Ed Miliband's green dawn has proved itself to be a long, unforgiving night

As the cold months approach, millions of British households are bracing themselves for yet another painful blow to their finances. Despite a bile bucket of promises and political posturing, Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, has failed spectacularly in his primary duty: to protect families from soaring energy costs and deliver the affordable, green future he so loudly proclaims from every tree top.

Instead of the promised green dawn, October 2025 heralds a brutal 2% hike in energy bills, a rise of about £35 per household, pushing the average bill up to £1,755 annually. This increase shatters hopes for relief and compounds the ongoing energy cost crisis that has gripped Britain since the dark days of the post-pandemic energy spike.

The facts paint a grim picture. The Ofgem-regulated price cap for a typical dual-fuel household paying by direct debit will rise to £1,755 from October 1, up from £1,720 in the previous quarter, marking a 2% increase compared to July-September 2025 levels.

The unit rates reflect this breakneck climb: electricity users will pay 26.35 pence per kilowatt hour (kWh)—up from 25.73p—while gas rates hover around 6.29p/kWh, down marginally from 6.33p.

Daily standing charges, those fixed fees simply for staying connected to the grid, have also risen sharply: electricity now costs 53.68p per day, gas 34.03p per day.

This escalation comes despite wholesale energy prices having eased from record highs seen in 2022 and early 2023. To put it in terrifying perspective, the energy price cap soared to an astonishing £4,279 at its peak after the war in Ukraine sent global markets into frenzy.

Although the cap has come down nearly 26.3% from that peak, it remains hundreds of pounds higher than pre-crisis levels. And crucially, even this reduced cap is a crushing burden for millions of families—many of whom are still buried under debts racked up during the worst months of the crisis, a legacy that Miliband and his predecessors have failed to address.

The industrial sector endures even starker consequences. Britain’s manufacturers and chemical producers pay the most exorbitant rates in Europe while our neighbour France enjoys some of the lowest.

This price gap has real economic consequences: major firms like Aramco Chemicals have scrapped multi-million-pound investments in places like Teesside, citing UK energy prices as simply “commercially untenable”.

These closures and cutbacks threaten the livelihoods of thousands in industrial heartlands, deepening regional inequalities that Miliband has repeatedly vowed to tackle but has glaringly failed to.

What makes this all the more galling is that Miliband’s strategy to combat fossil fuel volatility has been riddled with missteps and wasted billions.

And instead of embracing proven renewables and market reforms, the government’s purse strings have flowed heavily into expensive and uncertain technologies such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) and “blue hydrogen.”

These projects have drained tens of billions of pounds in taxpayer subsidies with little to show except delays, cost overruns, and shrinking political appetite even within the government itself.

The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis has warned the UK faces a “bottomless pit” of ever-increasing subsidies with dubious benefits.

Miliband’s green evangelising has propelled Britain into an energy policy morass, characterised by internal government conflicts, infrastructural bottlenecks, and strategic confusion. His war with Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is no secret.

Starmer’s enthusiasm for large-scale tech infrastructure projects, like Europe’s biggest data centre in Teesside, clashes head-on with Miliband’s environmental concerns over their immense power and water consumption.

The infrastructure needed to meet Miliband’s mad 2030 net zero target remains vastly unavailable. This is no small oversight.

Miliband’s response to his critics is to tack on more levies and surcharges to energy bills. Consumers now face charges to finance the controversial Sizewell C nuclear plant under a Regulated Asset Base (RAB) model, which guarantees investors steady returns regardless of project success—effectively privatising profits while socialising risks, and embedding higher costs into bills for decades.

Ed Miliband is presiding over an energy crisis that is slowly strangling Britain to death – and it’s not a pretty sight. Instead of charting a clear and achievable path to affordable, reliable, and clean energy, he clings to outdated models, expensive subsidies, and a rigid ideological framework that ignores economic and physical realities.

The latest £35 price hike in October might seem modest in isolation, but it symbolises the continuing failure—an utter and outright betrayal, really—that punishes ordinary Britons while energy companies and consultants cash in on government largesse.

With industrial investment evaporating, household budgets squeezed beyond breaking, and infrastructure developments mired in bureaucracy and conflict, Miliband’s green dawn looks more like a long, unforgiving night.

If this is his legacy, it is one of promises broken and opportunities squandered resulting in a profoundly dim future for Britain and its people.