The strange thing about Labour leader, Mike Jackson’s attack on the Watford Brexit Party candidate, William Berry, is that he focuses on a not very important detail of the candidate’s ‘tweet’ rather than on the defining political divide of the day (Brexit Party man rows with Labour, August 16). William Berry rightly criticises arch-Tory betrayers, Dominic Grieve and former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, for preferring EU vassalage to the restoration of the UK’s national independence.

Sadly, on 9th August, reality intervened when a combination of gusty weather, wind-turbines and the National Grid led to Britain’s most severe blackout in more than a decade causing rush-hour misery across train stations, railways, roads and airports - and leaving almost a million homes without power. In the past 12 weeks the Grid’s output has fallen dangerously low on three separate occasions. Sudden high-volumes of intermittent energy can make it more difficult to balance the frequency of the Grid. Industry sources have warned that “near-misses” are on the rise and claim that the system operator has been aware of the growing potential for a wide-scale blackout for years.

In this febrile environment, Brexit Party candidate, William Berry, may be just the man to challenge the geniuses in Whitehall, who naively invited China to bid for our nuclear power station at Hinckley Point. To fund what will be the most expensive power station in the world, the British government entered into a complex financial agreement with Chinese state-run energy company, CGN and Électricité de France. The Hinkley Point site should have begun powering around 6m homes well over a year ago. Delays have been blamed on protracted Whitehall wrangling over the project’s eye-watering costs. It will be at least another six years before Hinkley Point begins generating 7% of the nation’s electricity.

Both the Brexit Party and UKIP, instead of listening to the manufactured scare-stories of vested interests, are determined to back the mature technology of hydraulic fracturing developed over 100 plus years in America. Like the automobile, computer and smart-phone, shale-gas technology owes its success to the persistence and long-term commitment of private engineering companies prepared to take a personal calculated risk. But why did the shale-gas boom occur so long after the technology was invented? Modern day ‘fracking’ didn’t begin until the 1990s when George P. Mitchell conceived a new technique, which took hydraulic fracturing and combined it with horizontal drilling. This breakthrough has reduced the cost of energy, improved safety and enabled the US, for the first time, to become independent of the unstable oil cartels in the Middle East and elsewhere. America is now the world’s largest oil and gas producer. The maturation of the hydraulic fracturing technology over the past ten years is entirely due to the operation of free-market capitalism: without higher oil prices, the private capital investment needed to refine the technology would not have occurred.

When government ministers, who have no skin in the game, believe they can pick the winners and proceed to gamble with tax-payers’ money, they always back the wrong horse.

Prof. Christine Wheeler McNulty

Oxhey