British capitalism is today facing a massive energy crisis, largely of its own making.
It was after all, Thatcher and Heseltine who shut down the mining industry to get rid of the NUM, and announced that Britain could rely on the global economy for cheap energy.
Thatcher’s vision of Britain as a service economy has resulted in its once powerful manufacturing base being almost destroyed, with more than a little help from her ideological successor, the Blair government.
This government boasts that it believes in ‘total globalisation’. This amounts to a belief that British capitalists and bankers have a duty to get a much bigger return on their capital by investing it in Asia or South America – anywhere but Britain where the trade unions are still powerful.
Alongside this approach is its policy of super-privatisation, in which it seeks to privatise all state owned services such as health and education by handing over the state budget to private companies from all over the planet to introduce health and education markets.
However, its belief in the advantages of the global energy market has taken a big hit after its difficulties in Iraq, where it has been unable to steal Iraq’s oil, leading to an enormous inflation in oil and gas prices, while it has ‘problems of trust’ in relying on Russian gas.
As far as Russia is concerned the Blair government correctly estimates that the working class has not been defeated and the threat of Bolshevism and political revolution remain. Faced with this, it reasons that contracts with Russian nationalised gas and oil giants may well prove not to be worth the paper they are written on.
This contradiction they term a ‘security’ problem.
The closure of the British mining industry and the decline of North Sea oil has left the British capitalists naked, depending on foreign coal, gas and oil in a situation where gas and oil prices are rocketing upwards, and could even be cut off by revolutions in the Gulf and the Middle East.
Putting your faith in global markets is OK, if you have the power to hold them in your grasp, by force, as the US could.
But not even US imperialism can do that, after its defeat in the Iraq war.
This is why the energy future is grim for the British bosses.
In this critical situation Blair is opting for a nuclear future. He and his cronies have no intention of reopening the coal mining industry to produce clean coal, since that would of course mean the return to a powerful position of the National Union of Miners, after Thatcher spent £6 billion trying to exterminate it in 1984-85.
Nuclear power stations are enormously expensive to build. As well, they harm the lives of large numbers of people who live around them in terms of cancers, the constant danger of leaks and emissions of all kinds, and the risk of a nuclear power meltdown.
They are even more expensive to put out of action and decommission when their working life is over.
Then there is the massive problem of storing in deep concrete shelters huge quantities of highly dangerous radioactive waste, which remains fatal for tens of thousands of years.
This is the future that British capitalism is offering, a nuclear nightmare, along with much higher energy prices and energy rationing.
The immediate way forward as far as energy is concerned is though a reopening of the mining industry and the production of clean coal, alongside the use of other fossil fuels, plus the use of wave and wind power.
The only way to ensure secure supplies of energy is to have a safe and peaceful world. That means getting rid of the cause of war, capitalism and imperialism, and moving forward to socialism, getting rid of the current division of the world into exploiting and exploited nations.
This will mean the end of ‘unequal treaties’ of all kinds including trade agreements which serve only the interests of the bosses and bankers.
Only in this way can free and fair trade take place between nations. That this is preferable to Blair’s nuclear nightmare is obvious.