Keir Starmer resigned as Prime Minister today. I am not sure exactly why, and that in itself tells you something about the world we are living in.
The surface reasons are documented. Labour lost control of 35 councils and nearly 1,500 councillors in the 2026 local elections, with the BBC’s projected national vote share putting Labour at just 17%, in joint third with the Conservatives [1]. Reform swept local municipal elections across England in May, winning votes in working-class post-industrial areas that traditionally voted Labour, with some polls predicting Farage could be the next prime minister [2]. Then there is the Mandelson affair. In September 2025, the extent of Mandelson’s relationship with convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein became widespread as the Epstein files were released. Starmer dismissed Mandelson and said he regretted the appointment [1]. And there is the question of Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s Chief of Staff, who took responsibility for the Mandelson appointment and resigned in February 2026 [1], though whether this was genuine accountability or a convenient exit from an inconvenient situation remains, like so much else, unclear.
The May local elections could be viewed as the beginning of the end [2]. What finished it was a by-election in Makerfield on June 18th, won decisively by Andy Burnham, widely seen as the only Labour figure capable of taking on Reform on its own terrain. Starmer confirmed he would step aside after losing the confidence of much of his parliamentary party, saying: “The question my party is asking now is whether I am best placed to lead us into the next general election. I have heard the answer of my parliamentary party to that question, and I accept that answer with good grace.”
Some of all of this is probably true. Which parts, and in what proportion, I genuinely cannot tell you. Nobody can, with any confidence, right now.
What I can tell you is how it felt. Not sadness but more like a familiar heaviness. The recognition of another pattern playing out. A British Prime Minister, whatever his specific failures, falls on the suspicion of impropriety, on questions that remain unanswered, on a public and a party that ran out of patience before the results of difficult decisions could arrive. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, a man with confirmed, documented, grotesque impropriety on almost every imaginable dimension, racism, sexism, his own deeply troubling connections to Epstein, remains not just standing but worshipped. The asymmetry is not just unfair. It is the most revealing thing I can think of about this particular moment in history.
Complexity lost again today. A simpler story won. I don’t know if Starmer deserved to survive. I don’t know enough of the truth to say. And that not knowing is itself the condition we are all living in now, every day, on every story that matters.
I have been thinking about this a great deal lately. The propaganda works. The simple answer, the named enemy, the clean narrative of blame and rescue, travels further and lands harder than the truth, which is always more tangled and takes longer to explain. I found myself nodding along to a video my brother sent me last week about UK energy policy. I found it persuasive. And then I caught myself, because persuasive and true are not the same thing, and I have learned, slowly and with some difficulty, to be suspicious of content that tells me what I already believe.
My brother Findlay sent it almost as an afterthought. We had seen each other the weekend before, at my mother’s eighty third birthday, the first time in a while. He hauled me out of the sea at the mouth of a river once, when we were young, matter of fact about it, the way he is about most things that matter. We have drifted, the way people do, for reasons that are complicated and human and not easily summarised. But on a Tuesday in June he sent a link with a single line: worth viewing, piece about curtailment is little known.
He was right. I knew nothing about curtailment. Most people don’t. And that, it turns out, is not an accident.
The video was made by Will Hodson, who describes himself as having run a business that reduces people’s energy bills automatically [3]. He is not a disinterested party. He has a campaign, a proposed emergency energy bill, and a website asking for support. I mention this not to dismiss what he says but because on a day when I am writing about the difficulty of knowing what is true, it matters to say clearly: this is advocacy, not journalism. Some of what he says is verifiable. Some of it is contested. Some of it is framed in ways designed to persuade rather than inform. I want to separate those things as honestly as I can.
The claim that stopped me was this: Britain pays offshore wind operators to turn off their turbines. Not occasionally, not in exceptional circumstances, but routinely, at a cost that exceeded one billion pounds in 2025 alone, and which could reach eight billion pounds annually by 2030.
I had never heard of this. I checked it.
It is true.
The mechanism is called curtailment. When wind farms, particularly those off the coast of Scotland, generate more electricity than the grid can transmit south to where demand is highest, the National Energy System Operator instructs them to reduce their output. Under the contracts those operators hold, they are compensated for the revenue they would have earned. The result is that bill payers fund electricity that is generated, cannot be used, and is effectively discarded.
The Seagreen wind farm, Scotland’s largest offshore installation, had its output curtailed for seventy one percent of its operating time in 2024. It received sixty five million pounds in curtailment payments that year. Not for producing energy. For not producing it [4].
This is not, as Hodson frames it, primarily a scandal of green ideology or ministerial capture. The root cause is more mundane and in some ways more troubling: the grid cannot move the electricity from where the wind blows to where the people are. Scotland has some of the best wind resources in Europe. Most of Britain’s demand is in England. The transmission infrastructure connecting them has not kept pace with the expansion of generation capacity. Major upgrades are underway, but most will not be operational until 2029 at the earliest [5]. In the meantime, the turbines turn, the electricity goes nowhere, and the bill arrives anyway.
The honest version of this story is not that renewable energy is a conspiracy or that Ed Miliband has captured the energy department for ideological purposes. The honest version is that a genuine, necessary response to a real crisis was implemented with insufficient attention to the engineering reality of moving power around a country. The result is a system that is simultaneously too much and not enough, too much generation in the wrong places, not enough capacity to deliver it where it is needed.
I live eleven miles from those turbines.
