KEIR STARMER’S Great British Energy announcement, a proposed energy firm that will be a “partnership” between the government and private business, is part of a slight leftwards lean.  

Partly this is because now the “moderates” fully control the party they don’t just see abandoning public ownership as part of their primary mission — which was unseating the left.  

In charge, they can let their hair down and promise voters something. But in part it is also because the left kept pushing on the idea of publicly owned energy to address the crisis. The left kept the idea alive and as the right has few ideas, its has adopted this one.  

So, will Great British Energy be the big, green public-sector flagship that shows that Labour can be a progressive party of the future? It is all a matter of size.  

With nationalisation, you know how big your new publicly owned utility will be — it will be as big as the private firm you nationalise.

But Great British Energy will be a new firm. This green electricity generator won’t sell energy directly to the public, so it won’t be in competition with whoever you pay your bills to.  

But it will invest in and grow renewable energy — wind, water, solar — and possibly nuclear. These new energy sources are both very necessary and potentially profitable.  

All existing wind power generators and nuclear firms made big profits. Right now, they are making windfall profits, because they sell wind-generated electricity at the price of gas-generated electricity.

The gas price increase has put money in their pockets, even though Vladimir Putin hasn’t interfered with our wind.  

So “how big” is the key question. Will it be a huge public intervention to drive green energy? Or will it be Ed Miliband sitting forlornly in kiosk painted in Union Jack colours with a Great British Energy sign, guarding a single great British windmill?  

I think Miliband wants the former, but some in Labour would prefer the latter. Labour says it will get an £8 billion investment.

That’s around four times bigger than Britain’s last government-owned green investor, George Osborne’s Green Investment Bank, which he created in 2012 but privatised in 2017.

So bigger than just Miliband-in-a-kiosk. But it is less than half the quoted size of Scottish Power, which has £20bn in assets.  

I was at a Labour conference fringe meeting funded by energy giant EDF just after Starmer’s speech, with its Great British Energy announcement.

Shadow business secretary Jonathan Reynolds was the key speaker, speaking underneath an EDF logo projected just above his head.  

EDF’s head of PR Tom Davis spoke alongside Reynolds. Davis was an aide to a Labour minister in the late 2000s, showing New Labour era party-business connections still exist.

Dhara Vyas, deputy director of Energy UK — the trade body for firms like EDF, also sat on the platform.  

If Great British Energy was a serious challenge to the corporations, you might expect them to display some nerves, but they thought the new publicly owned firm was just another entrant into a vast and profitable market.  

Ironically, as Reynolds and EDF’s Davis both pointed out, EDF itself is a state owned renewables generator, but owned by the French state while acting as a profit-seeking business in Britain.  

I think Miliband wants to reshape the market through public intervention, but I think Reynolds and his EDF friends are happy with a modest company which could easily be privatised down the line.

Great British Energy is an idea from the left and it will be down to the left to make sure it doesn’t just become a sort of Potemkin village of public ownership.  

Left Labour women  

SOME of the stronger women of the soft left were also visibly pressing on public ownership at the conference.

This January, Ilford North MP Wes Streeting announced Labour would pay private health firms to clear NHS backlogs.  

I saw shadow health minister Rosena Allin-Khan asked about this at the otherwise very dull Fabian Question Time.

She rejected the plan, saying: “I have got to be honest; I am not totally aligned with idea of using private providers to clear backlogs.  

“I think we should be injecting money into the NHS; it isn’t just on its knees it has fallen flat on its face. I personally would not like to see money from the NHS going into the pockets of private providers to clear backlogs, I would like to see the NHS rebuilt properly.”

At another meeting, organised by think tank Demos, its boss Polly Curtis pressed Emily Thornberry in the conventional Blairite manner asking: “How do you avoid Labour presenting as ‘big state, big spending’ and change that story around public services?”  

Thornberry answered fairly robustly: “We’ve now got a government that is so ideologically driven that actually they are trying to actively undermine, I think, the institutions of the state.

“I mean Liz Truss talks about the state being malevolent, that it should get out of the way.  

“That’s the far-right ideology that has been imported from the United States into the centre of Britain, the centre of our politics. That’s where we are. That’s what we need to respond to.  

“And I think we shouldn’t be afraid of saying, as I’ve said today, actually what is the state about? The state is about us coming together and working out what kind of country we want and our country is held up by the institutions of the state.  

“And that’s not something to be afraid of. I mean — I’m a lefty, it’s kind of amazing that I get provoked into speaking like this, but it’s true, it speaks an essential truth of where we are.”  

Thornberry also noted that “people get suspicious when you talk about service reform because they think it is a way to manage cuts,” when at the base, “we need more doctors, buses and teachers.”

Thornberry held her ground, but the whole structure of the meeting was designed to promote outsourcing. It was sponsored by Reed in Partnership, the privatisation wing of the high street job agency.  

Demos used the meeting to promote a report recommending outsourcing of jobcentre services.

So it is good to see some figures on the soft left looking less soft — but there are big pressures pushing a more corporate agenda inside Labour.