Foreword
Energy policy is a good test of governments. Except they mainly fail it. These are big decisions on how to issue public licences and how to allocate what often is public money, in pursuit of cheap, reliable energy that also meets environmental goals. They do not come with great ideological baggage, in the sense of party political attachments one way or the other. Yet this Conservative government, and the coalition and Labour governments before it, have made a mess of things. The mistaken proposal to build Hinkley Point C, as Simon Taylor writes on p26 and as I comment on p30, is the culmination of years of mistaken impulses and unresolved contradictions in policy.
At least Iain Duncan Smith aimed for consistency in welfare; his target was the unifi ed system of Universal Credit, which as Philip Collins writes (p32) is admired by many—in theory. Duncan Smith chose to resign just as his ideas were about to come to fruition, or fail to do so. That is a pity; Philip is, I think, uncharitable in pronouncing that IDS had nothing to say; he did, in a role he embraced with passion, identify both the problems and a possible solution. He has though undeniably not yet delivered that.