THERE’S an irony to Rishi Sunak creating a new ministerial post for energy security on the day BP announces it has doubled its profits in just a year.
If it were not for his party’s privatisation of British Petroleum in the 1980s, its £23 billion profit would belong to us all.
Public ownership of the energy giant would provide a degree of “security” in itself: while if it wasn’t destined to fill the boots of shareholders those billions could be reinvested in ways that really boost our energy security, such as increasing storage capacity (Britain has reserves adequate to keep gas flowing for just nine days — by comparison Germany has 89 days’ reserves and France 123).
Or perhaps that money could be invested in a green transition. Yet the £11.8bn BP paid to shareholders in 2022 — more than its entire profit the previous year — was more than 14 times what it bothered to invest in its “low-carbon” division.
Overhauling our energy sector and achieving net zero is currently the responsibility of the very firms who profit most from burning fossil fuels.
Nor, with energy firms able to ratchet up prices to reflect short-term price fluctuations, are the likes of BP and Shell, which posted its own obscene profits last week, likely to be bothered by Britain’s lack of reserves.
Flexibility on prices works one way. Wholesale gas prices have been falling in Europe for months: they are now lower than they were when Russia invaded Ukraine. Yet our energy bills are double what they were then.
Unfortunately the “security” element of Shapps’s new brief is unlikely to include the financial security of households exposed to the highest energy prices in the world by a profit-driven system whose regulators have been captured by the industry they are supposed to police.
It may involve dragooning workers to break strikes against their will: Shapps is after all the brain behind the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill that exposes workers to summary dismissal if they refuse to cross their own picket lines. It will not have escaped ministers’ attention that energy sector workers are also now balloting for strikes.
It is likely to involve further “decoupling” measures to cut ties with states now defined as our enemies: repeated national security scares are now concocted at Westminster like that last month over semiconductor company Flusso’s acquisition by a Chinese firm.
The reality is that with China dominating both the technology and the global supply chains for solar and wind power — itself the result of the country’s planned investment in these sectors over years — the impact of restricting trade for political reasons will be to retard the shift to renewables and increase our dependence on fossil fuel imports.
Nor should we ignore the fact that the soaring price of those imports was linked to the US, British and EU decision to impose sanctions on Russian energy — sanctions which have not hurt Moscow (since higher prices mean the value of its energy exports has grown) but have inflicted real pain on millions of households in our own country now paying higher bills.
Our movement should have clear demands when it comes to energy security. Britain needs a planned energy transition managed by people with a stake in its success rather than in its failure — which means nationalisation of the energy sector. Labour, too, must be forced to recognise this.
And the interests of ordinary people should be paramount, rather than those of a US ruling class engaged in a futile and dangerous attempt to derail the Chinese economy through “decoupling.”
Our long-term security depends on addressing climate change. International co-operation is the only way to do so — great power rivalry is, as we see with the collapse of the Arctic Council, already unravelling what little progress we have made.
