WHO REALLY RUNS THE UNITED KINGDOM

Who Really Runs Britain?
It’s not the politicians you vote for. Since Blair rewired our constitution, power has been outsourced to unelected committees and foreign treaties. The Climate Change Act handed control of our energy to the Climate Change Committee, not Parliament. Our borders are ruled by the ECHR and UN conventions, not the British people. Step by step, sovereignty has been dismantled — not by accident, but by design. Westminster pretends to govern, but the real decisions are made in Brussels, Geneva, and New York.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Section 1 – From Coal to Quangos: Britain’s Managed Decline, 1970s–1997

The story of Britain’s modern energy and sovereignty crisis is not a tale of sudden collapse, but of slow, deliberate, and often hidden transformation. The Britain of the mid-20th century was not a land of post-industrial fragility, rising bills, or reliance on foreign states for energy security. It was a country that ran – quite literally = on its own fuel. Coal was not just a commodity. It was the beating heart of the British economy, the heat in millions of homes, the driving force of industry, and the bedrock of working-class communities in Yorkshire, South Wales, the North East, and Scotland.

By the 1970s, however, the political and economic foundations of that world were being undermined. Global events, European integration, and the rise of a new environmental orthodoxy created a perfect storm for what would later become Britain’s headlong rush into Net Zero. If Margaret Thatcher’s governments in the 1980s destroyed the miners, and if Tony Blair and Gordon Brown turned climate change into law in the 2000s, then the 1970s provided the volatile prelude: a decade of crisis that made Britain vulnerable to new forms of governance from Brussels, Washington, and the United Nations.

What follows is not the familiar, romanticised tale of a Britain “finding its place in the modern world.” It is the history of managed decline – a process by which the industries that had built and sustained Britain were systematically dismantled, leaving behind hollowed-out communities and a Parliament increasingly willing to surrender its powers to unelected bodies and international treaties.

1.1 The Centrality of Coal in Britain’s Industrial Life

To appreciate how profound this transformation was, we must first recall just how central coal once was to Britain. From the 18th century onwards, coal was the fuel that powered the Industrial Revolution. Coal-fired steam engines drove factories, railways, and ships. It was the reason why towns like Sheffield became synonymous with steel, why the Black Country glowed at night with furnaces, and why miners were at the core of the British working class.

By 1913, Britain was producing over 290 million tonnes of coal annually, making it the largest coal exporter in the world at the time¹. Coal provided not just energy but employment, identity, and community cohesion. Mining villages in Yorkshire, South Wales, and Durham were not just workplaces – they were whole ways of life, complete with welfare clubs, brass bands, and a deep sense of solidarity.

This dominance, however, came with costs. Coal was dirty, polluting, and dangerous to extract. By the 1960s and 1970s, Britain was facing the twin pressures of rising environmental awareness and industrial unrest. The smogs of the 1950s and 1960s had already made coal synonymous with pollution, leading to the Clean Air Acts of 1956 and 1968². At the same time, the miners -through their powerful union, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) – were able to bring the country to a standstill when disputes with the government over pay and conditions escalated.

1.2 The Miners’ Strikes: Power, Class, and Sovereignty

The early 1970s brought the first decisive clash. In 1972, the NUM launched its first national strike in decades, demanding higher wages in response to rising inflation. The strike shut down much of the country’s electricity supply, forcing Edward Heath’s Conservative government to impose a three-day working week in early 1974³. The sight of Britain’s cities plunged into darkness, with factories idle and homes cold, seared itself into the national memory.

The miners struck again in 1974, triggering another energy crisis. Heath, unable to maintain political authority, called a general election under the slogan: “Who governs Britain?” Voters answered: not you. Labour returned to power under Harold Wilson, partly because the public had grown weary of confrontation. But the underlying issue – the power of the unions over Britain’s energy supply – remained unresolved.

When Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, she was determined never to be humiliated by organised labour in the way Heath had been. The miners’ union was not just a workplace body; it was a political force, deeply entwined with the Labour Party and capable of threatening the government’s authority. To Thatcher, breaking the NUM was essential to breaking the post-war consensus that had left Britain, in her view, sclerotic and uncompetitive.

