This may sound perverse, but as the country seemingly writes off Gordon Brown as a dead loss, I’m finding strong reasons why his beleaguered administration deserves our support.

Why? Simply because Labour is the only major political party to take seriously one of the gravest problems facing the UK over the next decade – the looming energy crisis.

According to Ian Fells, Emeritus Professor of Energy at Newcastle University, we are likely to see severe power shortages emerging any time between 2012 and 2015 because of the growing gap between supply capacity and expected demand.

Professor Fells warns the UK could be hit by repeated power cuts that would shut down public transport, reduce hospital services and cause chaos in supermarkets and offices.

The impact on our economy would be devastating – far more serious than the last time we suffered major power cuts in the 1970s when computing power, email and mobile phones were not the essential business tools they are today.

As Professor Fells put it: "Electricity is the life blood of civilisation. Without it we spiral down into anarchy and chaos."

Yet the response from our political class to this very real threat has been little short of pathetic.

The Tories seem to think if everyone straps a little windmill to the roofs of their Notting Hill townhouses then everything will be OK.

The Lib Dems, meanwhile, have forfeited the right to be taken seriously on energy by swallowing the lunacies of the eco-fundamentalists hook, line and sinker – no coal, no gas, no nuclear.

It’s true that for more than ten years Labour has neglected its duty to secure future energy supplies, but at last there are at least some signs that ministers are beginning to recognise the urgency of the problem.

 Business secretary John Hutton told this week’s Labour Party conference that clean coal technology and a “renaissance in nuclear power” were needed if we weren’t to leave ourselves at the mercy of gas imports from unstable and unfriendly foreign regimes.

He bluntly told delegates: "No coal plus no nuclear equals no lights. No power. No future."

Contrast this clear thinking and straight talking with David Cameron’s pandering to fashionable eco-opinion. His most notable contribution to the debate was to borrow a private jet so he could hold a photo-opportunity on an Arctic glacier.

What Labour have grasped, but the Tories have not, is that in the current economic climate green politics are a complete dead duck.

Obsessions about global warming – or is it global cooling now? – are indulgences tolerated in an affluent society when there isn’t anything more serious to worry about.

In hard times – and we are in for an extended period of those now – thoughts inevitably turn to more pressing matters, like trying not to freeze to death.

When the election comes I suspect I won’t be alone in looking for a party with grown-up policies that might just keep the lights on. At the moment Labour are winning hands down.

When Rowan Williams, the sharia-supporting Archbishop of Canterbury, spoke out in defence of Karl Marx this week it was tempting to shrug one’s shoulders and file it under “Well, what did you expect?”.

But when the normally sensible John Sentamu, Archbishop of York, joined in the attack on modern capitalism, it is time to sit up and take notice.

Bishop Sentamu condemned traders who cashed in on falling share prices as "bank robbers and asset strippers".

I’m afraid the Archbishop, a courageous and godly man, simply does not understand the market. The only reason the so-called short sellers were able to force down the price of banking shares was because they were overvalued in the first place, built as they were on a mountain of bad debt and years of irresponsible loans.

If the market fundamentals underpinning the shares had been sound, the price could not have been forced down as far as it was.

By helping expose the real value of shares short sellers perform a vital service. The last thing we want is an artificial, rigged market that protects badly-managed companies from economic realities.

Private Fraser, the dour Scottish coffin maker from Dad’s Army, would be in his element in today’s spiralling economic crisis.

“We’re all doomed!” just about sums up the reaction of the commentariat as once solid banks collapse on a weekly basis.

Certainly, there is no shortage of material for the gravediggers of modern capitalism – from Northern Rock, to Bear Stearns, Freddie Mac, Fannie May, Lehman Brothers, AIG and now HBOS.

There is little sign that the crisis is over – or even at its peak - and there’s a feeling abroad that things are likely to get worse before they get better.

This has all been greeted with an obscene degree of lip-smacking relish by Marxist economists and their fellow travellers in the British press.

