The Phantom Lever: Burnham’s ‘GB Grid’ could be an Escape Hatch from a 100-Year Mistake
The Devolution of Political Power Requires the Decentralisation of Electrical Power
In a few hours, Andy Burnham will deliver the most important speech of his life – a Prime Minister facing his first conference as leader of a confused and fearful country. It is a moment of immense national significance.
Britain desperately needs Andy Burnham to succeed. Millions of Britons, myself included, wish him strength as he takes on the punishing cost-of-living crisis and challenges failed economic orthodoxies. Because he has not yet delivered his keynote, I do not know what he will say, and the operational details leaked last night of the £4bn ‘GB Grid’ are sparse. But right from his first appearance in the Commons as Prime Minister, he was saying clearly and repeatedly that “business is having to wait too long for grid connections.” What that means exactly is still a mystery. There could well be community energy exceptions or local provisions hidden in the fine print. The commitment shows Burnham’s heart is in the right place, but based on the framework released so far, it won’t assist us in breaking free from the centralised grid that has, for the last 100 years, dictated exactly where we are allowed to live, work, and play.
In the corridors of Whitehall and the backrooms of union headquarters, the whisperers have done their work. Infrastructure unions hungry for sprawling capital projects, civil servants who know no other model than 20th-century central planning, and political advisers hunting for a muscular, patriotic soundbite have surrounded the new Prime Minister. They have persuaded him that greatness lies in building a “Big Grid” – that creating a state-backed transmission company is the modern equivalent of Attlee’s 1945 settlement.
They have handed him a phantom lever. He will pull it with a great flourish… and billions of pounds of public money will vanish into corporate balance sheets. The structural crisis crushing British billpayers will remain entirely untouched. It is going to go horribly wrong.
Consider the reality beneath the political rhetoric. This is not the nationalisation of the grid. If Burnham were taking the high-voltage transmission system into outright public ownership, one could debate the ideological merits of a unified state monopoly. Instead, GB Grid is a shadow bailout, a reward for failure, and the first inkling that the energy executives, who have already cost us tens of billions in grid admin charges, will be allowed to walk away with their profits.
By stepping in to build network connections and co-invest in stalled works alongside private operators, the state is volunteering to absorb the most difficult, expensive, and delayed delivery bottlenecks. It is using taxpayer capital to clear a backlog created by decades of managerial failure inside incumbent monopolies like National Grid Electricity Transmission (NGET), where stalled maintenance and capital projects have piled up while connection queues stretched to 15 years. The private transmission operators