The Illusion of Action: Britain’s Energy Crisis Revisited
As war disrupts global energy flows, Britain looks outward for solutions, while the most effective tools to ease the crisis remain firmly at home.
By Adel Darwish
The trouble with governments in difficult times is not that they do nothing.
It is that they do something, repeatedly, and insist it is new.
Speaking this week, Keir Starmer sought to reassure the country that his government has a plan to weather what he called a gathering “storm”, driven by war in the Middle East and rising energy costs at home.
Yet in a moment of unusual candour, he also acknowledged the central weakness of that plan.
Some may say, he noted, that the measures being announced are not new.
“Yes,” he replied, “that is my point.”
It was an answer that explained more than it intended.
Because the latest package (higher minimum wages, modest reductions in energy bills, and targeted support) is a restatement of policies already in place. The increase in the National Living Wage was long scheduled. The energy price cap adjustment predates the current escalation and lasts only three months. Even the support funds now highlighted belong to an earlier phase of pressure.
In short, the government is responding to a new crisis with old instruments and presenting continuity as action.
The difficulty is not merely presentational. It is structural.
The cost-of-living crisis is, at its core, an energy crisis. Gas prices shape electricity bills, heating costs, and the price of almost every product in the economy. Add geopolitical instability — from Iran’s threat to the Strait of Hormuz, and the effect becomes immediate.
Elsewhere in Europe, governments facing similar pressures have reached for more direct levers. Several have reduced fuel taxes or adjusted VAT to cushion households and industry from price shocks.
In Britain, that option remains conspicuously untouched.
When pressed on this directly, the Prime Minister declined to engage . a pattern that has become increasingly familiar. The question asked, the answer delivered… somewhere else entirely.
Instead, the government’s response has been to frame the solution externally. The most effective way to bring down the cost of living, the Prime Minister argues, is de-escalation in the Middle East and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.
That is true, as far as it goes.
But it is also a convenient displacement. Governments cannot control events in the Gulf. They can, however, control taxation, regulation, and domestic energy policy.
It is these levers that remain largely untouched.
Hence the flurry of activity: meetings with industry, the convening of COBRA, and the assembling of thirty-five nations around a joint statement on maritime security in the Gulf.
A further international gathering followed, chaired by the Foreign Secretary, bringing together European and some Gulf Arab partners, though notably without participation from the United States, where “all viable diplomatic and political measures” were considered to restore freedom of navigation and secure vital shipping routes. Military planners, we are told, will then examine how to make the Strait safe.
But notably, this comes after the fighting has stopped.
The American absence matters. At a moment when questions are being raised in Washington about long-term commitments, including renewed speculation around NATO under Donald Trump, Britain’s reliance on its principal defence partner appears less certain than at any point in recent decades.
Yet there is little sign of a corresponding adjustment in strategy. If anything, the government’s current posture risks adding diplomatic friction at precisely the moment when clarity, rather than distance, would be required.
In other words, the strategy for economic relief is contingent on events beyond the government’s control, while the domestic levers that could be pulled now remain largely untouched.
There was, too, a quieter but no less significant shift. In setting out his longer-term vision, the Prime Minister made clear that closer alignment with Europe is now seen as central to Britain’s future, economically as well as strategically. Brexit, he said, had caused “deep damage”, and closer cooperation was now “too big to ignore”.
Not a reversal, at least not in name, but a direction of travel that is becoming increasingly difficult to disguise.
Meanwhile, the underlying contradiction in energy policy remains unresolved.
Britain continues to rely heavily on gas, and will do so for years to come. Yet it is choosing to restrict domestic production while increasing dependence on imports, often at higher financial and environmental cost.
It is a policy that manages optics, but not outcomes.
There is, perhaps, a longer view worth recalling.
In 1973, a distant war in the Middle East triggered an energy shock that Britain could neither control nor quickly escape. The result was not merely higher prices, but disruption, culminating in the three-day week, when economic reality forced political improvisation.
The political consequences were no less severe. Edward Heath, having sought a mandate amid the crisis, instead lost the election that followed.
But the deeper lesson came afterwards.
It was in the wake of that shock that Britain accelerated the development of North Sea gas. Though first supplies had reached Bacton in 1968, the crisis transformed urgency into policy. The conversion from town gas to natural gas was rapidly expanded, completed by 1977, a strategic shift that strengthened domestic supply and reduced vulnerability to external shocks.
It was, in effect, a lesson learned the hard way.
Half a century on, the direction appears to be reversing.
Where a previous Labour government responded to crisis by expanding domestic energy production, today’s Labour leadership is moving to restrict it, increasing reliance on imports while speaking the language of resilience.
History does not repeat itself exactly.
But it does, occasionally, watch as its lessons are quietly unlearned.
And, in a small moment of unintended symbolism this week, the most decisive action on Downing Street did not come from a minister at all.
Larry, the Downing Street resident cat, who has outlasted five prime ministers before Keir Starmer, was caught on camera slipping through the gates of the Foreign Office, emerging moments later with a mouse, and dispatching it efficiently outside Number 10.
It was, in its own modest way, a clear outcome from direct action.
A contrast, perhaps, with a government that continues to move between meetings, statements and summits, while the problem it is trying to solve remains very much alive.