Why has John Hutton, the Business Secretary, just conceded that Britain needs to go back to coal power? Because, despite all the hot air about renewables, the economy cannot run on wind alone. And because the Government's impotent failure to push nuclear power has made a fuel rod for its own back.

Mr Hutton has “privately expressed support” for doubling nuclear power's share of UK electricity to 30 per cent. New Labour's public position, however, remains that the market must decide if new reactors get built, with no state subsidies. There may still be matters that a government needs to keep private. But a revolution in energy production is not one of them. Nuclear power needs loud political and financial backing. If there is one deserving case for public subsidy, it is keeping the lights on.

The Government spent a decade in denial about the need for nuclear, too fearful of facing down the green lobby to face reality, dreaming that high-subsidy/low-efficiency wind farms could somehow fuel a 21st-century society. The storms may remind us that the British weather is rather better at disrupting power supplies. Even now that new Labour has supposedly come out of the nuclear closet, Mr Hutton's secret wish to raise its share to 30 per cent share would only return us to where we were a decade ago, before the old reactors were shut down.

Last week the Economic Research Council concluded “sadly” that the Government still believes “that White Papers, rather than private sector companies, build nuclear plants”. New Labour does not really take a laissez-faire attitude to energy. It interferes everywhere - but only to restrain and regulate growth through planning laws, reviews and consultations.

From the Manhattan Project to build the nuclear bomb in the 1940s to the 1960s Moon programme, governments seeking to make things happen put their muscle and money where their mouth is. Today, the British authorities that would equate the threat from climate change with the Second World War - and even want to bring back rationing - appear too cowardly to help to build a few nuclear power stations.

As a man of the libertarian Left, I am no old-fashioned state socialist. But there is a solid capitalist case for more public support for an energy sector on which the economy depends. Never mind nationalising Northern Rock to support ephemeral “shareholder confidence” in the banks, how about boosting public confidence that the power will still come on in the kitchen?

Yes, there does remain a problem of nuclear waste: the time and energy our impotent Government has wasted instead of pulling its finger out and pressing the nuclear button.

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