The green deindustrialisation of Britain

At midnight on Monday, Britain’s last remaining coal-fired power station turned off its turbines. The closure of the Ratcliffe-on-Soar plant in Nottinghamshire brings to an end Britain’s 142-year reliance on the black stuff for generating electricity.

The end of coal is being celebrated by the political class as a sign of Britain’s ‘leadership’ on the climate. Apparently, this is a mark of our ‘progress’ towards a greener, cleaner future. Indeed, politicians were so eager to shut Ratcliffe down that the deadline for its closure was actually brought forward by a year by Boris Johnson’s Conservative government, ahead of the 2021 COP26 climate talks in Glasgow.

What is now painfully obvious is that ‘leading the world’ in decarbonisation also means leading the world in deindustrialisation. Britain’s last coal power plant is merely one casualty among many of the drive to cut CO2 emissions. In fact, on the very same day that Ratcliffe closed, the steelworks at Port Talbot in Wales decommissioned its last coal-powered blast furnace as part of a transition to a less carbon-intensive manufacturing process, costing 2,800 jobs. A few weeks earlier, it was announced that Grangemouth, Scotland’s only oil refinery, will close, potentially as early as next year – a decision accelerated by the looming ban on sales of petrol and diesel cars.

These three closures alone have staggering implications for Britain’s economy and self-sufficiency. Coal may only have represented a tiny proportion of our energy mix before its elimination this week. But Ratcliffe was still essential to keeping the lights on during the past two winters amid the global energy crisis. Coal remains by far the cheapest source of electricity (even if it is made artificially more expensive in Britain thanks to heavy carbon taxes), and its price is far less volatile on the global market than oil and gas. Eradicating coal has come at an enormous cost. Thanks to the move away from reliable and cheap fossil fuels to unreliable and expensive renewable energy, the UK currently has the highest industrial electricity prices in the world.

The downsizing at Port Talbot is also directly connected to the green agenda. Its blast furnaces are set to be converted to electric-arc furnaces. These eco-friendly furnaces can make recycled steel, but they cannot make ‘virgin’ or ‘primary’ steel – a material essential to carmaking, the defence industry and other manufacturing sectors. When British Steel closes its last two blast furnaces in Scunthorpe, as has already been planned, the UK will become the only country in the G20 that cannot produce virgin steel.

Meanwhile, the Grangemouth oil refinery is currently responsible for producing 80 per cent of Scotland’s fuel – and generating a whopping four per cent of the nation’s entire economic output. Instead of producing home-grown fuel, it will be converted into an import terminal to supply Scotland with petrol and diesel from abroad.

Unions have successfully negotiated new jobs, training and enhanced redundancy packages for Ratcliffe’s 154 on-site workers. But there is no such luck for the thousands of workers from Port Talbot being put on the scrap heap, or the 400 or so expected to be cut from Grangemouth. Although the Labour government affects concern about these job losses, promising a ‘just transition’ to Net Zero, its war on fossil fuels all but guarantees that there will be more closures and redundancies in heavy industry. Cliff Bowen, of the Unite union, warns that thanks to Labour’s throttling of North Sea oil and gas, workers there risk becoming the ‘miners of Net Zero’ – alluding to the hundreds of thousands of coal miners who lost their jobs in the Thatcher era. Gary Smith, general secretary of the GMB union, has similarly warned that ‘we’ve cut carbon emissions by decimating working-class communities’.

The tragedy is that the nation that birthed the Industrial Revolution has become a leader in green reaction. Britain was the first country in the world to build a coal-fired power station – the Holborn Viaduct in London began operations in 1882. Abraham Darby pioneered the use of coking coal for steelmaking, while Henry Bessemer invented the ‘basic oxygen process’, the basis for modern blast furnaces. These inventions kickstarted a process that would transform humankind, giving rise to the most rapid advance in living standards the world has ever seen, and creating our modern age of prosperity.

Yet today, the Industrial Revolution and the fuels that powered it are looked on by the political class with fear and loathing. Britain’s industrial prowess helped ‘derange the natural order’, said Boris Johnson at COP26. Ludicrously, the new foreign secretary, David Lammy, considers the continued use of fossil fuels to be a more ‘pervasive’ and ‘fundamental’ threat than terrorism. This is why our politicians take a perverse pride in the UK becoming the first nation to set legally binding climate targets, to pledge Net Zero carbon emissions and to abandon the use of coal. It’s why the loss of vital strategic industries and assets is greeted with a mere shrug.

The green deindustrialisation of the UK shows how environmentalism has turned normal politics on its head. It invites us to view prosperity as wicked and penury as progress. The British people will pay a heavy price for the green designs of their leaders.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.