At the end of last month, a fire at an electrical substation in Maida Vale caused chaos in west London. Homes lost power. Transport services ground to a halt. It came in the same week as outages across Spain and Portugal and just a few weeks after a fire at another substation caused Heathrow airport to shut down. We also know that the British government is drawing up contingency plans for Russian attacks on energy infrastructure. All of this raises an important question: how resilient would the British state be in the face of a determined effort to cripple its power grid?
The blunt answer is: not very. David Betz, at King’s College London, has long warned that Britain’s national infrastructure is dangerously vulnerable to simple tools such as hammers and hacksaws. Politicians often preoccupy themselves with the abstract threats of the digital age while ignoring the reality that substations, transformers and transmission towers remain exposed to the age-old dangers of vandalism, arson and explosives.
Academics such as Betz believe financial crises and ethnic tensions under the surface of British society are creating the conditions for not just dangerous unrest but outright civil war. Betz thinks this conflict will take place between diverse groups in the cities and ‘nativists’ in the countryside, the latter of whom will have easy access to critical infrastructure outside of cities.
Our security services would be stretched far beyond their capacity to foil plots by individuals and groups. During the Troubles, the IRA plotted to knock out power stations in south-east England using bombs. As recently as 2022, an extremist group in Germany planned to destabilise the government in part by disabling access to the energy grid, with conspirators including former members of the German army.
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