The confrontation came to a head in March 1984, when the NCB announced the closure of 20 pits. Arthur Scargill, the fiery leader of the NUM, called a national strike without a ballot. The result was one of the most bitter industrial conflicts in modern history. Over the course of a year, tens of thousands of miners clashed with police in picket lines from Yorkshire to Nottinghamshire. The confrontation at Orgreave coking plant in June 1984 became iconic: mounted police charging into crowds of striking miners with batons drawn, while television cameras rolled⁴.

The strike ended in March 1985 in defeat for the miners. The NUM returned to work weakened and divided, their bargaining power shattered. Thatcher had achieved her political goal. But the price was paid in Britain’s industrial heartlands, where the collapse of coal mining led to mass unemployment, social disintegration, and long-term economic stagnation. Communities that had powered the nation for generations were left to wither.

Yet even as Thatcher broke the miners, she also made a historic intervention that would have unforeseen consequences for Britain’s future energy policy.

1.3 Thatcher’s Environmental Turn: Science Meets Politics

In September 1988, Thatcher addressed the Royal Society. Drawing on early reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), founded earlier that year by the UN Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization, she declared that “the health of our economy and the health of our environment are totally dependent upon each other” and warned of the dangers of global warming⁵.

This was a pivotal moment. For the first time, a major Western leader had endorsed the idea that climate change was not only real but required government intervention. Coming from Thatcher – a leader who had built her reputation on defying entrenched interests and championing market liberalisation – it gave enormous political legitimacy to a nascent movement.

Thatcher’s motives, however, were complex. On one level, she was a trained scientist (with a degree in chemistry from Oxford) and took environmental issues seriously. On another, her embrace of climate rhetoric dovetailed with her hostility towards coal: portraying coal as an environmental threat provided an additional justification for closing pits and reducing union power. For her, climate change became not only a scientific issue but a political weapon.

Ironically, Thatcher’s government also invested heavily in North Sea oil and gas, entrenching Britain’s dependence on hydrocarbons. While she spoke of reducing greenhouse gases, she was simultaneously accelerating the “dash for gas,” which replaced coal with a resource that was, at the time, plentiful and cheap. This contradiction – environmental rhetoric masking a different energy dependency – foreshadowed the deeper contradictions that would later plague Britain’s Net Zero policy.

1.4 Europe’s Expanding Role

Alongside Thatcher’s domestic revolution, Britain was becoming more deeply enmeshed in European structures. The Single European Act of 1986 committed member states to closer economic and regulatory integration, including in energy and the environment⁶. For many, this was the thin end of the wedge. Energy policy, once seen as the prerogative of sovereign governments, was increasingly framed as a matter for Brussels.

By the early 1990s, under John Major, this trend accelerated. Major signed the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, transforming the European Community into the European Union and embedding commitments to common policies on energy, environment, and climate change⁷. At the same time, Britain participated in the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, where world leaders signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Though non-binding at first, the UNFCCC created a reporting and compliance architecture that would later underpin agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol (1997) and the Paris Agreement (2015).

For Britain, these commitments represented a profound constitutional shift. By signing international treaties and accepting European directives, successive governments were voluntarily constraining their own freedom of action. In theory, Parliament remained sovereign. In practice, whole areas of policy were now being shaped by international agreements and implemented by domestic quangos.

Major himself was no environmental crusader, but his government’s embrace of Europe meant accepting the environmental dimension of EU law. The 1990s Large Combustion Plant Directive and other Brussels-led measures accelerated the closure of older coal plants, while the narrative of “sustainable development”  born at Rio and promoted by the UN – became embedded in Whitehall policy documents.

Major’s premiership is often remembered for its internal divisions over Europe and economic turmoil after Black Wednesday (1992). But his quiet acquiescence to European environmental governance was no less significant. By the mid-1990s, Britain’s energy policy was no longer solely its own. The stage was set for the next act -¡ one in which Tony Blair would embrace climate change not merely as an environmental issue but as a central organising principle of government and a tool of global politics.

Endnotes (Sections 1.1–1.4)

1. Thatcher, Margaret. Speech to the Royal Society, September 1988. UK Government Archive.


2. United Nations. Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro, 1992.


3. Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 1997.


4. Carbon Trust. “History of the Carbon Trust.” Carbon Trust official website.


5. Stern, Nicholas. The Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change. HM Treasury, 2006.


6. Climate Change Act 2008, c.27. UK Government Legislation.


7. Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. “About Us.” TBI website.