They Built the Machine. They Turned It On. They Forgot How It Works.

By Shane Oxer
Campaigner for fairer and affordable energy

Kevin Hollinrake’s recent article arguing that Britain should protect its best farmland from solar farms is well-meaning, reasonable in tone , and completely detached from the reality of the system his party built and still governs under.

This is not, as he seems to think, a planning dispute. It is a constitutional and institutional failure.

He concedes, correctly, that “we cannot run a G7 economy on intermittent power alone”. Quite. But that is precisely what the law now requires the system to attempt.

It is not.

The destruction of the countryside is not a planning failure. It is the direct and unavoidable consequence of the Climate Change Act 2008 and the carbon budget system that flows from it , legislation introduced under Labour, but embraced, entrenched, and expanded by Conservative governments.

Ed Miliband provided the ideological spark. David Cameron turned it into a moral crusade with his “greenest government ever”. Theresa May wrote Net Zero into law in 2019 without even a serious attempt at a costed plan or systems analysis. And Rishi Sunak has left the legal machinery almost entirely untouched while offering the public the illusion of “pragmatism”.

Presiding over all of this is the Climate Change Committee , an unelected, unaccountable body whose modelling assumptions now quietly dictate infrastructure, planning, taxation and industrial policy across the British state.

Once you pass a law that mandates the decarbonisation of the entire energy system, the rest is no longer a matter of political discretion. The state is legally obliged to maximise renewable deployment, electrify demand, and rebuild the grid at continental scale. Land must be taken. Infrastructure must spread. Objections must be overridden.

That is not ideology. That is how the statute works.

Planning inspectors are not “balancing” countryside against energy needs. They are implementing a legal duty. Courts are not arbitrating policy. They are enforcing a statutory target. Ministers are not steering the system. They are servicing it.

Mr Hollinrake’s proposals inadvertently illustrate the deeper confusion. Floating solar on reservoirs is presented as the use of “dead space”, when reservoirs are in fact critical national infrastructure whose ecology, chemistry and operation are already under strain. Rooftop solar is offered as if it were a serious substitute for power stations in a winter-peaking, high-latitude country, when it contributes least at the moment of maximum demand and nothing to system stability.

He concedes, correctly, that “we cannot run a G7 economy on intermittent power alone”. Quite. But that is precisely what the law now requires the system to attempt.

This is the central Conservative failure: the party still behaves as if Net Zero were being “implemented badly”. It is not. It is being implemented faithfully.

Even if solar were banned on farmland tomorrow, the legal obligation would simply force the same ideology elsewhere: more offshore wind, more onshore wind, more pylons, more batteries, more substations, more HVDC corridors, more curtailment, more cost. The footprint does not shrink. It only moves.

The deeper error was to outsource thinking itself. Strategy to the Climate Change Committee. Modelling to consultants. Delivery to quangos. Enforcement to the courts. Scrutiny to nobody.

Ministers now inhabit a hollowed-out state: announcing initiatives, giving speeches, publishing plans, while the real direction of travel is locked in by a legal structure they barely understand and no longer control.

This is how a governing party ends up arguing about furniture placement while the building is being demolished by statutory order.

The Conservatives did not merely fail to stop the machine. They built it, turned it on, and forgot how it works.

Until someone in that party finds the courage to confront the root of the problem , the Climate Change Act and the carbon budget regime itself , all talk of “better siting” is theatre.

You cannot humanise an inhuman system.

You cannot make Net Zero countryside-friendly.

You can only stop it.