Power Failure: The Political Cowardice Behind Britain’s Energy Crisis

Britain isn’t just being let down—it’s being systematically stripped in a sabotage of its industrial future.

While politicians from both major parties smile for cameras and mouth platitudes about “growth” and “investment,” they continue to hand over our essential energy infrastructure to profiteers and multinational corporations with no allegiance to this country. The result? Britain now suffers from some of the highest electricity prices in Europe—crippling both households and what remains of our industrial base.

The numbers tell the brutal truth. Between 2020 and 2024, energy companies have made an operating profit of over £483.4 billion.

Our energy-intensive manufacturing firms—steel, glass, ceramics, chemicals—are being bled dry by electricity bills 60% higher than their EU competitors. Medium-sized businesses pay 30% more, small enterprises almost 40% more. Even our largest industrial players, who should benefit most from economies of scale, are being mercilessly gouged. This isn’t a minor economic disadvantage—it’s a death sentence for British industry.

How can any politician seriously talk about “levelling up” or “industrial strategy” while ignoring this fundamental handicap? It’s like claiming you want to win a race while deliberately hobbling your own runner.

Rigged Markets, Broken Promises: The Scandal of UK Energy Prices

The UK’s energy market isn’t just inefficient—it’s deliberately rigged against consumers and businesses. Our heavy reliance on gas generation means that under the marginal pricing system, electricity prices are set by the most expensive generator needed to meet demand—almost always gas-fired plants. Even when cheaper renewables are producing most of our electricity, we still pay gas prices for every kilowatt.

This market design has a single purpose: maximising profits for energy companies. Add in exorbitant grid connection costs (some of the highest in Europe), the post-Brexit inefficiencies in energy trading, and a revolving door between government and energy company boardrooms, and you have a perfect storm of state-sanctioned corporate extraction.

The political establishment wants you to believe this crisis was unavoidable—a result of global shocks beyond Britain’s control. Don’t swallow it.

The cost-of-living crisis began in 2021, long before Russia invaded Ukraine. We imported just 4% of our gas from Russia even before the war. Our European neighbours faced the same global challenges yet managed to shield both households and industry from the worst effects through price caps, windfall taxes with teeth, and direct industrial support.

The truth is far simpler and more damning: we are a captive market on an island, with consumers treated as nothing more than obedient bill-payers funding shareholder dividends while workers freeze and factories close. The “Big Six” energy suppliers have been allowed to operate as a de facto cartel, with weak regulation and even weaker political oversight.

The Great British Energy Swindle: Profits Up, Factories Down

This is what decades of free-market fundamentalism gets you—not efficiency, but exploitation. Not innovation, but extraction. And now we’re reaping the whirlwind as our industrial base continues to shrink.

Port Talbot’s blast furnaces closed. British Steel struggling. British Glass warning of factory relocations. Ceramics producers shutting down kilns. These aren’t just statistics—they’re communities being hollowed out, skills being lost, and strategic capacity being surrendered.

Meanwhile, countries with coherent industrial strategies—Germany, France, Japan, South Korea—maintain their manufacturing base despite higher labour costs because they understand that affordable, reliable energy is the lifeblood of industry. They treat it as strategic infrastructure, not as a cash cow for the private sector.

The Great Power Grab: Who Really Profits From Britain’s Energy Crisis?

The current Labour government was elected with a mandate to fix this broken system. Yet what do we see? Timidity. Half-measures. The same old deference to market dogma.

Great British Energy—once promised as a public alternative to break the stranglehold of private monopolies—has been downgraded to a mere investment vehicle with no generation capacity of its own. The windfall tax has more holes than a colander. And industrial energy prices remain criminally high with no real strategy to bring them down.

The Way Forward: Public Ownership

This isn’t just policy failure. It’s a betrayal of Britain’s working communities and industrial heritage.

A real industrial strategy would start with recognising a simple truth: energy is too important to be left to the market. We need:

• A genuine public energy company with generation capacity
• Regional publicly-owned distribution networks
• Hard price caps on industrial electricity
• Massive investment in renewable capacity owned by the public, not private interests
• An end to the rigged marginal pricing system
• Direct public ownership of strategic energy assets

Until we break the grip of the energy oligarchy on our political system, we’ll never see a fair economy, a just energy system, or a renaissance of British industry. This isn’t radical—it’s what most successful industrial nations already do. It’s what Britain used to do before the ideological experiment of privatisation.

The question isn’t whether we can afford to take back control of our energy system. The question is whether we can afford not to.

Paul Knaggs