Any based global forecaster with a grasp of reality listening to the British Broadcasting Corporation on a day in August 2009 should have felt parts of their brain explode.

A series entitled Great Lives was broadcast on Radio 4. To commemorate the life of South African communist Joe Slovo, presenter Matthew Parris invited his daughter Shawn, also something of a communist, and the son of a Marxist, David Miliband, then British Foreign Secretary.

Speaking out of his bottom, David proceeded to describe the African National Congress’s attack on the Sasol Oil Refinery in 1980 as marvellous, and more than marvellous, justified. This was in response to a question as to whether terrorism is sometimes acceptable.

Now, if you were an aging, embittered Irish Republican Army (IRA) terrorist convinced the Good Friday Agreement was the mother of all sellouts, day-drinking with your aging IRA terrorist friends in a soon-to-be-condemned Belfast boozer, it would have been a case of: “Well, lads, you heard the man, gear up and once more into the breach” – or whatever that weirdo English playwright meant. If you were Hugo Chávez, you would summon your deputy Nicolás Maduro, then the two of you would summon the British Ambassador, Her Excellency Catherine Royle: “Leaving aside for a moment your bowl haircut, Ma’am,” the two of you would ask, “does this mean we can carry on doing what we are doing?” If you were Robert Mugabe fiddling with the aerial on the radio, you’d shriek, then you’d lament: where has the racist Englishman I loved so dearly gone?

The United Kingdom (UK) was still a reasonably serious international player at that point, so Miliband was attacked from all sides, including his own party. The UK’s Foreign Secretary had issued something of a hall pass to “freedom fighters”, including those fighting for “freedom” in Afghanistan, where UK armed forces were active. He was condemned by both the former leader of the Liberal Democrats, Sir Menzies Campbell, and the Conservative shadow defence secretary, William Hague.

But the most unnerving feature of the event wasn’t how reckless Miliband’s remarks were: it was the certainty that he’d never apologise. He felt – feels – that way, and children of Marxists don’t apologise for feels.

Sly

The Miliband brothers went on to challenge each other for the leadership of Labour the following year. David’s polished dimness was no match for his brother Edward, who’d also inherited his Marxist father’s slyness – but importantly, had learned to deploy its shapeshifting extensions.

The UK breathed a sigh of relief in 2015 when the Conservatives trounced Labour, dodging the bullet of Ed Miliband as the country’s premier. Unbeknown to them at the time was the role he’d come to play in a decade, which would be more consequential and far more expensive.

A reasonable assumption is that Ed got into the climate around 2008, a year before the Climategate scandal broke at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. The incident alleged scientists, among the names mentioned the disgraced Michael Mann, were cooking the books, but the establishment calculated that it was too long on anthropogenic global warming to lose face, so with the help of its media supporters the scandal was quietened, and folk like Ed could move onto a term originally conceived on a train in 2005 that was to mainstream in the mid-teens: net zero.

Submission

When Ed returned to the energy secretariat in 2024, he had the tremendous fortune of a decade of submission to the phrase, and the idea that an economy would be underwritten by a new energy mix that included a sun that didn’t shine, intermittent wind, and most importantly, platitudes. Between the years 2008 and 2024, politicians from both sides had tried to foment the dismantling of cheaper, more reliable energy (oil and gas) as something of national interest.

The appeal was extraordinary: far left Labour and Greens, along with milquetoast or current thing Lib Dems, noted its advantageous ideological extensions, while Conservatives, such as the former Home Office secretary Amber Rudd, saw generously remunerated non-exec positions in multinational green energy firms for life after politics. Boris Johnson, having once championed the benefits of natural gas exploitation via fracking, surrendered his once-sensible positions, joined them, and the march endured.

Credit Ed Miliband where it's due: he has been monumentally successful in his net-zero campaigning. Part of that success has been to convince the UK that the North Sea wells, once a major force in international oil and gas markets, let alone domestically, have reached levels of maturity that make extraction more complicated, thus more expensive. His Chancellor has played her part in peddling this myth, questioning the motives of the drillers, much to their frustration – even suggesting these people might be misogynists.

So, it would be a pointless exercise asking people like Ed and his brother David what they thought of policies legislated as “redress” that exclude groups on the basis of immutable characteristics. Even more pointless would be asking them to read the material consequences of those policies, such as William Gumede’s excellent analysis of the catastrophe of broad-based black economic empowerment (BBBEE) published recently on Politicsweb.

Changing ideas

Like BBBEE in South Africa, the idea that UK society must shoulder the net-zero burden – and its good – is losing, and no amount of official intransigence or progressive boomer cheerleading will change that. Perhaps this is because, like BBBEE, the profile of the net-zero beneficiary has emerged, and people don’t like what they see – be it the hippy multimillionaire charging around in gender-neutral clothing (Dale Vince) or the parasitic finance class (ESG). Or perhaps it's because of our current trajectory: in months, just the testing of artificial intelligence in corporate environments could witness tens of thousands of jobs being cut in already stressed markets. At the point of knocking on doors, people generally return to the basics, and net zero for the UK, like BBEEE for SA, is evidently a luxury handbrake.

Bad ideas are depressingly unavoidable. Lockdowns. Central bank currencies. Quantitative easing or digital IDs. But in the event they are ever documented responsibly, net zero and BBEEE will warrant special chapters.

What should not be forgotten is that while the perception of both ideas concluded, for decades, that they serve humanity’s best interests, the instincts of those championing them were not honed on the same objectives. We bear the brunt of angry individuals obsessed by classification, drafting rules out of spite or revenge that rarely prohibit them – they are the Kim Il-Sung University of Pyongyang, a fortress of madness and privilege protected from the deprivation and despair – us – that surrounds it.