The China problem
But Starmer’s critics — including those in the Trump administration itself — have a ready-made counter.
The clean energy mission, they say, means Britain sleepwalking into dependence on a new energy hegemon — China, a country which dominates the supply chains for renewable energy and electric vehicles required by the U.K. and others if they are to wean their economies off fossil fuels.
It was a point made bluntly by Trump’s envoy to the London summit, Tommy Joyce, acting assistant secretary of international affairs at the U.S. Energy Department. “There are no wind turbines without concessions to or coercion from China,” he told delegates.
It’s a weak point in Labour’s clean energy plan to which the government appears sensitive. This week Miliband bowed to pressure from rival parties and his own backbenchers when he promised to amend legislation so that the new state-owned power company, GB Energy, is less exposed to slave labor in supply chains for solar panels. It was a measure aimed squarely at China’s production, which has been linked to forced labor in the Xinjiang region.
Political rivals spy an opportunity. Andrew Bowie, the Conservatives’ interim shadow energy secretary, wrote this week that the “ideological pursuit of net zero” was driving the U.K. “into the arms of China.”
Bowie did not limit his arguments to solar. “This isn’t about one site, one sector, or one deal. It’s a pattern,” he wrote. “Across the board, net zero zealotry has opened the door to greater Chinese involvement in our energy infrastructure.”
Miliband, for his part, acknowledges the risks of “concentration” of clean energy supply chains, and retorts that investing at home is the answer. Reducing reliance on China “starts with actually taking seriously a proper industrial policy where you start to build it in Britain,” he told POLITICO at the London summit.
The challenge for the U.K., a middle-sized economy talking up its global green influence, is whether it can truly shake off claims of dependency on the Chinese superpower. Fail at that, and political rhetoric about patriotic clean energy will only fall flat.
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