Despatch: Driven to blackouts

In the winter of 1973, Britain ran on three days a week. Candles lit homes, shops shut early, and a Prime Minister insisted everything was under control — right up until it wasn't. Half a century later, the warnings are sounding again.

Dr Lawrence Newport, Director of Looking for Growth, draws a stark and unsettling parallel between the energy crisis that brought Edward Heath's government to its knees and the fragility of Britain's power supply today. The numbers are not reassuring: North Sea output at historic lows, gas storage a fraction of what it once was, and an import dependency that leaves the country acutely exposed to the kind of international shocks that, history suggests, are a matter of when rather than if.

The failure, Newport argues, is not one government's alone. Successive governments chose dependency over resilience — allowing a labyrinth of reviews, consultations, and legal challenges to strangle domestic energy production while quietly decommissioning the reserves that might have offered protection. Hinkley Point C, the most expensive nuclear plant ever built, stands as the monument to decades of political drift.

The Government insists Britain has one of the most reliable energy systems in the world. Newport is less sure. And the cost of being wrong, he warns, will not be felt in Westminster.

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