No matter that hundreds of thousands may lose their jobs and we’ll all be hit by higher mortgage payments and depleted pensions (unless you’re lucky enough to work in the public sector, of course) – the doom-mongers jubilantly claim the latest events have at last proved them right.

“This is the end of capitalism,” they cry with glee. “The free market model has failed!”

And out of the ashes of the collapsed system will rise a glorious proletarian revolution – or at least increased regulation and control by the state of what socialists call “the commanding heights of the economy”.

Well perhaps, but I can’t help thinking I’ve heard it all before. In fact the theory that cyclical crises in capitalism will eventually lead to its inevitable collapse has been around a long time – ever since Karl Marx first propounded it in Das Kapital in 1867.

As with many fine theories brute reality often finds a way of proving them wrong - and capitalism has shown itself to be remarkably resilient, bouncing back from each crisis to become ever stronger.

Even after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 - a disaster that dwarfs today’s problems - it took the US less than 20 years to rebuild the world’s most powerful economy.

But if this really is the end of capitalism, we should bid it a fond farewell – because it has benefited ordinary people enormously, creating wealth on a previously unimaginable scale and lifting millions out of destitution.

In contrast, wherever a Marxist system has been imposed on the people the invariable results have been repression, murder, famine and economic collapse.

Ask yourself this, where would you rather live – in the US, UK or Germany, or in the socialist paradises that are Zimbabwe or North Korea?

Would your rather be weeping into your Veuve Clicquot in New York, or boiling up a soup of grass clippings in a vain effort to feed your family in Harare?

I suspect the present obsequies for capitalism are premature. No doubt we’re in for a hard few years with a good deal of economic pain.

But eventually people will once again want to develop businesses, build houses and create jobs.

It is this irrepressible creativity of ordinary people that may just ensure capitalism’s survival.

You would think that putting your life at risk to fight for the UK’s armed forces would be proof enough of a person’s devotion to Queen and Country, particularly if the person in question was born overseas.

Not according to the Home Office, which argued in the High Court this week that five Gurkha veterans do not have “strong ties” to the UK and therefore have no right to settle here.

Loyalty and courage don’t count, argued the Home Office lawyer. Even if a Gurkha had won the Victoria Cross he wouldn’t be allowed into Britain.

Yet if the Gurkhas converted to Islam, entered Britain illegally, claimed benefits, preached that women are inferior and that homosexuals and unbelievers should be murdered and persuaded impressionable young people to blow themselves up on the Tube – they’d be welcomed with open arms.

Isn’t it just possible the government has got its priorities entirely the wrong way around?

Organic food is nutritionally no better for you than conventionally produced crops, according to scientists at the authoritative Food Standards Agency.

That won’t stop people buying it, of course, and nor should it in a free country.

If you want to pay over the odds for a pack of air-freighted green beans in the deluded belief that you are somehow saving the planet, then that’s your look out.

Similarly many consumers have been frightened witless by tabloid scare stories of “Frankenstein Foods” and have boycotted genetically modified produce as a result.

Yet, there’s not a scrap of evidence that GM food is bad for you. In fact millions of people have been eating GM food for years without a single documented case of anyone coming to harm.

But these irrational prejudices have nothing to do with science – they are lifestyle choices.  They show the incredible self-indulgence of well fed people who are lucky enough not to have anything more serious to worry about.

Alas, the same cannot be said of the impact on Africa, where the anti-science hysteria whipped up by the green movement has devastating consequences.

This week former chief government scientist, Sir David King, accused aid agencies, poverty campaigners and green groups such as Friends of the Earth, of bullying poor nations into abandoning technologies that could help feed the poor.

He argued that GM technology could increase crop yields in Africa by ten fold and help reduce the 700,000 lives lost unnecessarily through malnutrition and unhygienic food and water each year.

Organic and GM-free methods may be acceptable in rich countries with surplus food, but in Africa the results are catastrophic.

By imposing organic and GM-free agriculture onto Africa, the aid agencies and their eco-allies are condemning millions of the world’s poorest people to destitution, disease and an early death.

If environmental campaigners want to make these choices with their own shopping baskets, then that is little more than a harmless eccentricity.

