The minister of make-believe is about to become the most dangerous man in Britain - John Redwood

The truth is, we are all affected by the high prices, and the state cannot afford to help us all out again. Public spending is too high already, and high state borrowing is causing further upward moves in government borrowing costs and interest rates.

All sides have to accept that for the foreseeable future, the UK is still going to need plenty of gas and oil to fuel factories, heat homes and power vehicles. The issue should be how do we ensure we have access to enough of it, and how do we help keep the prices down?

The Government, in the person of Ed Miliband, lives in a make-believe world. He thinks just a few more wind farms will solve the problem while we wait for the much-delayed new nuclear power plants.

This crisis should jolt him into reality.

Electricity only covers one-fifth of our energy requirements. The present level of renewables manages just 10 per cent of our total energy needs across a year, and on days with little wind and no sun leaves us almost completely dependent on fossil fuels.

Most of us rely on electricity for our lighting and domestic appliances, but turn the gas on for heating and put petrol in the car.

Factories making steel, ceramics, paper, glass and the rest all need gas. Mr Miliband needs to see that the dominant uses of power need fossil fuels.

All but one of our current nuclear power plants are scheduled to close over the next five years, leaving our nuclear contribution well down even after allowing for the one new plant to come on stream at Sizewell.

Mr Miliband is going to need those smaller nuclear plants he dreams about to replace lost capacity, and in the meantime has to fill the gap closure will create.

Mr Miliband keeps telling us that if we got more of our own gas out of the ground, it would not lower the world price. There is no world price.

Gas delivered down a pipe from a UK field to a UK customer is cheaper than imported LNG, which has to include all the costs of turning it into a liquid and back into a gas, and the extra transport costs.

The US supplies its own gas down a pipe to its own customers at a fraction of the price charged in the UK, because it lacks the capacity to export more in liquid form at higher prices. The UK has no capacity to liquefy and export domestically produced gas.

The UK lacks gas storage, unlike many European countries. That made sense when we produced all our own gas earlier this century.

Our gas fields were our gas stores, and we could sink another well to turn up the gas. Today, Miliband's crazy policy of not letting us get more gas out of our fields means we need much larger gas stores for imports to help us over shocks in world supply.

The Minister stays paralysed by inaction as if this were not a problem.

Producing our own oil will have less impact on world prices, given the volumes, though every little extra helps. What it would do is give the government a big increase in tax revenues. It will raise business investment and create more well-paid jobs for UK employees.

Why is the Labour Party, the original party of the working man, so against more jobs in the UK and so in favour of oil jobs going abroad?

The UK need the PM to announce not just a few temporary subsidies for the worst off facing a big increase in fuel bills, but a whole new energy policy.

Getting more of our own gas and oil out would boost growth, generate tax revenue and jobs and start to fill the gap between what we need and what we produce.

The UK and the surrounding seas lie above big gas and oil fields, and stores we need to tap some more. Doing so would even reduce world CO2, as our own gas produces so much less CO2 than imported LNG.