Theresa May is turning out to be a Red Tory who takes her economic policies from Ed Miliband. When Labour pledged a cap on energy prices at the 2015 general election, this policy was rightly rubbished by the Tories – because such manipulations of the market always end up in higher prices in the long run. Anyone but a blockhead, or a Red Tory, would be able to see this at once.  Competition among the energy producers would diminish. For the energy firms would get together and agree to charge similar prices – to create a “cost cluster” just below the level of the cap.

The best way to reduce the cost of power for householders and for industry is to resource energy supplies from  cheaper and more readily available fuels.

But the Conservative government refuses to do this – having made the absurd promise to reduce Britain’s carbon footprint to zero by 2050. Incidentally, we are the only country to make this pledge.

Our present energy policy is an act of criminal insanity.

What economic sense is there in offering massive subsidies – at the taxpayers’ expense – to wind and solar power, especially when these sources are unreliable? The Red Toryism of Mrs May is hardly achieved by giving huge handouts to rich landowners to erect thousands of inefficient windmills.

Odd that fanatical environmentalists should so conspire to ruin the landscape.

A few years ago, new advances in technology enabled our mines to produce increasing supplies of “clean” and cheap coal. Now we have closed down the coal mines and the huge power station at Drax is importing, at colossal cost, massive amounts of biomass from the other side of the Atlantic – incidentally destroying whole areas of woodland

Such an absurd policy amounts to both economic profligacy and environmental vandalism at the same time.

In the USA there has been achieved, through the spectacularly successful fracking industry, a revolution in energy production and supply which in little more than a decade has changed America from being an oil-importing nation – dependent on the greed and chicanery of the Gulf States – to become a net exporter of energy. This bloodless revolution has resulted not only in gigantic economic benefits but in shifting the strategic geo-political balance to favour the western nations.  For the first time we are freed from Saudi Arabia’s economic blackmail.

To favour western nations? Well, at least to favour those western  countries which go in for fracking: Poland and Hungary come to mind.

Mrs May says she is the champion of those “just about managing.”  Given sensible energy policies the country would enjoy economic boom years and a considerable reduction in the cost of living – especially for those described by the new Red Tories as “vulnerable.”

With fuel prices constantly on the rise – the only possible result of our insane energy policies – those currently just about managing will be able to manage no longer.

Meanwhile, Britain is sitting on vast resources of shale gas and yet production has barely begun.

By these follies and by gross neglect, Mrs May’s government is imposing the sort of hardship on our people that would have been the envy of the German U-boat commanders.