WHO REALLY RUNS THE UNITED KINGDOM

Chapter 1

Section 1.1 – The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Dependency

The story of Britain’s energy and sovereignty crisis cannot be understood without first revisiting the dramatic unravelling of its industrial base. The collapse of coal, steel, and manufacturing was not simply an economic event. It was the precondition for the political and constitutional changes that followed — including the surrender of parliamentary sovereignty to international climate law. The industrial working class, once the backbone of the nation’s power and independence, had to be broken before Britain could be restructured into a post-industrial, service-driven economy governed less by Parliament and more by quangos, global institutions, and unelected “experts.”

Coal: The Bedrock of Industrial Britain

For more than a century, coal was the foundation stone of Britain’s rise as the “workshop of the world.” From the collieries of South Yorkshire and South Wales to the great pits of Scotland and the Midlands, coal powered the furnaces of Sheffield steel, the shipyards of the Tyne, and the textile mills of Lancashire. Coal supplied nearly 90% of Britain’s electricity in the mid-20th century, and it provided secure, domestically produced energy at a time when most of the world was vulnerable to imported oil shocks.

But coal was more than fuel. It was culture, community, and politics rolled into one. Mining villages were built around collieries, with their own clubs, welfare halls, and identities. Generations of families worked underground, creating solidarity that made unions like the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) extraordinarily powerful. At its height, the NUM could bring the country to a standstill.

This power was demonstrated in the miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974. Rolling blackouts, the infamous three-day week, and images of candlelit households reminded Britain of its dependence on the miners’ labour. In 1974, Edward Heath went so far as to ask the country, “Who governs Britain?” in a snap election — and the voters’ answer was, effectively, “not you.” The Labour Party returned to power, carried on the back of industrial unrest and public sympathy for workers.

For many, this seemed to prove that energy sovereignty and political sovereignty were inseparable. If Britain’s power supplies could be paralysed by industrial action, then political power itself was precarious. This lesson would not be forgotten by Margaret Thatcher.

Thatcher’s Offensive: Breaking the Miners to Break the Old Order

When Thatcher entered Downing Street in 1979, she was determined to confront what she saw as the stranglehold of militant unions. The miners, led by Arthur Scargill, were the most powerful and symbolically important of them all. The great strike of 1984–85 was therefore more than an industrial dispute; it was a battle for the soul of the nation.

The government stockpiled coal, secured alternative supplies, and deployed unprecedented levels of policing. The state bent every institution to its will — the courts, the media, the Treasury — in order to defeat the strike. After a year of bitter conflict, the NUM was broken.

The economic rationale offered was simple: British coal was expensive and uncompetitive, especially against imports and North Sea gas. But the political consequences were profound. By dismantling the coal industry, Thatcher did more than change the energy mix. She destroyed the most organised source of working-class power in Britain. The pits closed, but so too did the political space for communities that had once forced Westminster to take their interests into account.

The social cost was catastrophic. Towns like Wath upon Dearne, Barnsley, and Easington, once thriving industrial communities, were plunged into unemployment and poverty. Promises of new industries rarely materialised. Instead, there followed a spiral of welfare dependency, poor health, and despair. The cultural fabric of entire regions was torn apart, leaving scars that remain visible today.

The Shift to Gas: A False Sense of Security

The destruction of coal coincided with the rise of North Sea gas. Discovered in the 1960s and developed rapidly through the 1970s and 1980s, North Sea reserves seemed to promise a new era of secure, domestically produced energy. The “dash for gas” during the 1990s, under both Conservative and Labour governments, transformed the electricity mix. Gas-fired power plants were cheaper and faster to build than coal or nuclear stations, and they emitted less carbon dioxide, which was becoming a growing political concern.

For a time, the strategy appeared successful. Britain enjoyed cheap, reliable gas, and ministers boasted of modernisation. Yet beneath the surface, vulnerabilities were accumulating. Unlike coal, which could be stockpiled for months, gas depended on just-in-time supply chains. By the 2000s, Britain had moved from being a net exporter of gas to a net importer, increasingly reliant on supplies from Norway, Qatar, and Russia.

