First it was Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, now it is the blockade of the world’s petroleum artery in the Gulf. For the second time in four years, Britain is facing an energy crisis that has been made much worse because of the absence of preparation by its political leaders.

The fact is that our energy politics were conceived for a world where convulsive, global events were a thing of the past. The notion that it would be difficult to access supplies of oil or liquefied natural gas from the international markets did not figure in the understanding of the politicians and officials who shaped our perilous current moment. But even today, the advocates of energy sovereignty on the left and right appear to lack knowledge, understanding or power over this very foundational matter.

The roots of the crisis lie in a succession of choices made between the 1980s and 2010s, when British governments eschewed concern over control and ownership of our energy supplies. “Selling coal to Newcastle” went from an idiom meaning a pointless action to a commercial reality as Britain privatised its strategic energy industries, decimated domestic capacity and opened up to the international market. Valuable North Sea gas supplies were burned up cheaply and quickly in power stations while promising state support for onshore wind turbines was discontinued, leaving Britain highly dependent on imported kit in that leading new sector. In 2017, Theresa May’s Conservative government even oversaw the closure of Britain’s main gas storage facility off the Yorkshire coast at Rough (only for it to be rushed into reopening after the 2022 price spiral).

One response today has been to demand renewed drilling in the North Sea to displace imported oil and gas. This is popular on the right but also has some supporters on the centre and left. Reform and Conservative politicians, along with the Scottish National party, have been particularly keen to lampoon Labour’s energy secretary, Ed Miliband, for pursuing a ban on further offshore exploration during a moment of global turbulence.

Arguments for renewed North Sea drilling have a politically valuable, meme-like quality: drill, baby, drill. They tell a seemingly plausible tale of untold riches being kept from British citizens by nefarious green eco warriors and red bureaucrats. The case looks much trickier when it is held up to more scrutiny. North Sea petroleum production is overwhelmingly exported, partly because Britain’s refineries are not adapted to manufacturing fuels from the “maturing basins” under the North Sea. (The oil there has evolved from a “light” and “sweet” crude towards “heavy” and “bitter” varieties, as the most valuable and easiest to refine petroleum was extracted first.)

Furthermore, Britain’s refining sector – which turns crude oil into sellable products such as petrol – is in retreat. There were 18 major plants in the early 1970s, but this had dwindled to six in 2025, with two more closing last year alone: Grangemouth in Scotland and Lindsey in the East Midlands. The Conservative government in power in 2023 accepted Grangemouth’s closure when it was announced by Petroineos, a partnership between the Chinese state-owned PetroChina and Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos. Neither the incoming Labour government nor the SNP Scottish government acted to save it.

Grangemouth was a jet fuel refiner. Its closure has contributed to Britain’s shortage in a crucial manufactured product, the short supply of which might be leading to a summer of rationing and cancelled flights. The current moment certainly demonstrates the continued strategic value of domestic refineries. Advocates of investing in new refining capacity, however, would have to explain how they intended to subsidise it – either through public ownership or some form of subsidy payment to operators, which would probably either support foreign state-owned enterprises such as PetroChina or line the pockets of Ratcliffe.

Given these complications, why rely on imported oil and gas when we have our own wind and solar, after all? Miliband has championed clean power as an alternative to polluting and politically damaging fossil fuels. Yet the case for these alternatives often seems to rest on the misleading assumptions in the public debate that “energy” and “electricity” are interchangeable. Solar and wind produce electricity, but the truth is that Britain still overwhelmingly needs energy in the form of hydrocarbons, which accounted for 70% of energy consumption in 2024. That 70% includes everything from aviation and shipping to domestic heating and industry.

Electricity accounted for less than a quarter of final British energy consumption in 2024. Annual electricity production is, in fact, far below where it stood at the turn of the century. While we hear much about the rising renewables sector, the growth of wind and solar is only partly replacing Britain’s lost coal and nuclear capacity. The latter has not recovered from the impact of privatisation in the early 1990s, which was accompanied by competition from cheaper gas and more recently from renewables.

The problem is that oil and gas are not straightforwardly interchangeable with electrical power. Electricity does not yet fuel large commercial airliners, nor does it propel petrol cars or power gas boilers. Accordingly, the answer is to Electrify Everything – a clarion call of the environmental movement that Miliband appears to at least implicitly embrace. But the stubborn reality is that the pace of change in Britain is glacial. Reliance on market mechanisms and private providers to encourage millions of households to transition to electric cars or heat pumps means we are nowhere near being able to electrify everything. These policies also have perverse distributional outcomes: wealthier households are gaining most from public subsidies.

Britain’s responses to the energy consequences of the gravely real war in the Middle East have a strongly phoney war character. Our energy politics simulates contention and conflict. But it avoids confronting the need to take responsibility – that means rapid state action, far beyond anything that the Labour government has proposed, in rolling out electrification at scale and pace. That is what “energy sovereignty” would look like.

• Ewan Gibbs is a historian of energy, industry, work and protest at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Coal Country: The Meaning and Memory of Deindustrialization in Postwar Scotland