A Tunbridge Wells diarist reads about Washington slowing Ukraine’s drones to protect the price of diesel and wonders what Britain’s Green Party would make of a war over fuel
Monday, 19 October 2026. Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent. The waiting room of my garage on the A26, my nine-year-old diesel estate up on the ramp, a vending machine coffee that tastes of the ramp, 9.15am.
Diesel, The Great Unspoken Ally
I am sitting in a garage, having my diesel car serviced, reading the London Prat on how Trump tried to stop Ukraine bombing Russian oil refineries by quietly slowing its drones above a certain speed. Russia, meanwhile, keeps hitting Ukraine’s power stations, leaving hundreds of thousands without electricity, and the main concern in Washington appears to be the price of diesel. It is, as these pieces usually are, uncomfortably close to the bone. A war in which the most protected party is a fuel price.
I have no sympathy for the Kremlin. I have every sympathy for Ukraine. But I must confess, sitting in this garage, that my first thought was not geopolitical. It was: what on earth would Britain’s Green Party make of this?
A Party That Hates Every Side Of The Story
Consider the Green Party’s position. They disapprove of war. They disapprove of oil. They disapprove of refineries. They disapprove of diesel especially, with the venom of a convert. They disapprove of Trump. They are suspicious of drones, which are military, and of satellites, which are owned by billionaires. They disapprove of Russia, of course, but also of the arms that Ukraine needs to resist it, at least in their more pacifist moods. A Green spokesman asked about the Prat story would need to disapprove of every single participant, including the reader, for driving.
I do not say this to be unkind. I say it because the Green Party has become, over the last few years, a serious force in British politics, and I would like it to explain how Britain keeps its lights on while it disapproves of everything that produces electricity. Even the Daily Mash has noticed the problem, with a headline in which the Green Party explains it was dangerously close to being electable. I can reassure them. They are not there yet.
The North Sea Question
The real British lesson in the Prat piece is about dependence. When a country relies on energy produced somewhere else, its fate is decided somewhere else, by people with their own interests. Ukraine, in the report, discovers that its drones can be slowed by a foreign power. Britain, which has spent the last decade winding down its own North Sea oil and gas production, imports a large share of what it uses. We have, in effect, chosen to be dependent, and called it virtue.
Labour’s energy policy, steered with the evangelical zeal of a man who has never had to start a diesel car on a January morning in Kent, has been to refuse new North Sea licences and promise that clean power will make everything cheaper. My electricity bill has not yet received the message. Neither, I suspect, has anybody else’s. The Greens want to go further and faster. I would like to see them explain that to the man fixing my car, who has two children, a forty-minute commute and opinions.
The Mechanic Has Opinions
He does. I asked him, while he was examining my exhaust, whether he would ever vote Green. He laughed for so long that his colleague came out of the office to see what had happened. When he recovered, he said he would vote Green the day they build a tractor that runs on good intentions. I said they would probably tax it. He said they would probably ban it and replace it with a bus that does not come.
That, I think, is the political problem the left has never solved. It is easy to be against everything from a flat in Brighton. It is much harder in a garage in Kent, where the economy runs on diesel and the voters can do arithmetic.
What Britain Should Learn
The Prat piece is about Washington’s priorities, and it skewers them nicely. But the British lesson is more uncomfortable. Energy is power, in every sense. A country that cannot produce its own will always be at the mercy of someone else’s priorities: Moscow’s, Washington’s, the market’s. The Green answer is to produce less and hope. The Labour answer is to produce less, hope and tax the hope. The Conservative answer, in recent years, has been to argue among ourselves while the bill arrives. None of us comes out of this well, but at least I can admit it.
The Car Is Ready
The mechanic has handed back my keys and told me the car is good for another hundred thousand miles, if Labour lets it live that long. I paid the bill, which was larger than last year’s, and made a mental note to blame the government, as is my right as a Kent taxpayer. As I drove home, the radio carried news of another Russian strike on Ukraine’s grid, and I thought of the people in the dark, with no garage, no diesel and no choice. That sobered me. The jokes about the Greens remain true. But the war is not a joke, and nor is the cold. Somebody, somewhere, needs to keep the lights on. I would prefer it to be someone who believes in power stations.