When the Rough gas storage facility — which once provided enough reserves for 70% of peak winter demand — was closed in 2017, Britain was left with barely a few days’ worth of storage capacity. By comparison, Germany and France could cover months. The result was a fragile system, highly exposed to global price volatility.

In effect, Britain had traded one form of dependency (on coal miners) for another (on international gas markets). The difference was that coal miners were British citizens, subject to the nation’s political processes, while global gas suppliers were not. Sovereignty had not been secured; it had been outsourced.

The European Dimension: Supranational Energy Governance

Alongside these domestic shifts came the steady encroachment of European regulation. Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community in 1973 brought with it the acceptance of shared sovereignty. Initially, this was framed in terms of trade and tariffs. But by the 1980s and 1990s, the European Commission was expanding its reach into environmental and energy policy.

The 1986 Single European Act, signed under Thatcher, formally enshrined environmental protection as a European Community objective. This allowed Brussels to issue directives on pollution, energy markets, and later climate change. By the time John Major signed the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, creating the European Union, Britain was locked into a supranational structure that claimed authority over key aspects of energy policy.

Major’s government, consumed by the fallout of Black Wednesday and internal battles over Europe, offered little resistance. Instead, Britain leaned into European commitments, participating in the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and signing up to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Though not legally binding at first, these agreements created new reporting obligations and expectations. They embedded the principle that environmental issues transcended national sovereignty and required international governance.

This was the quiet constitutional shift: energy policy was no longer solely about domestic security or affordability. It was increasingly framed as an international obligation, overseen by Brussels and the UN.

The Rise of Environmental Orthodoxy

The late 1980s and early 1990s also marked the mainstreaming of environmentalism as political orthodoxy. Thatcher’s 1988 speech to the Royal Society had given climate science political legitimacy, but it was the global conferences that followed — Rio in 1992, Kyoto in 1997 — that cemented climate change as the defining issue of international governance.

Environmental NGOs such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth gained unprecedented influence. They were no longer fringe campaigners but key stakeholders in policy formation, regularly consulted by government departments and the EU. Their arguments — that climate change required urgent, legally binding action — were absorbed into the mainstream.

For ordinary Britons, these debates often seemed remote. But their consequences were anything but. The stage was being set for legislation that would make climate obligations superior to economic concerns, industrial needs, and even parliamentary sovereignty.

The Managed Decline as Precondition

By the late 1990s, when Tony Blair swept to power with his landslide victory, Britain was already a nation transformed. Coal was gone, manufacturing was hollowed out, and energy sovereignty had been traded for global integration. The unions that once defended working-class interests were shadows of their former selves. The ground was prepared for a new phase — one in which climate policy would not merely guide decisions but would become the very framework of governance.

This managed decline was not an accident. It was the essential precondition for the rise of the quango state and the legal entrenchment of Net Zero. A nation stripped of its industrial backbone, dependent on imported energy, and enmeshed in supranational frameworks was ripe for capture by an ideology that presented itself as scientific necessity.

The Climate Change Act of 2008 did not emerge in a vacuum. It was the logical endpoint of decades of dismantling — a process that began with the miners’ strikes, passed through the treaties of Maastricht and Kyoto, and culminated in the creation of an unelected Climate Change Committee. The fall of industry and the rise of dependency was not just history; it was the beginning of a new constitution.


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Endnotes

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


2. Edward Heath, “Who Governs Britain?” speech, February 1974, Hansard Parliamentary Archives.


3. Samuel, Raphael. The Lost World of British Communism (Verso, 2006), pp. 212–217.


4. Dieter Helm, Energy, the State, and the Market: British Energy Policy since 1979 (Oxford University Press, 2004).


5. House of Commons Library, “UK Gas Storage and Security of Supply,” Briefing Paper No. 06186, June 2017.


6. European Communities, Single European Act, 1986.


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