the wider economy.” Informed by the “lessons” of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the latest crisis over the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Miliband insists Britain must “double down” on net zero, tax North Sea oil and gas investments punitively, and “electrify everything” while rejecting any new exploration and development of domestic hydrocarbons.
Pernicious Political Elite
This is not ignorance born of inexperience. Miliband has been a central figure in Britain’s—and the world’s—climate movement for nearly two decades. As Climate Change Secretary under Gordon Brown, he helped shepherd the 2008 Climate Change Act, the legislative foundation for the UK’s self-proclaimed folly of “international climate leadership”. He has since served as Shadow Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change and, since July 2024, as the government’s Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary.
His fingerprints are on every major escalation: the legally binding net zero target by 2050, the push for “clean, homegrown” renewables, and the deliberate throttling of North Sea production through windfall taxes and regulatory hurdles. Far from a novice, Miliband is a seasoned operator who has consistently placed climate ideology above economic realism. The roots of this approach lie in his education. Miliband read Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, before earning an MSc in Economics at the LSE.
PPE, that notorious Oxbridge conveyor belt of generalist debaters and policy wonks, has long been criticised for producing slick operators fluent in debating abstractions and civil service procedures but often shallow on real world trade-offs and incentives. The degree is seen as a “sure ticket to the top,” having regularly produced numerous UK Prime Ministers (including Cameron, Truss, and Sunak), cabinet ministers and top civil servants.
Add the Fabian socialist ethos of the LSE—long a cradle of central planning and state-directed “progress”—and you have the perfect incubator for learned economic illiteracy. This is not a failure to learn economics; it is the active absorption of a peculiar strain of it, one in which “saving the planet” by a self-appointed expert class from the apocalypse of “global boiling” trumps every mundane consideration of reliability or opportunity cost.
Enter Mariana Mazzucato, the UCL professor whose 2021 book Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism has become the bible for Starmer’s five-mission Labour platform. Miliband’s praise of her as the “godmother of missions” was no throwaway line. Mazzucato’s framework—bold state “missions” to shape markets, “directionality,” “intersectoral collaboration,” and “public value”—has been adopted wholesale. Starmer’s missions on net zero, health, education, and the rest echo her call for government to move from “fixing market failures” to actively creating markets through “moonshot” ambition.
Critics of Prof. Mazzucato, including economists like Alberto Mingardi in City Journal and Michael D. Thomas in The Independent Review, refer to her work as an example of the “nirvana fallacy”: comparing imperfect real-world markets to an idealised, omniscient state free of rent-seeking, bureaucratic capture, or coordination failures. Her evidence is selective—she overstates the state’s role in innovations like the mobile phone while downplaying government waste, political short-termism, and the knowledge problem that Friedrich Hayek warned against in his critique of central planning’s “fatal conceit.”
Mazzucato’s jargon—“missions,” “moonshots,” “collective intelligence”—is not neutral rhetoric. It is the linguistic scaffolding of a worldview in which experts in white papers and government institutes know better than price signals, consumer choice, or entrepreneurial discovery. Miliband and Starmer quote her not as an economist offering testable hypotheses but as an influencer whose narrative fits the climate zeitgeist.
Since 2023, Prof. Mazzucato has served as a key technical adviser to Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley and co-authored with the prime minister two major reports on inclusive and sustainable development for Barbados. A central plank of the government is the Bridgetown Initiative which Mottley launched and invited Mazzucato to join as a founding member in 2022. The Initiative calls on the UN to give climate-vulnerable small island developing states (SIDS) which allegedly face existential threats from sea-level rise expanded access to loss-and-damage funding and climate finance mechanisms.
The Climate Imperative Above All
Economics is the science of ranking alternatives under scarcity, aka “opportunity costs” and trade-offs among various public policy choices by government. When climate change is elevated to existential imperative, trade-offs disappear by fiat. There is only one opportunity (“decarbonize”) and only one cost (“decarbonization”) that matters. The only permissible policies are those that accelerate decarbonisation, no matter the cost to bills, jobs, or growth. Nowhere is this clearer than in UK energy policy. Miliband insists that renewables are “homegrown” and “clean,” and “cheaper” to boot, insulating Britain from volatile global fossil fuel prices.
Yet none of these claims survive scrutiny. Solar and wind components are overwhelmingly manufactured in China, whose coal-fired power underpins the entire global supply chain from mining rare earths to refining polysilicon. The “clean energy superpower” vision depends on Beijing’s dirty energy. The UK has various “on shoring” initiatives to bring about a “manufacturing renaissance” in clean energy. Most are far-fetched to say the least (remember Boris Johnson’s boast about making the UK the “Saudi Arabia of wind energy”?) There are no UK-owned major OEM (original equipment manufacturers). Turbines are still designed and largely supplied by foreign companies (Vestas, Siemens Gamesa, GE Vernova). A “British wind turbine” from scratch would require enormous R&D, capital, and scale that doesn’t currently exist.
