Imagine someone had said to King Charles: “Yes, you are going to end up top dog, but you won’t give your first address to parliament as king until a week before your 75th birthday. And, in it, you’ll have to walk the country through new annual oil and gas licences that represent a disregard for the future of the planet that you’ve spent your adult life worrying about.” Well, the poor guy would have been pretty dispirited. In fact, these energy plans look like a deliberate provocation – so much so that you have to wonder whether Rishi Sunak and the king have beef we don’t know about.
The oil and gas licences themselves are nonsense. Sunak knows that. None of the major industry players are rewriting their business strategies on the understanding that the Tories will be in power even this time next year, let alone on a rolling annual basis beyond that. The fields under offer are unlikely to produce enough oil and gas to meet our need for what Sunak calls “energy security”; Shell and BP have already sold some of their North Sea assets. In other words, this policy has no concrete practical application. It is pure vice-signalling.
