FAKE NEWS, we’re told by the corporate media, is a serious problem and you should only trust “reputable” sources like them.

This assertion is made more laughable by their total regurgitation of a claim that “the lights could go out” next Christmas, a classic piece of “fake news.”

It comes from a report by the “British Infrastructure Group of MPs” (BIG) — not a real parliamentary group despite its name — carrying the name of Tory MP Grant Shapps.

It’s all nonsense, and you would think anything with Shapps’s name on it would raise suspicions. The former Conservative Party chairman has been caught masquerading as a marketing guru called “Michael Green,” lying about — sorry, “over-firmly denying” — having a second job while an MP and allegedly editing his own Wikipedia page.

But the report’s claims have appeared verbatim across the media — even the one that “MPs [plural] have warned” is false, when it is only Shapps.

The report is ridiculous. Its top point after “the lights could go out next Christmas” is that the National Grid’s electricity “safety buffer” this winter is 0.1 per cent — in fact it’s 6.6 per cent, higher than last year.

It’s true to form for the BIG, which in a previous report titled We’re Jammin’ (really) suggested that traffic lights be dug up to reduce traffic congestion. This is an old favourite of Thatcher’s favourite think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs and is total tripe.

The idea comes out of some weird right-wing libertarian fantasy world. It’s quite possible that Shapps inhabits that alternative universe, with his claim that Britain’s supposed energy problems are to be blamed on “a decade of target-led, interventionist energy policy.”

This paper must have missed that decade given that we’ve still got our rip-off, backward privatised electricity market.

This is the point where the report’s real aim begins to seep out. It praises the smashing of the publicly owned electricity utilities and paints a picture of a wonderful life under privatisation. Then it introduces the villain: action to clean up electricity generation and reduce its contribution to planet-wrecking climate change.

This is an old right-wing fairy tale, its moral being that government should let “the market” handle things and everything will be fine. But the market only provides what is profitable for private participants, at however high a price they can get away with, while dumping the ill effects of their actions onto wider society.

The lights are not in danger of going out, but we must reshape electricity provision in this country. The government has cut the ground out from under renewables — recently making solar panels much more expensive — at a time when we need a gigantic programme of investment and installation.

The cost of renewables is dropping fast and cheap government borrowing could take advantage of that to transform electricity generation. At the same time, advances in storage and small local generation offer the chance to build a more resilient grid that is decentralised and democratised. Robin Hood Energy, owned by Nottingham City Council, is a good first step down this path.

But ideologues such as Shapps and the Tory government as a whole are obsessed with privatisation and the unaccountable concentration of power. We know where that leads: a high cost to households and to the planet.

A radical renewable future is within our grasp and the only hope we have of getting out of this hole the capitalist class has dug for us.