In any full-cycle analysis of renewable energy manufacturing, the mining and refining of minerals and rare earths required to produce components in solar, wind and battery technologies is anything but clean. And the myth of “cheap” renewables has been debunked countless times though interminable debates on system costs and intermittency keep being repeated across the energy policy literature. But the real test for all countries embarked on the Net Zero campaign remains as to how long can government subsidies for renewables on the one hand and high taxes on fossil fuels on the other, last before voters revolt over high energy bills and before the bond vigilantes come calling as the country tests its creditworthiness in international credit markets.
Meanwhile, punitive taxes on North Sea investments have accelerated decline in a sector that still provides Britain energy security and tax revenues. IEA’s Executive Director Fatih Birol — who had sounded contrite previously regarding his anti-fossil fuel posture in public meetings with US Energy Secretary Chris Wright — once again echoes Miliband. Since no new oil and gas investments are needed because demand will fall and investments will be stranded, Mr. Birol advises that the UK should forgo much of its potential North Sea expansion “despite the pressure”.
In the energy crises brought on by the Russian invasion of the Ukraine in 2022 and now in the face of the Hormuz crisis, Fatih opined in an “exclusive with the Guardian” interview:
“There will be a significant boost to renewables and nuclear power and a further shift towards a more electrified future…And this will cut into the main markets for oil…The vase is broken, the damage is done – it will be very difficult to put the pieces back together. This will have permanent consequences for the global energy markets for years to come.”
What Net Zero Has Wrought for Britain
Britain’s cumulative GDP growth since 2008 lags the US and even much of the EU, as Jon Moynihan meticulously documents in his two-volume Return to Growth: How to Fix the Economy. While the US boomed on the shale revolution and market-led innovation, the UK has presided over deindustrialisation, energy poverty, and policy-induced stagnation.
Massive government R&D spending on green innovation — as per Prof. Mazzucato’s call for “moonshot missions”—falls short when subjected to economic scrutiny. Miliband’s £22 billion bet on carbon capture and storage (CCS)—an unproven, outrageously expensive technology—exemplifies the conceit. It is the very industrial policy Mazzucato champions: government “picking winners” while socialising risks and privatising rewards for cronies.
Private firms like Google and SpaceX often lead where government lags. Government R&D subsidies invite cronyism—firms find it easier to lobby for handouts rather than compete in a competitive marketplace. Bureaucratic committees cannot replicate the dispersed knowledge of markets with skin in the game. Nuclear fusion, for instance, always remains “50 years away,” and history is littered with white elephants from state-directed innovation. Miliband’s approach reflects this planner’s hubris writ large.
Lenin’s Useful Idiots
The deeper problem is emotional, not intellectual. As one perceptive X post claims, Ed Miliband suffers from a “saviour complex”. Advisers who understand economics are sidelined because the mission is messianic: Britain must lead the world in “climate leadership,” consequences be damned. This learned illiteracy is shared across the Anglosphere’s progressive governments—from Ottawa to Canberra to Brussels. They double down on net zero dogma even as energy prices soar, industries flee, and voters revolt at the ballot box.
Mazzucato’s ideas provide the perfect intellectual cover. Her missions promise purposeful capitalism without the messy realities of perverse incentives, bureaucratic failure or unintended policy consequences. They elevate “public purpose” above profit and loss, allowing politicians to pose as visionaries while entrenching bureaucratic power and corporate welfare. In this, they serve a larger agenda: using climate as the Trojan horse for expanded state control over the economy.
Lenin famously found “useful idiots” among Western intellectuals sympathetic to the Bolshevik cause—naïve fellow travellers who lent credibility to revolutionary violence. The Greens, it seems, have found their own cadre in the Mazzucato mould: well-credentialed, jargon-fluent economists whose learned illiteracy provides intellectual respectability to policies that immiserate the working class, hobble growth, and enrich cronies.
Call them Mazzucato’s idiots. They are indispensable to the Net Zero agenda precisely because they cloak ideological zeal in the language of economic sophistication. Britain deserves better. Until policymakers rediscover the humility of classical political economy—acknowledging trade-offs, the limits of state knowledge and state action, and the superior information-processing power of competitive markets—the method to Miliband’s madness will continue to deliver higher bills, lower growth, and energy insecurity dressed up as climate virtue and moral triumph.
The mission, it turns out, is not to save the planet. It is to remake capitalism in the image of the administrative state. And the bill, as always, will be paid by ordinary Britons.
A version of this article was first published in the Daily Sceptic https://dailysceptic.org/2026/04/29/milibands-favourite-economist-doesnt-understand-how-markets-work/
Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO2 Coalition and a former contributor (cancelled) to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.
