Pipeline run for this draft

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You drive past a petrol station in Bristol or Hull or Swansea or Basildon and there are fifty cars queued out onto the road. Fifty. People arguing with the attendants because the £30 limit means she can't fill her tank enough to get to her parents' for Easter. This is Britain in April 2026. We import nearly half our oil, despite sitting on considerable untapped reserves. We have no meaningful strategic reserve to speak of. The Strait of Hormuz closes and within five weeks we're rationing fuel at the forecourt like it's 1973 again. Every government since the nineties knew this dependency was a vulnerability. Every single one decided it was a problem for the next lot. Well, there is no next lot any more. There's just us, in the queue, watching the price tick up. Britain could have the cheapest energy in the developed world within a decade. And in fact it's not so much a nice ambition as it is a geopolitical and autarchic necessity. Without it, we are at the mercy of every war we didn't start and every dictator we can't control. That's not sovereignty. That's a country on a leash.