And it’s not the greener firms that will save us.

To be an economist one cannot also be a diplomat, in as much as to be truly economically objective, one risks making statements which will very often prove objectionable and open oneself up to confrontation. The following statement falls squarely into the category of, ‘You will not want to hear this but is it perfectly true all the same’, so here goes.

The upwards cost of energy shock we have experienced is almost entirely of our own making and we must now quickly find the energy to fix things. Had we approached things differently in advance of what has hit Ukraine, we would not have faced the scale of the energy cost shock we have. As to the nature of our self-inflicted suffering, this falls under two quite different headings:

Our pretence that the market in which we buy our energy is as competitively supplied as the one in which we buy our groceries.

The delusion that we could afford to reject investing in more varied domestic forms of energy supply than ‘pure renewables’, and somehow avoid our bills rising and avoid moreover being hostage to global energy price shocks.

So to be clear, there was an ‘energy crisis’ coming to the UK even had the invasion of Ukraine not happened. What the invasion of Ukraine has merely done is bring forward what was going to befall us. Let me explore our twin delusions in slightly more detail, starting with the second.

For years now we have been restricting how we make and store energy. True, we have been doing so in efforts to protect our environment. No less true is we have given little or no attention to how restricting home-grown forms of energy supply has made us extremely vulnerable to what would hit us when something like the invasion of Ukraine strikes, viz the cost of oil and gas shooting up. And to be clear, such events are far from uncommon.