The video made a claim I already believed: that refusing to grant new North Sea licences while importing gas from Norway makes no sense. I signed a petition on Change.org last month, Issue More Drilling Licences for the North Sea [6]. It has 2,478 signatures. It is not popular. But I signed it because it felt like common sense, and I wanted to check whether that instinct was right.
It is, but not in the way the video suggests.
Norway is reviving three mothballed North Sea gas fields as demand in Europe soars [7]. It supplied 76% of UK gas imports in 2024, up from 58% the year before [8]. We are buying gas extracted from the same geological basin we are choosing not to develop ourselves, transported through pipelines we do not own, at prices set by a global market we cannot control. The carbon footprint of that gas is lower than liquefied natural gas shipped from the United States or Qatar, but higher than gas we could extract ourselves. We are paying more, emitting more, and employing fewer people here, in order to maintain a policy position that does not actually reduce the amount of gas we consume.
That is worth saying clearly. Refusing a North Sea licence does not reduce demand. It redirects it. The gas still gets burned. The difference is where the money goes, and where the jobs are, and who controls the supply chain when a crisis arrives.
But the honest version of this argument is harder than the video acknowledges. The North Sea basin is maturing. In 2025, for the first time since 1960, not a single exploration well was drilled in UK waters [9]. Apache, one of the major operators, has announced it will cease UK production by the end of the decade. The tax regime, an effective rate of 78% under the Energy Profits Levy, has driven investment away more effectively than any green policy. Even in the most optimistic scenario, with every possible licence granted and every possible investment made, UK gas production would still decline significantly over the coming decades. There is no credible version of the future in which the North Sea solves the UK’s energy security problem indefinitely [10].
What there is, is a short to medium term argument that matters enormously to a city like Aberdeen. While the transition to renewables continues, while the grid upgrades that will allow curtailed wind to actually reach the people who need it are still years away, domestic gas is cleaner, cheaper, and more secure than the alternatives.
I live in Aberdeen. I can see what managed decline looks like from the inside. What troubles me most is not the sadness of it, though it is sad, but the waste. We have established infrastructure, a skilled workforce, and a short to medium term opportunity to use what we already have while the longer transition continues. The politics that is preventing that is not principled. It is populist in a different direction from Trump or Farage, greener in its symbolism, but equally unwilling to sit with the complexity of where we actually are rather than where we want to be.
The curtailment story is not, at its core, a story about bad policy. It is a story about what happens when the people responsible for a genuine and necessary transition decide that the full picture is too complicated, or too damaging, to share honestly.
Most people do not know that wind farms are paid to turn off. Not because it is technically obscure, it is not, but because nobody with a platform has found it convenient to explain it. The government finds it inconvenient because it undermines confidence in the green agenda. The energy companies find it inconvenient because it invites scrutiny of their contracts. The opposition finds it convenient only as a weapon rather than as a problem to solve. So the information sits in industry reports and academic papers and occasional investigative pieces, and the people paying for it through their bills remain largely unaware.
This is not a minor omission. It is exactly the kind of lie of omission that erodes trust and creates the conditions in which populism thrives. Reform does not win because people are stupid. It wins because people sense, correctly, that they are not being told the full truth, and the party that offers the simplest alternative explanation, however partial or wrong, feels more honest than the silence. Trump does not win because his supporters cannot see his flaws. He wins because the institutions that should be trustworthy have spent decades proving they are not, and the man who says everything out loud, however grotesque, feels at least like he is not hiding anything.
The green agenda is not wrong. Climate change is real, the transition away from fossil fuels is necessary, and the investment in renewable energy over the past two decades has produced genuine results. But a transition that is not explained honestly, that conceals its costs, that moves faster than the infrastructure can support and then refuses to acknowledge the consequences, is a transition that will eventually lose public consent. And a transition that loses public consent does not get replaced by something better. It gets replaced by something that promises to tear it up entirely.
The road map exists. The economics of energy transition are real and can be explained. Grid upgrades are underway. Curtailment costs will fall when the transmission cables connecting Scottish wind to English demand are completed. The timeline is known. The investment case is documented. The genuine path from where we are to where we need to be is not a mystery. What is missing is the political will to explain it honestly, to say: this is expensive, this is complicated, there are things we got wrong, and here is what we are doing about them.
That is not a difficult message. It is just an honest one. And honesty, it turns out, is the hardest thing to find in an energy policy debate, or in any debate that matters right now.
My brother sent me a link on a Tuesday. It told me something I didn’t know. I checked it. Some of it was true. Some of it was framed to persuade rather than inform. The distinction between those two things is not always obvious, and finding it takes time and effort that most people cannot spare.
That is the problem. And it is also, I think, why this site exists.
References
[1] 2026 Labour Party leadership crisis – Wikipedia
[2] Keir Starmer has resigned, paving way for a 7th UK prime minister in 10 years – NPR
[3] Britain’s Energy Crisis Explained – Will Hodson, Looking for Growth
[4] Major wind farm was paid £65m to cut power output by three quarters – The Telegraph via Yahoo News
[5] Why Is Britain Turning Off Its Own Wind Farms? – Modo Energy
[6] Issue More Drilling Licences for the North Sea – Change.org petition
[7] Norway reopens three North Sea gas fields – Yahoo News/Telegraph
[8] Where Does the UK Get Its Gas From in 2026? – Heatable
[9] North Sea Divergence: Norway revives oil fields as UK halts new exploration – Scottish Business News
[10] Could expanding North Sea gas production cut GB energy bills? – Regen