Net Campaigning for Brexit made me something of a monomaniac, and a party full of monomaniacs like UKIP was often accused of being a single issue party. But that was always a misreading because the EU was every issue. It was a question of trade, energy, immigration and democracy itself – from the technical to the philosophical. Energy is is much the same which is why I am in danger of becoming a monomaniac yet again. Secure, affordable energy is the most important issue and the lack of it endangers everything. It threatens the very stability of the nation.

Thus, I make no apology whatsoever for banging on about Net Zero and disastrous green energy polices. As such, this is a continuation of Brexit politics, because breaking away from EU energy stupidity was one of the many compelling reasons to vote leave. We are now seeing the culmination of two decades of climate virtue signalling which has left Europe massively vulnerable to energy shocks.

I’ve written plenty in recent weeks on why renewable energy is a terrible idea and I will not rehash those arguments here. Instead we need to ask why our politicians believe it presents an answer to our energy woes, contrary to any grown up assessment of the facts.

For starters, mainstream politicians are sheep. They are led by focus groups and polls rather than principle. And sadly, wind energy does, superficially, enjoy public support in the polls. This is because wind turbines have been sold to the public as cheap, clean energy on the completely, demonstrably wrong assertion that the wind is always blowing somewhere. This propaganda is pumped into our homes from an early age. It starts with BBC children’s television, and wind turbines are often used as a visual backdrop for any discussion about climate change. The idea has been successfully lodged that we need to move away from fossil fuels.

This has created a generation of policy wonks who all believe in roughly the same ideas, believing that climate change presents a greater danger to our health, wealth and prosperity, and believe we need to phase out fossil fuels as quickly as possible – by any means necessary – and being from middle class comfortable backgrounds, they are usually insulated from the consequences of the policies they advocate.

These wonks tend to be of the spreadsheet sociopath persuasion, where the arms of government exist not to serve the public, but to shape public behaviour and public opinion. In essence, public opinion is an output, not an input. The other thing is that these people are actually quite stupid. They rise seamlessly through the ranks of political nonjobs in policy and think tankery, with no real idea of how policy plays out in practice, and young enough not to know anything about what came before. They have zero background in engineering or even the private sector, and the seniors tend to be English Lit graduates.

There is then the groupthink dimension. If you are at all sceptical about climate science, or hold any views counter to the prevailing orthodoxy, you don’t even get your foot in the door, let alone climb the ladder. It comes as no surprise to see that Net Zero policy wonks have gender pronouns in their twitter bios. These witless creatures occupy positions in all manner of lobby groups and global NGOs funded by “philanthropic organisations”. It is a domain where independent thought goes to die. It also comes as no surprise that were all remainers to the last man and woman and get most of their personal politics from The Guardian.

These gifted young things spend their days producing glossy propaganda brochures for NGOs and think tanks, which are dutifully picked up by BBC News and Radio and given a full uncontested airing. They then become our “expert class” who have led the nation into so many dead ends. This drivel usually works its way into the newspapers, and it is still the case that MPs get most of their information from the legacy media, which is also run by clueless middle class children.

Worse still, MPs do very little reading of their own. They have their advisers but in the main go along with the groupthink which is transmitted orally. We saw this during Brexit as a succession of Labour MPs demanded we stay in the customs union, failing to understand that the majority of border formalities for trade pertain to single market regulation. Once they get the wrong end of the stick it is impossible for them to unlearn their misconceptions – not least because breaking ranks is career suicide. It doesn’t help either that dissenting voices are increasingly censored on social media.

It’s not called the Westminster bubble for nothing. This is why our system of representative democracy is so bad. You have to be a certain type of snake to become an MP. For starters, to have any chance of winning a seat you have to join a mainstream party and conform to its absurdities, which always results in people who will subordinate their own thinking in order to climb the greasy pole. You then have over six hundred self-serving virtue signalling narcissists all in the same room, living and working side by side, with very little integration with the real world, and we foolishly give them the power to make decisions for us.

Over time the respective groupthinks of the media and politicians begin to merge, which is why there is such a massive culture gulf between our metropolitan elites and the broader public who just want reliable and affordable electricity so they can go about their business. That is why every issue is now a culture war issue. It’s not John Smith of Grimsby who thinks there are thirty seven genders. It isn’t Susan Brown of Doncaster who wants to feed puberty blockers to kids. It’s London QCs, politicians and Oxbridge academics. Once a terrible idea has wormed its way into the establishment, it’s next to impossible to dislodge it before it does untold damage. Westminster is the last hiding place for horrible ideas.

When it comes to energy policy, it’s leaden with technical jargon and it is generally assumed that anyone with a command of the jargon knows what they’re talking about. MPs are easily dazzled with bullshit. Very few of them are capable of independent thinking, and even if they were, they wouldn’t. The higher up they go the less they know and the more likely they are to accept whatever they are told by their advisers. That was partly what caused Theresa May’s downfall. Her Brexit gurus had a feeble grasp of the issues.

Superficially you can see why they get carried away with big ideas like Net Zero. Who, in principle, doesn’t want a modern, clean and efficient grid? They get carried away by talk of new and unproven technologies, and the lack of urgency in the past has allowed them to focus on the high fantasy rather than immediate needs. Any technical problems, we are told, will be overcome by some or other market innovation or gizmo. They don’t ask when it will come into being or how much it will cost. Why would you when you can charge your heating bill to expenses?

We are also very much the victim of fad politics where the issue of the moment dictates all other policy. The rush to divest from Russia sees us charging headlong into a mineral intensive energy system. Being that they don’t think about (or have any notion of) unintended consequences, it hasn’t occurred to them. Thus we switch from Russia for fossil fuels to Communist china for metals, microchips and minerals, just as global competition for them is driving up prices.

As we are about to discover, though, everything around us is built on readily available and affordable energy. Once you interfere with that, everything starts falling apart. And they most certainly have interfered. They’re the ones who cancelled new gas storage facilities. They’re the ones who blew up our coal plants without like for like capacity replacement. They’re the ones who forced us to rely on gas to provide energy when the wind doesn’t blow. They’re the ones who piled on massive carbon taxes on our energy. They’re the ones who inflicted massive damage in order to gain affirmation from their peers.

It is this same cretinous herd like behaviour that railroaded us deeper into the EU without a referendum. It is these same people who flung open the borders without consultation or consent, believing there would be no consequences. The lose sight of what they were elected to do, believing their role to be one of imposing their superior values on the rest of us. The core problem in British politics is arrogance untempered by democracy. In those stakes they despise democracy. It’s why they sneered at the Brexit referendum and refuse to put Net Zero to the vote. They don’t like plebs having a say and they most certainly don’t want a debate about any of it.

The same democratic deficit that existed in the EU continues to plague our politics. We have brought decision making closer to home, but it might as well be on mars for all that our feral ruling class is interested in things like public consent. There was headroom for us to grumble along with the status quo while our politics was still capable of managing the basics, but as energy bills skyrocket and continuous electricity supply is looking precarious, we can no longer afford to cut them any slack. The primary threat to our health, wealth and prosperity are the imbeciles we continue to elect. If this latest episode hasn’t persuaded you to vote differently, you deserve what you get. Meanwhile, if we’re facing winters without heating, it seems like we need a bit of global warming.