LONDON — A world leader took to the stage this week. The days of his voters being treated unfairly by global markets were coming to an end, he said. Manufacturing and jobs would be brought back home. In the “industrial heartlands” of the rust belt, “community, pride and purpose” would be restored.
But this wasn’t Donald Trump. It was U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and he was talking about his country going green.
The U.K. was in international, multilateral convenor mode Thursday and Friday, hosting 60 countries for a summit on the future of energy security in London.
And the way it is selling its clean energy and net zero mission to the electorate at home owes a lot to Trumpism’s basic appeal to voters: putting country first.
By pushing for “home-grown clean energy,” Starmer told delegates, the U.K. has a way to “take back control of our energy system” by shielding voters from the price spikes and unpredictability of international fossil fuel markets — a vulnerability starkly exposed in 2022 by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the gas price spike and rampant inflation that followed.
“Take back control” was, of course, the clarion call of the 2016 Brexit campaign — and its co-option by Starmer and his energy secretary Ed Miliband in the service of clean energy is no accident.
“The thread that runs through public attitudes to everything right now is a sense of powerlessness,” said Steve Akehurst, director of polling company Persuasion UK, whose insights on voter attitudes have been influential among Miliband’s core team. “Voters increasingly crave control: control of borders, control of the economy — and control of our energy supply.”
Starmer is convinced such patriotic arguments will neuter the attacks of net zero-skeptic rivals in the shape of Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives and — more potently, judging by recent polls — Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
Farage also sees Brexit parallels in net zero, telling The Sun on Sunday that it “could be the next Brexit, where parliament is so hopelessly out of touch with the country.” He called this week for the U.K. to double down on fossil fuel production by becoming self-sufficient in gas — never mind declining reserves in the North Sea and widespread public opposition to fracking on land.
But Labour’s strategy is to portray any reliance on fossil fuels — touted by Farage — as tantamount to accepting foreign influence on British energy supply and therefore over national security. For Starmer that has become an explicit part of selling the clean energy shift, saying on X on Friday: “For too long, Britain depended on other countries for energy to power our homes.”
It’s a deliberate strategy, said one government official, to ensure that — if net zero is indeed the new Brexit — Farage will this time find himself on the side arguing for foreign influence and international markets, while Labour can present themselves as the patriots, arguing for home-grown clean power.
In his speech, Starmer referenced his political opponents — and countered with a pledge to deliver his green goals through “muscular industrial policy.” And he threw in some some borderline-jingoistic rhetoric of which Farage or Trump would have been proud.
“We are stepping up now to make energy a source not of vulnerability, and worry, which it is at the moment and it has been for so long, but a source of strength, of security and pride, with British energy, powering British homes, creating British jobs,” the prime minister said.
Closing this week’s summit, Miliband squared up to the haters.
“Whether it is political parties or other forces that want to take on net zero and the energy transition, they need to know this government is not for bending, this government is not for buckling, this government is standing firm,” he said. “And you know what, I think the British people are on our side.”
The China problem
But Starmer’s critics — including those in the Trump administration itself — have a ready-made counter.
The clean energy mission, they say, means Britain sleepwalking into dependence on a new energy hegemon — China, a country which dominates the supply chains for renewable energy and electric vehicles required by the U.K. and others if they are to wean their economies off fossil fuels.
It was a point made bluntly by Trump’s envoy to the London summit, Tommy Joyce, acting assistant secretary of international affairs at the U.S. Energy Department. “There are no wind turbines without concessions to or coercion from China,” he told delegates.
It’s a weak point in Labour’s clean energy plan to which the government appears sensitive. This week Miliband bowed to pressure from rival parties and his own backbenchers when he promised to amend legislation so that the new state-owned power company, GB Energy, is less exposed to slave labor in supply chains for solar panels. It was a measure aimed squarely at China’s production, which has been linked to forced labor in the Xinjiang region.
Political rivals spy an opportunity. Andrew Bowie, the Conservatives’ interim shadow energy secretary, wrote this week that the “ideological pursuit of net zero” was driving the U.K. “into the arms of China.”
Bowie did not limit his arguments to solar. “This isn’t about one site, one sector, or one deal. It’s a pattern,” he wrote. “Across the board, net zero zealotry has opened the door to greater Chinese involvement in our energy infrastructure.”
Miliband, for his part, acknowledges the risks of “concentration” of clean energy supply chains, and retorts that investing at home is the answer. Reducing reliance on China “starts with actually taking seriously a proper industrial policy where you start to build it in Britain,” he told POLITICO at the London summit.
The challenge for the U.K., a middle-sized economy talking up its global green influence, is whether it can truly shake off claims of dependency on the Chinese superpower. Fail at that, and political rhetoric about patriotic clean energy will only fall flat.
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