IMAGINE going to a restaurant where there’s no food. Or going to church and the parson doesn’t mention God. Then can you imagine the Chancellor of the Exchequer making a budget speech containing no measures adequate to resolve Britain’s acute and chronic energy crisis? You don’t have to imagine it, because that is what happened last Wednesday.

Well, to be fair, Osborne did announce a further £730m for offshore windmills, but that’s – literally – a drop in the ocean. And he increased the climate change levy which taxes non-domestic users of electricity in the hope that this will make them increase their energy efficiency. What it amounts to is yet another punitive imposition on businesses struggling to climb out of recession.

Choose your analogy for Britain’s energy policy: re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, fiddling while Rome burns. Any way you look at it, it’s a disaster.

To be fair, there used to be one or two promising projects in the critical business of energy supply. Getting the French EDF to build Hinkley Point nuclear power station, for example. But EDF demanded payment at twice the going rate and even at that eye-watering price it looks as if it won’t do the job after all. So now the Government is turning to the Chinese. The sharp-witted political commentator Jeremy Warner commented on this bizarre scheme: “If Britain had sub-contracted its civil nuclear programme to the Iranian Ayatollahs, it would scarcely have looked more humiliating or as potentially dangerous for our national security.”

So are we going to be able to keep the lights on? The issue must be in some doubt. The quaint notion of the Greens that windmills alone, offshore and onshore, can provide our energy has been exposed as a ludicrous fantasy and is now believed in only by a handful of flat-earthers. When the wind doesn’t blow, windmills have to be backed up by conventional means, which only adds to the cost. In any case, we have been forced to admit that investment in windmills will always fail unless backed up by enormous Government subsidies. “Government subsidies” is a lying phrase which really means massively increased electricity bills for householders.

There is now a glut of oil and gas, making these sources of power as cheap as they’ve ever been. But once again there is a catch: having dithered for so long, the Government now finds itself in the awkward position of having to subsidise the new gas plants as well. And remember what I said about that phrase “Government subsidy”: it just means you and I pay through the nose. The main reason why oil and gas prices are so low – though if you’re a householder or you run a car it’s not so you’d notice – is the spectacular success of shale gas in the US. This policy is now being pursued energetically in Eastern Europe too. The exploitation of shale gas has not only turned upside down the world energy markets but it has radically altered the balance of power globally: the oil sheiks of Saudi Arabia no longer have us over a barrel, so to speak.

So let’s get fracking in Britain then. You must be joking! Cowed by the Greens and assorted “protestors” whose energy policies seem to be designed to return us to the Stone Age, the Government dallies and dithers once again. But unless we miraculously acquire a sane national energy policy – and quickly – we’re all going to be left answering that old wartime question: “Where were you when the lights went out?”