Who really runs the United Kingdom

Chapter 1.6 – Conclusion: A Parliament in Chains

The opening chapter of this book has traced the long arc of Britain’s journey from industrial sovereignty to energy subjugation. It began with coal , the material bedrock of Britain’s rise to global power and ended with the Climate Change Act of 2008, which enshrined in law a set of obligations that no Parliament can undo without tearing up Britain’s entire constitutional fabric. The thread running through this history is unmistakable: each stage of decline was not an accident of fate, but the product of conscious decisions taken by governments, parties, and elites who chose to sacrifice sovereignty on the altar of ideology and international prestige.

From Coal to Dependency

Coal was not merely an energy source. It was a symbol of independence , abundant, domestic, and controlled by the British state and British labour. To dismantle coal was not simply to modernise the economy; it was to dismantle a culture of self-sufficiency. Thatcher’s victory over the miners in 1985 marked the end of that independence. Britain shifted to gas, and then to a cocktail of imports and subsidies, leaving the nation exposed to international volatility.

The promise was that liberalisation and globalisation would deliver cheaper energy and greater efficiency. The reality was dependency , dependency on gas imports, on unstable international markets, and eventually on unreliable renewables. Once coal was gone, Britain’s capacity to determine its own energy destiny was fatally weakened.

Maastricht to Paris , A Constitutional Transfer

John Major’s signature on the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 was the first decisive step away from parliamentary sovereignty in environmental policy. By accepting that pollution and emissions were “transboundary” matters, Parliament conceded that Brussels had legitimate authority over Britain’s energy system. This principle opened the door to a flood of EU directives — from the Large Combustion Plant Directive that killed coal stations to the Renewable Energy Directive that forced subsidy regimes for wind and biomass.

At the global level, the Rio Summit and Kyoto Protocol embedded Britain within the UN’s climate machinery. Kyoto, though couched in diplomatic language, was a constitutional innovation: Parliament had bound itself to targets set elsewhere, enforced not by voters but by international bureaucrats. By the time the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, the ratchet was complete. Britain’s carbon commitments could only move in one direction , tighter, deeper, more expensive , never looser.

At every stage, ministers reassured the public that these commitments were modest, temporary, or voluntary. In truth, they were permanent structural transfers of sovereignty. Britain’s constitution was being rewritten by treaty and directive, with Parliament little more than a rubber stamp.

The Quango State. An Unelected Government Within

If treaties provided the legal scaffolding, quangos provided the machinery of enforcement. From the Carbon Trust to Ofgem, from the Energy Saving Trust to the National Grid ESO, a web of semi-independent bodies emerged that insulated decision-making from democratic accountability. These institutions operated in the shadows, staffed by experts and consultants who owed their positions not to voters but to ministerial appointments, NGO pressure, and corporate lobbying.

The Climate Change Committee (CCC), created by the 2008 Act, epitomised this new order. Armed with statutory authority, the CCC set the terms of Britain’s carbon budgets — legally binding obligations that no government could ignore. Its recommendations carried the force of law without ever passing through the crucible of electoral debate. This was not advisory power; it was legislative power by another name.

The existence of the CCC meant that Parliament had effectively tied its own hands. MPs could pass budgets, amend taxes, or debate subsidies, but they could not touch the trajectory of decarbonisation. That path had been set in law and placed under the guardianship of unelected technocrats. Sovereignty, in its most basic sense — the ability of Parliament to decide the nation’s future , was gone.


The Role of Blair, Brown, and the Politics of Illusion

No account of Britain’s descent into the Net Zero straitjacket is complete without recognising the central role of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Blair’s internationalist vision positioned Britain as the global cheerleader of climate leadership, a convenient moral shield after the debacle of Iraq. Kyoto, DEFRA, the Renewables Obligation, and the proliferation of quangos all bore his imprint.

Brown, meanwhile, provided the fiscal and intellectual cement. His commissioning of the Stern Review in 2006 turned speculative modelling into holy writ, declaring climate change “the greatest market failure in history.” This gave the Treasury a permanent justification for intrusive intervention and limitless subsidies, all under the guise of economic necessity.

Together, Blair and Brown created the intellectual and institutional conditions for Miliband’s Climate Change Act. Without their groundwork. Blair’s globalist ethos, Brown’s Treasury orthodoxy , the Act would have been unthinkable. The illusion of consensus they cultivated ensured that by 2008, opposition was virtually non-existent. Only five MPs had the courage to vote against a law that would bind generations.

