The evils of slavery weigh so heavily on Britain’s conscience that we must decolonise our museums and our university courses, tear down statues of all those involved in the trade and quite possibly pay billions of pounds in reparations to the descendants of slaves who live 200 years ago. Yet the obsession with putting right historic wrongs does not, it seem, extend to rooting out slavery which is taking place beneath our noses in current times.
When the bill to set up Ed Miliband’s Great British Energy reached the House of Lords, Lord Alton of Liverpool, a former Liberal MP who now sits as a crossbencher, tabled an amendment which would stop the government-owned company buying solar panels where there is ‘credible evidence’ that slavery has been used in their manufacturing process. Now, the government is set to whip its MPs to remove the clause. The ‘race to net zero’, as ministers like to call it, appears to trump the human rights of forced labourers.
Lord Alton’s amendment, which passed by 175 to 125 votes in the Lords, is no wrecking amendment. It was put there because there is considerable evidence that the manufacture of solar panels is steeped in slave labour among Uighurs in China. The problem is polysilicon, which is used in the manufacture of 95 per cent of the world’s solar panels. Nearly half of it comes from factories in the Xinjiang region of northwest China.
Research by Sheffield Hallam University has lifted the lid on what goes on there. Almost all of Xinjiang’s polysilicon is produced in factories owned by four companies which have been involved in Chinese government labour programmes – officially set up to boost the economy of the region but which many fear have been designed to suppress the Uighurs and choke off dissent. Those who work on these programmes seem a long way removed from the ‘well paid green jobs’ which Miliband keeps promising us will result from net zero commitments. ‘First person reports indicate that people working in the camps are either unpaid, paid far less than the minimum wage, or have their salaries reduced with the explanation that they owe a debt to their employers for food or transport to work,’ the Sheffield Hallam study reports. Local police forces hold the ID cards of the workers, which are compulsory for internal travel within China, while many Xinjiang factories themselves are surrounded by razor wire and steel fences – apparently designed to stop people getting out rather than in.
While the government insists that Lord Alton’s amendment is unnecessary because renewable energy companies are already under obligation to try to ensure that their supply chains are free of forced labour, there is scant sign that the current law is working. The associations with forced labour taint not just Chinese-made solar panels but those made all around the world, as many manufacturers elsewhere also source their polysilicon from China.
Green energy enthusiasts are forever boasting of how the price of solar panels has plunged in recent years and that it is now one of the cheapest forms of energy worldwide. But then I dare say if oil and gas companies working in the North Sea were allowed to, and minded to, use slave labour to operate their rigs that would be a cheaper form of energy, too. Net zero has become such a religion that it has created a moral blindspot among many of those who advocate it. Solar energy might be ‘clean’ in the sense it is responsible for relatively few carbon emissions, but in terms of the human rights of the workers who make the panels it is anything but.
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