⏳ Who killed Britain's factories?

You hear it constantly: another British factory going dark, and chalked up to net zero “madness”. Port Talbot's furnaces. Grangemouth's refinery.

The story tells itself: mad green targets, impossible energy bills, lights out.

A nice tale… but the self-appointed police are naming the wrong killer.

So what emptied our factories?

British manufacturing slid from 30% of the economy in 1970 to 10% 2008 - the year Parliament passed the Climate Change Act.

Two-thirds down before “the green crap”.

You can't pin the body on the man who came on stage in Act 3.

• North Sea oil meant a strong pound pricing our exports out in the 1980s.

• The City swallowed all engineering talent.

• China joined the WTO in 2001 with costs way below ours.

So why does the story feel true? Well, the energy bill isn’t entirely innocent. Britain pays the highest electricity prices in the developed world - half as much again as France or Germany. Tata blamed power prices when Port Talbot's furnaces went cold; Grangemouth couldn't make the sums work either.

There's a real wound under the wrong diagnosis.

It’s not the windmills - it's policy. Policy that we could rewrite tomorrow.

• In Britain, the last power station switched on sets the price we all pay - and that last plant is almost always gas. When cheap wind and solar are doing most of the work, the bill is written by the one dear gas turbine at the back. The most expensive fuel sets the price for the country. All the time.

• The second is what we pile on top of the power cost. For twenty years we've heaped environmental and social levies onto electricity rather than gas. We have, with a straight face, made the clean option the dearer one - and then wondered why nobody rushes to electrify.

Both are choices. Tearing up net zero touches neither - just locks dependence on imported gas. That comes through Hormuz (or not).

The fix is already written

The Climate Change Committee's advice to Government: Make electricity cheap again.

• Take the policy costs off the electricity bill, pull Britain's 4-to-1 electricity-to-gas price gap down toward France's 2-to-1.

• Move industry to electricity

• Electrification stops being a cost British industry carries and becomes the advantage it runs on.

Net zero didn't burn the factory down - it turned up with a hose, and we're arguing about whether to take it away.