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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast.

I'm Oscar Edminson, and I'm joined today by James Hill and Michael Simmons.

And James, you've written a fascinating column in the magazine this week about how energy is going to become one of the key political battlegrounds going into the next election. Can you tell us about it?

Yeah, absolutely. So for about 25 years or so, there was a fairly consistent cross-party consensus on energy in Westminster.

Then we had, of course, the net Zero declaration by Theresa May in 2019. COVID

then hit. Coming out of that, Boris Johnson was very much enamoured with the idea of Net Zero

2050, the UK hosted COP 26. He talked about making Britain the Saudi Arabia of wind.

And now, since the election, and even before the election, when Claire Coutinia

was the energy sector in Rish Sunak, there was an adjustment away from some of those targets

of what people call are watering down. And now the Conservatives very much are focusing, I think

quite rightly, on cost of living as an issue. It's at the forefront of every Labour MP's mind in

Westminster. It's something hoping to score some hits on. So while, for instance, Kirstama's gone to Brazil this week for COP 30, and to go out there and say that, you know, this is going to be really important for the future of green jobs. Clavene-Beynock is headed to Scotland to stand there with oil and gas workers. Clacketino, as now the shadow industry is launching a Cut My Bills campaign this week. She's pledging to take the cost of bills down by 20% by getting rid of subsidies and ensuring that they're going to try and make this an issue where given this, as I argue in the piece, so little in the way of clear blue water on the economy, with even Mell Strife for instance, appearing to suggest that he would raise taxes if he would Rachel Reeves. It therefore suggests it's how do you get this cost of living down? It was all the big debate in Westminster. With food prices and energy prices so high, what do you do? And so Claire Cotiniu's answer is that, look, the world has changed over the last five years. Government borrowing costs are much higher. It therefore means it's much harder to finance some of the schemes that were first forecast in 2020, 2021, to kind of enable this energy transition.

She thinks that it's the right time to say, look, we shouldn't be the one sort of slagulating our stuff while other countries around the world are committing more to emissions.

The Labour argument is very much the opposite that. Ed Miliband is very keen to make this a focal point of his campaign,

arguing that there's actually a early adapter prize in all this, making the UK home of these

industries. And so really it then becomes down to, I mean, which claims are you going to believe?

And it's quite interesting watching it in the House of Commons. There is a fairly

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