Mark Carney stood up at Davos and did something you don’t often hear from politicians: he described the world as it is, not as we wish it still was. The old “rules based order” is fraying, great powers are weaponising trade and supply chains, and sovereignty now means something brutally practical. Can you keep your economy running when someone decides to squeeze you?
His answer was “strategic autonomy”, which sounds grand until you translate it into plain English. It means resilience. It means options. It means not being one shock away from panic buying gas at any price.
And once you’ve said that out loud, you’ve basically written a love letter to the EU without meaning to. Because the EU is what “middle powers banding together” looks like when it actually exists. Not a summit photo, not a press release, but a permanent bloc with scale, rules, money, and the ability to negotiate like an adult.
That’s the part we gave up. Brexit wasn’t just leaving an institution, it was leaving leverage. We traded the power of a continental market for the thrill of “sovereignty”, then acted surprised when we had less influence over the rules we still have to live with.
Energy is where this becomes painfully obvious. If your electricity and heating depend on imported gas priced on global markets, you are not sovereign. You’re renting stability from the world, and the rent spikes whenever there’s a war, a cartel squeeze, or a trader panic. Flags don’t keep the lights on.
Which is why Net Zero matters, and why the anti-Net Zero brigade annoy me so much. Net Zero isn’t a lefty hobby or a moral crusade. It’s energy security with a climate benefit. It’s the long way of saying: stop being held hostage by fossil fuels.
Yes, it costs money. So does doing nothing. So does every gas price shock. So does every flooded road, wrecked harvest, and insurance bill creeping up because the climate is going off-script.
The UK should be brilliant at this. We’ve got wind, decent solar, engineering talent, and every reason to electrify fast. But we’ve somehow turned it into a culture war, as if physics cares what Nigel Farage thinks.
Carney’s point was simple: the world is hardening. Power is back. Energy is leverage. The winners will be the countries that build resilience quietly and at scale.
Which is why the EU will muddle through, and why Britain will keep paying extra for the privilege of pretending “going it alone” is the same thing as being in control.
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