Sir Humphrey has learned to hold his nose. After decades of official disgust at mining, refining and petrochemicals, Whitehall is learning to love the dirty stuff again – the very things we need to defend ourselves and grow a modern economy.
The vibe shift is palpable in Westminster and reflected in the booming share prices of mining and defence companies. And about time, too. In a collective spasm of shame, we stopped digging up and working with the most vital materials of the modern world.
Our policy class considered these industries to be filthy, and at Davos, the elite toasted itself for its high standards of moral hygiene by making a new, cleaner, “weightless” world. But we were becoming strategically dependent on China for the basics of modern life.
“China has realised they can dominate the world,” says Jeremy Wrathall of Cornish Lithium, which opened a £15m demonstration plant last autumn, producing battery-grade lithium hydroxide for batteries as a by-product.
“Most of the West has been asleep at the wheel and China is now laughing all the way to the bank.”
Today, China controls the supply chains for many of these critical minerals, and in December, the PRC turned the screws further. “So, you want to hurt our semiconductor industry?” asked Beijing. “Well, get a load of this”.
It promptly blocked the United States from receiving any antimony, gallium or germanium. The message was clear: we can hurt you far more than you can hurt us, because only we have what you need, and you don’t.
Donald Trump’s indulgence of Vladimir Putin may look craven in European capitals, but it’s an entirely rational strategic response to China’s critical minerals monopolies.
The US can secure supplies from mineral-rich Russia and Ukraine to buy time for its own domestic refining to grow. If this peels Russia away from its alliance of convenience with Trump’s real enemy, China, then that’s a bonus.
But the British minerals story remains largely unappreciated. There’s lithium and tin in Cornwall, copper and gold in Northern Ireland, and nickel, cobalt and rare earths in Scotland.
“For modern warfare, you need metals such as lithium, caesium and rubidium for atomic clocks and night goggles,” says Wrathall. “We will be producing them in Cornwall as a by-product of what we do.”
Not long ago, Whitehall had one official dealing with critical minerals, now there are 50 across five departments. The paybacks for tiny strategic investments are huge: one £15m scheme captured £170m of investment.
“We’re starting to see the green shoots of an industrial foundation for which we can build a strong critical minerals supply chain,” says Jeff Townsend of the Critical Minerals Association. With an integrated petrochemicals centre and freeport on Teesside, the parts are falling into place.
Sky-high industrial energy prices need to come down, but what’s really missing is a wider sense of the genuine industrial renaissance before us.
We can not only dig the stuff up but apply science to it to create a higher-value product: what’s called “midstream processing”. And we can also start exploiting the resources that we think are there, but haven’t bothered to look for since the Macmillan era.
Re-shoring makes us more secure and enables us to apply scientific innovation to add value.
The UK Critical Mineral Intelligence Centre at the British Geological Survey has just published its critical assessments. Gavin Mudd, its director, explains how we export 2,000 tonnes a year of tungsten, a metal vital to our defence industry.
But we could export 15,000 tonnes thanks to ingenious new recovery techniques: that’s about 20pc of the world’s production.
Most tantalising of all are the untapped riches under our soil. We’re pretty sure they are there but haven’t had to look for them for decades.
“The last national geophysical surveys were done in the 1950s and 1960s,” explains Mudd.
Wratham has unearthed archives that even the British Geological Survey (BGS) didn’t know it had. And the strategic and commercial imperative is now urgent.
For example, monazite is an ore that is described as a “pathfinder” to rare earths, yielding cerium, lanthanum, and neodymium. It is incredibly expensive, and Wales is full of it. (It’s a common misconception that rare earth metals are rare.)
But we haven’t tried to assess those monazite resource deposits for more than 30 years. Resourcing the geologists at the BGS could be the smartest investment any government makes, for who knows what else they will find.
So many times, this column often rues, the UK has found itself with a winning lottery ticket only to throw it away.
For example, in 2013 fracking was popular across the country, particularly in communities that stood to benefit from it. However, a campaign was then launched equating the process to “tiny explosions”, a highly misleading description of spraying rocks with water.
This activated the environmentalists, and politicians got nervous. The Colvile-Wolf authored Conservative Manifesto of 2019 killed shale gas for a decade.
The revulsion against mining and industry culminated in Boris Johnson’s speech to the United Nations in 2021, which talked about the derangement of the “natural order”.
We can’t afford to make that mistake again – to capitulate to wild, bourgeoisie fears of getting dirty, and using our natural riches.
What we have is better than gold.
Britain cannot repeat its fracking mistake in the race for critical minerals
Whitehall must overcome its disgust at ‘dirty’ industries or risk missing out on a genuine industrial renaissance