The politics of illusion worked: climate was presented not as ideology but as science, not as politics but as morality. To question it was to be branded a denier, a heretic, a crank. Under these conditions, parliamentary sovereignty was not wrested away by force; it was surrendered willingly, almost gratefully.

The Constitutional Consequences

What makes the Climate Change Act unique in British constitutional history is not merely its content but its structure. By writing carbon budgets into law, Parliament created a permanent parallel authority. Future governments could not repeal or amend targets without tearing down the edifice of the Act itself. In effect, the law created a “one-way valve”: policy could move only towards deeper decarbonisation, never away from it.

This was a constitutional innovation of staggering consequence. For centuries, Parliament had been supreme, able to legislate freely, alter course, and respond to the will of the electorate. The Act curtailed that supremacy. It established a permanent constraint on Parliament’s freedom, justified not by treaty with another state but by treaty with itself. A form of constitutional suicide.

The result is that Britain today operates under two constitutions: the visible one, where Parliament still debates and passes laws, and the invisible one, where climate targets set by the CCC dictate what policies are permissible. The latter trumps the former, because it is enshrined in statute and reinforced by international commitments. This dual system is the very definition of a Parliament in chains.

The Human Cost

Abstract talk of sovereignty can obscure the human consequences. Behind the Climate Change Act lie millions of households struggling with energy bills inflated by subsidies. Behind EU directives lie communities gutted by the closure of coal stations and steelworks. Behind the Paris Agreement lie industries relocating overseas, jobs lost, and families broken.

Britain’s pursuit of climate virtue has come at the expense of its own people. Rural landscapes have been industrialised with wind turbines and solar farms. Farmland has been diverted to biomass for export. Grid instability has driven up costs, forcing businesses to shut down production during winter peaks. Fuel poverty has become endemic in one of the world’s richest countries.

The rhetoric of “global leadership” rings hollow when pensioners cannot heat their homes, when factories are silent, and when communities once proud of their contribution to national power are left to decay. The price of Britain’s entanglements is not borne by the elites who sign treaties in Rio or Paris. It is borne by the ordinary citizen, whose voice has been silenced in the name of a cause he never voted for.

A Warning for the Future

The conclusion of this chapter is therefore not merely historical but urgent. Britain stands at a crossroads. The chains that bind Parliament — international treaties, EU directives, and the statutory straitjacket of the Climate Change Act , are not abstract. They are real, legal, and enforceable. They will continue to dictate Britain’s energy future unless they are actively broken.

The lesson of history is that sovereignty, once surrendered, is rarely regained without struggle. Britain cannot rely on the goodwill of international bodies, nor on the self-restraint of quangos, to restore democratic control. The only path forward is deliberate and decisive: to repeal the Climate Change Act, to dismantle the quango state, and to withdraw from international commitments that override domestic priorities.

This is not a call for isolationism, but for honesty. Cooperation is one thing; constitutional subjugation is another. If Britain is to prosper, it must cooperate on its own terms, not those dictated by Brussels, Geneva, or New York. Energy is too vital, sovereignty too precious, to be outsourced to unelected bureaucrats and international treaties.

Closing Thought

The Climate Change Act was sold as progress, as morality, as science. In truth, it was the culmination of decades of managed decline, international entanglement, and political cowardice. It was the moment Parliament abdicated its role as the guardian of the nation’s sovereignty and became instead a junior partner in a global project that serves ideology before people.

Chapter 1 has shown how we arrived here. The chapters that follow will show the consequences: the rise of quangos, the destruction of the grid, the illusion of storage, and the financial waste of Net Zero. But the conclusion of this first chapter is clear. Britain does not suffer from a temporary energy crisis or a passing cost-of-living squeeze. It suffers from a constitutional crisis. A Parliament in chains, bound by laws it cannot change, serving masters it cannot name, and betraying a people it no longer represents.


Endnotes – Chapter 1.6

1. Thatcher, Margaret. “Speech to the Royal Society,” 1988.


2. Treaty on European Union (Maastricht Treaty), 1992.


3. United Nations, “Rio Declaration on Environment and Development,” 1992.


4. Kyoto Protocol to the UNFCCC, 1997.


5. European Commission, Large Combustion Plant Directive, 2001.


6. Climate Change Act 2008, c.27.


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


8. Stern, Nicholas. The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review, 2006.


9. United Nations, “Paris Agreement,” 2015.