Net Zero Sacrifices Working Class To a New Tech Empire

Britain once built the infrastructure of empire. Today, it is dismantling the infrastructure of sovereignty. Not by accident, but by policy design. 

Net zero was meant to deliver justice, green jobs, and a fairer future. But in practice, it is entrenching inequality, excluding regions from economic renewal, and handing control of the next industrial revolution to foreign monopolies. While elites claim moral leadership, working-class communities are left with rising bills, lost jobs, and no stake in the future.  

At precisely the moment artificial intelligence is redrawing the map of global power, Britain is making itself strategically irrelevant. The models that drive trade, defence, and national security are trained on high-performance computing infrastructure.  These data centres require uninterrupted, affordable electricity and cannot run on intermittent power. A single disruption can undo weeks of training time. Yet Britain’s energy policy remains fixated on variable renewables and symbolic emissions targets.  

Tech giants like Microsoft, Meta, and Google are investing hundreds of billions in AI capacity. They are building in Ireland, Virginia, the UAE, and Southeast Asia. They are not building in Britain. The grid is too fragile. The energy costs are too high. The regulatory signals are too confused.