July 13, 2024 - 8:00am

In terms of both domestic and international politics, the logic of Labour’s “securonomics” policy is unassailable. Like other advanced Western economies, only more so, decades of privatisation and globalisation have rendered Britain vulnerable to geopolitical shocks and increasingly hostage to the whims of foreign tyrants. We produce little of use and import much that is vital: arresting this perilous situation would, at a stroke, make the country both richer and more secure.

However well-intended, Labour’s manifesto commitment, reaffirmed by Ed Milliband earlier this week, of refusing new oil and gas licences in the North Sea achieves the precise opposite result. Labour inherited Boris Johnson’s objective of achieving Net Zero by 2030, a strikingly ambitious goal in good times, but one manifestly unsuited to a country at the brink of major international conflict. If we believe Defence Secretary John Healey’s assessment that Britain faces a “generational threat” derived from a “decade or more of Russian aggression”, then well-meaning Net Zero aspirations must, for the time being, be deferred.

Britain has already led the world in reducing carbon emissions — essentially by offloading production of vital goods to geopolitical rivals such as China — and as a result, our 1% global share is negligible for a major economy. Yet China emits carbon at more than 30 times Britain’s level, and its 1.1% growth in 2022 alone already renders Britain’s self-sacrifice an entirely pointless exercise. Indeed, observation of China’s energy policy reveals what preparation for war, undertaken by a serious actor ruthlessly focused on its national interest, looks like.

Hardening its energy security measures, in what observers view as a clear combat indicator, China is amassing a vast strategic stockpile of oil while granting permits for two new coal-fired power plants every week. Britain’s keen watchdogs of international obligations should note that China has legally committed itself to decarbonising by 2060, but its actions reveal the superpower to be moving in precisely the opposite direction. In the long term the results for the global climate will no doubt be disastrous; but in the short term China, like Russia, is preparing itself for a major conflict, while Britain is not.

Though China is also undertaking a vast expansion of renewable energy, it is doing so by underwriting its grid’s basic security through the use of coal. In the Chinese version of securonomics, Beijing is making sure it has new sources of energy ready to go before switching off the old supply, and Britain would do well to match this outbreak of common sense. The goal of decarbonisation is genuinely good, and Britain should strive to achieve it as soon as practical.

Yet until then, it makes no sense to continue to import £45 billion of foreign fossil fuels each year from geopolitically dubious sources, while sitting on our own untapped energy security stockpile.

Net Zero by 2030 was a noble aspiration in better days, but the world situation since 2022 has changed dramatically and so should Britain’s energy policy. Geology has granted Britain a vast natural bounty in oil, gas and coal, equivalent to that which our rivals happily exploit to maximise their world power. In the current circumstances, it would surely be better to exploit this resource, even by accelerating production, and then use the wealth released to fund a vast national rollout of clean and secure nuclear power.

The end result would still be a decarbonised grid within decades, laying the groundwork for vastly enhanced future prosperity through cheap energy, while ensuring Britain’s security and resilience in the threatening years ahead. This, surely, would be true securonomics. We simply cannot harden Britain’s exposure to looming international shocks while simultaneously leading the world in decarbonising our grid within the next half-decade. It is a binary choice, one or the other, in which Britain’s national security must come first.


Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.

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