Our very ability to keep the lights on and maintain critical infrastructure is under threat. That is the stark message from Sir Richard Dearlove, the former ‘Chief’ of MI6. In the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s Annual Lecture, Dearlove asked whether Britain has thought seriously enough about the vulnerabilities that are being introduced into our increasingly complex energy infrastructure. His answer was emphatic and sobering.
“We have as a nation negligently wandered close to a cliff edge,” he said. Britain has allowed the security dimension of energy policy to become an afterthought. We are, according to Dearlove, effectively inviting hostile disruption.
Decades of deindustrialisation have hollowed out our industrial base to such an extent that we have lost control over the production of crucial parts of the grid
Decades of deindustrialisation have hollowed out our industrial base to such an extent that we have lost control over the production of crucial parts of the grid. The global market for grain oriented electrical steel (vital for producing transformers and generators) has become dominated by Chinese producers; in 2020, Britain lost its last domestic producer. The risk is that if our electricity grid was disabled or became incapacitated, we would be unable to replace key parts of it ourselves. Large scale transformers and generators ordered today can take years to arrive, rather than months.
That structural insecurity is quite clear to our strategic adversaries. Moreover, dominating crucial supply chains has long been a stated objective of the Chinese Communist Party. But we have ignored the threat anyway.
As well as prospective supply chain disruption, Dearlove – who served in the intelligence services for 38 years before he retired from MI6 in 2004 – warned of direct threats to Britain. We are already in a form of “grey war” with Russia over Ukraine, and yet the threat it poses is still being dismissed by some. Since the Cold War, Moscow has been investing in the capability to interfere with undersea cables, pipelines and electricity grid interconnectors. These interconnectors are now increasingly vital in helping us keep the lights on, so they are becoming a bigger target.
This is where the significance of Net Zero comes to the fore. A much stronger distinction needs to be drawn between the objective of decarbonisation over the long term, which most people support, and the rigid pursuit, backed by legislation, of a net zero emissions target by 2050. It is this rigidity that has led us to build interconnectors with our European neighbours instead of investing in firm power, rather than as well as, and prevented us from using our own oil and gas reserves rather than importing these fuels from abroad. It is this rigidity which the Institute of Fiscal Studies has just pointed the finger at for rising electricity costs.
Net Zero allows for no flexibility, even for matters of vital national security; it simply must be met as a matter of law. This is its biggest weakness, and why Dearlove proposes national security exemptions to Net Zero. These are a “quarter way house until sanity returns.” Ultimately, only its abolition can give us the flexibility we need to respond to the threats we face.
We should not just be worried about our physical disarmament, he warns, but our “moral disarmament” too. Whether it’s Extinction Rebellion, Islamists or the far-right, all aim to disrupt the British liberal democratic order. Dearlove isn’t saying the Chinese government had any hand in creating these groups, but that they could be promoting their activities to try to undermine and weaken the West. The Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department has an objective to shape a world favourable to Chinese interests and counts 40,000 employees on its books, with a further 600,000 in affiliate organisations, not to mention a budget of billions of dollars. It doesn’t seem much of a stretch to imagine they might be infiltrating and supporting the work of extremists.
However, a central part of Dearlove’s message was that we are as responsible for these vulnerabilities as our geopolitical adversaries are, if not more so. Acute vulnerabilities are there to exploit. They will be if we maintain our complacent posture and they have already weakened our diplomatic position. The voice of a weak nation does not carry much weight.
To start addressing these risks we need a new consensus on energy. Nothing radical, but simply a reassertion of national security as taking precedence over decarbonisation as a guiding principle of energy policy. Encouragingly, there are those on the left who already share this view. Labour MP Henry Tufnell has described the loss of Britain’s oil refineries as “scary”, recognising their importance to British industry and the livelihoods they sustain. We need many more of his colleagues to start speaking up.
The pursuit of Net Zero has wrought so much damage but there is time to change course. Our leading politicians claim to treat national security with the utmost seriousness. They can show they mean that by listening to Sir Richard’s message and taking the necessary steps to protect Britain’s energy system.
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