A sceptical old Tory inspects the Green party’s promises, visits a house with no boiler and comes home having lost one argument out of four
A Green Leaflet, a Heat Pump and the Day My Nephew Was Unbearably Right
A young man with a beard and a lanyard came to my door on Tuesday morning while I was doing the crossword. He was from the Green party. He wished to know whether he could count on my support. I told him he could count on my full attention for exactly four minutes, and that he should begin with the cost. He did not begin with the cost. They never do. He began with the planet, about which I am as concerned as the next person, and proceeded to the leaflet.
I should explain where I stand, as I always do. I write under a false name; I am a retired headmistress; I have voted Conservative since Mrs Thatcher’s first election. I am what the leaflet would call a sceptic. I want to be exact about that word, because it is abused. I do not doubt that the climate is changing or that we are the cause; I taught science for a decade before I taught anything else and I can read a graph. What I doubt is the people who have appointed themselves to fix it, their sums, and above all their tone.
The Leaflet
I marked it at the kitchen table, as is my habit. It was printed, it said, on recycled paper with vegetable ink, and I can confirm that the red pen went straight through it.
It proposed to insulate every home in the country. Good. Sensible. My own house was built in 1908 and leaks heat like a sieve; I am in favour. I wrote: how many homes, at what cost each, done by whom? There are, I believe, getting on for thirty million dwellings. I taught the daughters of builders. There are not enough builders. The leaflet did not mention builders.
It proposed to replace gas boilers with heat pumps. I shall come back to that.
It proposed to stop all new drilling, tax the oil companies until the pips squeaked and use the money for the insulation. I wrote: you intend to fund a permanent programme from the profits of an industry you are closing. Explain. The young man said it was a transition. I said that in my experience a transition is what one calls a gap when one has not measured it.
And it proposed a number of things that had nothing to do with the climate at all, concerning rents, wealth and the working week, from which I concluded what I have always suspected: that for a good many of them the green is the wrapping and the red is the sweet.
The Tone
But it was not the policies that put my back up. It was a sentence near the end which said that we simply have no choice. I underlined it twice.
I spent thirty-eight years in schools and I know that sentence. It is what a person says when they would like to be excused from arguing. There is always a choice. There is a choice between doing a thing quickly and expensively and doing it slowly and cheaply. Between asking the pensioner in the draughty house to pay and asking someone else. Those are political questions, and the proper way to settle them is to put the figures on the table and let the public decide. To say there is no choice is to say that the public should be quiet.
I told the young man that. I gave him seven minutes in the end. He was perfectly polite. He said he would take my comments back. I said I had heard that before, from inspectors.
My Nephew’s House
Now I must be honest, since a diary that is not honest is a waste of ink. On Saturday I went to lunch with my nephew, who is an engineer of forty and the only member of my family with any sense, and who last winter did the very thing the leaflet recommends. He had the gas boiler taken out of his 1930s semi and a heat pump put in.
I went prepared. I had read in my newspaper that these machines do not work in cold weather, that they cost a fortune, that they make a racket and that the houses are never warm. I wore two cardigans. I intended to be gracious about it.
The house was warm. I should like to be able to report otherwise. It was evenly, comfortably warm in every room, including the downstairs lavatory, which in my own house is a place of penance from November to March. I could not hear the machine. I went into the garden to listen for it, in my coat, and my nephew came out and pointed at a grey box by the fence, and I had to put my ear almost to it.
I asked about the cost. He got out a spreadsheet. He is that kind of boy; he was that kind of boy at seven. The installation had been expensive, even after the government grant, a good deal more than a new boiler. He had also had to fit larger radiators and put more insulation in the loft. The running cost was, he showed me, a little lower than gas had been, though he said that depends entirely on the price of electricity and would not be true for everyone.
I said: so it only works if you are an engineer with savings and a spreadsheet. He said: at the moment, more or less, yes. That is the real problem, Auntie. Not that they do not work. They work. It is that the people who most need a cheaper warm house are the ones who cannot find the money up front, and nobody has solved that.
The Score
I did the sums on the train home, as I had promised myself I would. Of the four things I had believed, one was plain wrong: the thing works, and works in the cold; they are everywhere in Norway, he tells me, which is not noted for its mild winters. One was half right: it is quiet, though I gather they are not all so. And two stand. It is dear to install, and a great many houses like mine would need a lot of work first.
So I was wrong on the engineering and right on the money, and so, I notice, was the leaflet, the other way about. It was right that the machine does what it says. It was silent on who pays. If the young man with the beard had come to my door with my nephew’s spreadsheet instead of a picture of a polar bear, I should have given him ten minutes and possibly a cup of tea. The official figures on grants and costs are on GOV.UK, and the spending watchdog at the Office for Budget Responsibility has published what the whole programme might cost the Treasury. Both are heavier going than the leaflet and a great deal more use.
What I Still Maintain
I remain a sceptic, and I remain cross. I do not think the Greens are serious about arithmetic. I think their answer to every question of cost is that somebody rich will pay, and that this is the oldest evasion on the left. I think we simply have no choice is an insult to a free people.
But I have had to move one item from the column headed nonsense to the column headed true but expensive, and I was brought up to own a correction. My newspaper misled me about the cold. I have written to tell it so. It has not replied.
For the Paper
My editor at The London Prat says the house rule, set out in what satirical commentary is, and what it is not, is that the facts under a joke must be sound or the joke is merely a mistake. I had a very good piece ready about a family huddled round a heat pump in their overcoats. I have had to throw it away. That is the cost of having a nephew.
The replacement: a canvasser, it reports, has informed a householder that there is no choice. The householder asked what the choice would cost. The canvasser said that was not the point. The householder said that in that case it was not an argument, and offered him a pencil. Elsewhere, a newspaper has confirmed that a device it declared useless is in use across Scandinavia, and regrets nothing.
It goes on the English satirical news page, where both sides may be annoyed by it. For readers who wish to check a claim about energy before repeating it at a dinner party, as I failed to, the paper’s checklist for telling satire from real news works equally well on newspapers one agrees with. More of my marking is over here.
