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.
And it is not just investment we are losing. It is autonomy.
If we cannot host and power the infrastructure of intelligence, we will depend on others to run our models, store our data, and secure our systems. That includes national defence. The Ministry of Defence has already admitted that AI-enabled military systems require sovereign computing hardware. Without it, we either downgrade our capabilities or outsource them. That is not strategy. It is surrender.
And from that surrender comes a deeper form of dependency.
In the 20th century, empires extracted value by imposing railways and trade routes. In the 21st, the tools are digital; platforms, algorithms, and privately owned computing systems. If Britain relinquishes its ability to govern the foundations of the AI era, it will not shape the system. It will rent access to it. And the rent will not be cheap.
But the cost is more than economic. It is constitutional.
AI infrastructure will determine not only who leads but who writes the rules of the new global order. History shows that those who write the rules protect themselves. This is not just a loss of competitiveness. It is the construction of a system designed to push economic risk and climate volatility downward.
The working class will not simply be governed by systems they do not own. They will be governed by systems built to offload future burdens onto them, failing infrastructure, energy rationing, degraded public services and welfare, and digital controls, so that the AI elite remains insulated from disruption. Climate harm will not be prevented. It will be redistributed.
This is not theoretical. The AI revolution is already underway. It is not led by governments. It is dominated by private capital, elite technical talent, and commercial platforms. According to The New York Times, top AI researchers are now receiving pay packages worth up to $250 million. No government can match that. Not even close.
The idea that government will lead this transformation is a fantasy. But that does not mean it has no role. Quite the opposite: the state must create the conditions for sovereign AI infrastructure to exist on British soil. That means stable, low-cost baseload power. It means national data centres. It means a decisive pivot from performance politics to physical capability.
Because infrastructure goes where energy is cheapest and most reliable. Social and economic mobility will form around those places. That is not a projection. It is already happening, from Virginia to Dublin.
If Britain wants opportunity beyond the M25, beyond the tech elite, and into places that have endured a generation of decline, it must host the infrastructure of the AI economy. If not, those jobs will go elsewhere. And the promises of net zero, retraining, green industries, and a fair transition will be remembered as just that: promises.
We are at risk of building a new economic underclass. Not because of climate inaction, but because of climate policy that prioritises symbolism over capability, and narrative over national resilience.
This is not climate denial. It is climate realism. The UK produces less than 1% of global emissions. Even perfect decarbonisation will have no measurable planetary effect. But the economic harm from rising prices, falling investment, and strategic decline is already visible and growing. Climate change is a locked-in reality. The question is no longer whether it will happen, but whether we can afford to adapt to its effects, and who will pay for that adaptation.
What we are losing is not just GDP. We are losing leverage. We are losing autonomy. We are losing the ability to say, credibly, that we control our future.
Net zero must no longer be treated as a sacred cause or an instrument of moral vanity. It has become a mechanism for inequality, dependence, and elite insulation. This is not about left or right. It is about survival.
Abolishing net zero, in its current form, is now a moral necessity. We cannot decarbonise symbolically while surrendering economically. We cannot address climate threats by destroying the very infrastructure needed to adapt to them.
This is urgent. Every year we wait, the capital goes elsewhere. The talent goes elsewhere. Our future goes elsewhere.
Britain built the first Industrial Revolution. We now face the next, and the fastest in human history. If we wish to remain sovereign, prosperous, and free, we must act.
That means energy realism. It means sovereign infrastructure. It means local opportunity.