Miliband must publish his secret China energy deal

This week, Ed Miliband had two clear opportunities to explain why he will not publish the UK’s energy cooperation agreement with China from March 2025. First, in the House of Commons, when challenged by the Shadow Energy Secretary, Claire Coutinho, he dismissed the concern as a “wacky conspiracy theory that she gets on the internet”. Then again before the Energy Security and Net Zero Committee, where he was asked repeatedly why the agreement has not been disclosed and refused to answer the question seventeen times. 

But this is not a conspiracy theory. Energy security is national security.

This is an agreement that concerns critical infrastructure. It has been signed with a state that NATO describes as a “systemic challenge”. Last year, China and Russia described their partnership as having “no limits”. As such, Parliament and the public are entitled to know what ministers are signing in the country’s name.

The debate so far has centred on human rights. It is suspected that publication could expose the companies embedded in Britain’s green supply chains, potentially triggering strategic litigation and even delaying key Net Zero targets. That would be politically awkward for a government that presents itself as legally scrupulous and morally exacting.

Yet the uncomfortable reality is that without Chinese manufacturing dominance in turbines, batteries and grid equipment, Clean Power 2030 becomes far harder to deliver. And as one of America’s Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin, once observed: “Necessity never made a good bargain.”

Human rights concerns are serious and legitimate. But when the subject is energy systems and supply chains, the central issue is strategic.

Anyone concerned with Britain’s hard power capabilities – and the independence of our democratic institutions – in the face of revisionist powers such as China and Russia should be concerned about an agreement that deepens structural dependence in sectors Beijing openly treats as instruments of strategic leverage and as foundations of its military-industrial strength.

This is not paranoia or alarmism. Let’s just take what China’s President Xi Jinping said in 2020. 

During the Covid pandemic, Xi described the crisis as a “stress test [for China’s great power status] under actual combat conditions”. He then set out, with unusual frankness, how Beijing understands supply chains as leverage. China, he said, must “build on our advantages” and forge “assassin’s mace” technologies – capabilities designed to offset stronger powers by exploiting points of dependence. It must “tighten international production chains’ dependence on China”, forming “powerful countermeasures and deterrent capabilities” based on the ability to cut off supply to foreigners. He then singled out sectors such as electric power equipment, communications equipment and “new energy”.

Industrial supply chains have always carried strategic weight. Even nineteenth-century Britain understood that industrial capacity underpinned power. What has changed in today’s multipolar order is the degree of concentration, the speed of digitised interconnection, and the willingness of states to weaponise dependency. Control over manufacturing ecosystems now generates leverage at a global scale. The Covid years demonstrated that with uncomfortable clarity.

And what British policymakers too often fail to confront is how deeply those industrial ecosystems are entangled with geopolitics. A Bloomberg analysis published this week estimated that a war over Taiwan between the United States and China would wipe $10 trillion – roughly 10 per cent of global GDP – off the map. Beyond the principal actors, the European Union could see output fall by 10.9 per cent, and the UK by 6.1 per cent. Dependency can be activated – and exploited – very quickly.

But there is no need to speculate about future conflicts. Chinese-dominated supply chains are already shaping the battlefield in Europe. Consider the war in Ukraine. Kyiv’s sanctions adviser, Vladyslav Vlasiuk, has said that when the foreign-made components in Russian weapons such as drones are counted, roughly 60 per cent originate in China. Other European officials place the figure closer to 80 per cent, describing Chinese supply as the single greatest obstacle to effective sanctions enforcement against Russia.

For all the rhetoric about ending dependence on Russian oil and gas – revenues that fund Putin’s war machine – there has been little scrutiny by Miliband of how the renewable technologies we now rely on are tied to Chinese supply chains that continue to enable Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine. In seeking to escape one strategic dependency, Britain is now entrenching another because China dominates the world’s green industrial base. 

Defenders of the deal may counter criticism by insisting that the agreement is merely a memorandum of understanding and that security agencies would intervene if anything genuinely dangerous were contemplated. Perhaps. Yet even innocuous sounding agreements can become politically and economically costly to unwind.

As the master of geoeconomics, China’s industrial diplomacy is often structured to embed long-term ecosystems of technology, standards and commercial dependency. Disentanglement is rarely painless. Nottingham City Council, for example, has been warned that severing its “sister city” relationship with Ningbo could cost the local economy up to £100 million a year, according to documents released under pressure. Exit, once entanglement has deepened, carries a heavy price.

Given how this Government – and the Conservatives before it – have used Contracts for Difference and poison pill clauses to lock in long-term renewable energy commitments, it is not unreasonable to ask whether international agreements with China could similarly entrench supply-chain dependencies that a future government with a mandate to end Net Zero would struggle to unwind after the next election. Until the agreement is published in full, we do not know.   

Miliband is not a malevolent figure. He clearly believes Net Zero will help to create a better world. He may also believe that engagement and cooperation with China are marks of political maturity. But he is increasingly reminiscent of the late Victorian and Edwardian romantic idealists – before 1914 – who convinced themselves that commerce and interdependence would soften the rivalry with Imperial Germany. 

After the Mandelson–Epstein affair, not to mention the shady Chagos Islands deal and the Chinese mega-embassy scandal, secrecy and partial disclosure will not wash with voters. In a climate of eroded trust, the only way to determine whether this government is acting in the national interest is through full transparency. As such, Miliband must publish his deal.