March 21, 2025 - 2:40pm
Heathrow Airport has been shut down for a full 24 hours due to a fire at a nearby electrical substation. It is very unusual for a major international airport to be shut down for such a long period, and this is the biggest disruption Heathrow has suffered since the 2010 eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano.
It will take days, perhaps weeks, for the full details of what has happened to emerge. But it is now clear that parts of the UK’s critical infrastructure are far more vulnerable than many Britons would like to believe. The shutdown of Heathrow has stranded 220,000 people who were intending on flying today. This will no doubt cause extensive backlogs and chaos in the days ahead, including spillover to other airports which will be stretched to capacity. Over 1,300 flights have been affected.
The problem here is not one of simple convenience, however. Nor is it simply a story of a few days of chaos at British airports. Rather, it strikes right at the heart of many aspects of Britain’s national business model. For better or for worse, the country has little left in the way of manufacturing, which has fallen from over 25% of GDP in the Sixties to less than 10% today. Other Western nations have also seen declines in manufacturing share, but Britain stands out as having experienced the most aggressive decline.
Since the 1986 Big Bang, the UK Government has instead tried to run an economy based on international services. This is why the British economy is so unusually reliant on London, which makes up nearly a quarter of the entire country’s GDP. The Heathrow shutdown has therefore impacted multiple aspects of the British economic model.
The most obvious of these is that Heathrow serves as an air corridor between the United States and Europe. It is an extremely convenient stopover point between the two continents, and so serves as a central hub for transatlantic travel. The trip from Heathrow to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, for example, is the busiest flight route in Europe. In the last couple of years, however, passengers have started to notice that Heathrow has become increasingly less reliable, with delays now a commonplace at the airport. The pictures of massive fires and trapped passengers this week will no doubt further dent its reputation.
Other aspects of the British international services model also require reliable and safe air transport. London serves as a meeting place for transatlantic business, as well as an unusually large number of events, because of its convenience. As a result, the shutdown of Heathrow will greatly harm Britain’s image as an easy international meeting place.
In the Nineties, the Irish Republican Army launched a terror campaign on the British mainland by targeting critical economic infrastructure, with the aim of disrupting the national economy. The Baltic Exchange bombing in 1992 caused more financial damage to Britain than the 10,000 bombs the IRA had planted in Northern Ireland over the previous 20 years. Since the Good Friday Agreement, it appears that Britain has forgotten how vulnerable its international services economy is to serious infrastructure disruptions. Following the Heathrow shutdown, the British Government will now have to learn a hard lesson.
Philip Pilkington is a macroeconomist and investment professional, and the author of The Reformation in Economics
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Subscribe“For better or for worse, the country has little left in the way of manufacturing,”
In just about every way possible the shutting down of our once thriving manufacturing industry is for the worse.
Anyone who’s listened to Professor David Betz’s rather alarming thoughts on possible attacks on infrastructure knows how vulnerable we are.
This should be a wake up call.
How is there no back-up plan that can provide power? A single point of failure for an airport this critical??
Poor planning as usual
Apparently, the so-called “backup” generator was affected by the fire too.
That takes ‘planning’ to a whole new level of incompetence.
…..and two tier DEI-ago wants to commit the RAF to give air cover for Ukraine…..you couldn’t make it up.
There was internal redundancy within the substation and it only took a few hours to switch to the two others. The emergency backup power worked. In a major incident nobody was hurt.
That sounds like a reasonable risk tradeoff between probability and consequences…. in peaceful times
But even though this was accidental, it shows a vulnerability, the design should be reviewed considering that these days an intentional attack is much more likely
Hopefully others are checking whether this could happen to them before crowing about it.
I would have thought the network operator could have been more nimble in switching supply from another substation.
To say that British ‘leadership’ is out of touch with what is important to have a successful country and economy is being kind.
Oh you are far too kind
Governance of the UK is abysmal
Just muddle through
Is no longer a viable option I Today’s fast evolving World
Why because there no longer a Empire to loot and plunder
To provide back up when matters go pear shaped .
This attitude has merely accelerated the decline of the UK .
Which is now terminal and utterly impossible to halt far less recover
What happened at Heathrow can only be described as ” Bad Governance”