But imposing their anti-science bigotry on people far less fortunate than themselves is despicable.

The same mixture of scaremongering and hypocrisy could be found at the trial last week of six Greenpeace activists who scaled a chimney at Kingsnorth power station in Kent.

After days of relentless green propaganda the jury decided that despite causing £30,000 worth of damage and putting lives at risk, the six were justified in breaking the law because they were protesting about global warming.

According to the jury it would seem it is OK to break the law so long as you are sanctimonious enough to believe you are doing it for a higher purpose.

After the case a jubilant Ben Stewart, one of the activists, called for “clean technologies” to be used to generate electricity.

Does he mean clean coal? No, they are against that, even when carbon capture and storage can be used to bury the CO2 emissions.

Nuclear then? No, they oppose that too, even though it is a proven and reliable way of producing carbon-free electricity.

Gas? Bio-mass? No they are out as well.

So that leaves solar, wave and wind power which after years of massive subsidies provide less five per cent of our electricity needs – or they do when the wind is blowing.

The notion that all our coal, gas and nuclear power could be replaced by such renewables in the next 50 years is quite simply nuts.

It would take 400 wind farms the size of Ovenden Moor to replace a single coal-fired plant like Drax. It just isn’t going to happen.

So if Greenpeace gets its way and shuts most of our power stations the result will be even higher energy prices and power cuts – which will hit the most vulnerable in our society.

Not for the first time green polices will hurt the poor.

If there’s one thing the last 11 years of a Labour administration should teach us, it ‘s that governments just aren’t very good at getting things done.

Despite seemingly unlimited bright ideas and a healthy Commons majority throughout, Labour’s record of achievement in office is decidedly modest.

This is not because of any lack of ambition; indeed Ministers have made clear their intention of interfering with every aspect of citizens’ lives – from regulating the temperature of our bathwater to instructing us what bedtime books to read to our children.

But time and again the latest new initiative, trumpeted to much fanfare, goes absolutely nowhere and is quickly overtaken by another shiny action plan, which in turn ends in failure.

Why should this be so? One simple reason is the distinct lack of managerial competence within ministerial ranks.

Labour, and to be fair the Conservatives too, are packed full of very posh, very clever people who have never run anything more complex than the Junior Common Room of an Oxford college.

They move effortlessly from university to a job with a think-tank or trade union research department, before being parachuted into a safe parliamentary seat.

The next minute they are supposed to be running the health service, the education department or the Treasury – with entirely predictable results.

It is one thing penning clever analytical papers, but entirely another piloting through changes in a large and complex organisation.

We’ve become so immune to the endless cycle of brilliantly presented policy announcements followed by dismal failure, that the public has simply stopped listening.

Take for example Gordon Brown’s latest initiative this week to revive the housing market by suspending stamp duty on cheaper properties.

This was supposed to be a key plank in Gordon’s great autumn fight back after a terrible summer of plotting and by-election disaster.

But it created hardly a ripple. Britain’s homeowners gave a collective shrug of the shoulders. No one seriously expects the government’s actions to make much difference and I’d be astonished if it heralds any big change in Brown’s dismal poll ratings.

Of course it was partly government meddling that created the housing crisis in the first place.

The then-housing minister, Yvette Cooper, one of those posh, clever people with absolutely no experience, steamrollered through the introduction of Home Information Packs in the teeth of dire warnings from people who had worked in the housing industry all their lives.

The result has been what the Law Society and Which? called “the worse piece of consumer legislation in 50 years”.

HIPs are yet another costly, bureaucratic hoop for house sellers to jump through at a time when the market is collapsing.

Cooper was rewarded with promotion to Chief Secretary of the Treasury and is even tipped as Britain’s first female Chancellor of the Exchequer. Heaven help us!

Maybe the answer is to ban the under-40s from becoming MPs – then these bright young things will have to go out and earn a living in the real world before inflicting their ideas on the rest of us?

Perhaps then ministers would have gained experience in actually getting things done – and the wisdom to know that sometimes it is better to leave well alone.