After centuries of economists insisting that money does not grow on trees, the Prime Minister has apparently located one. His solution to Britain’s energy crisis? A new public body to invest in electricity infrastructure—which is to say, a committee that will spend money we do not have on power lines we cannot afford, then call it innovation.
The pitch is straightforward: create a state-owned entity, hand it some capital, and watch energy costs plummet like a Tesla in a power cut. Never mind that every public body created to solve a problem in the last two decades has either ballooned in cost, moved the problem sideways, or both. This one will be different because… reasons.
Here is what actually happens: the government creates the body, appoints well-meaning people to run it, they hire consultants to figure out what they should do, the consultants recommend spending more money, and in five years we have a new layer of bureaucracy that costs £200 million annually to maintain a database of which power stations exist.
The real absurdity is the assumption that the problem is insufficient government involvement. Britain’s energy costs are high because of global gas prices, aging infrastructure, and underinvestment—none of which a new quango magically solves. What it does do is give a conference speech a nice headline and defer the actual hard choices (like raising bills or building nuclear plants) until after the next election.
So yes, we found the magic money tree. It grows IOUs.