Modern Political Power & Social Paralysis

Just over a year ago, I stood in front of my neighbour in bewilderment at her cognitive dissonance. She was about to perform a ritual known across the political landscape as “tactical voting” while telling me that “net-zero” wasn’t just a buzzword. How did so many people with dread about planetary collapse vote for a character for whom planetary risk is subordinated to the financial risk concerns of his donors and for whom environmentalism is something you disinfect your hands after touching? How did Starmer sell the Greens on Labour Green, a financial product designed to look like transformative action while fitting neatly into a spreadsheet marked “Fiscally Prudent?”

The headline act was a publicly owned energy company: Great British Energy (GBE). Sounds revolutionary, doesn’t it? Like the NHS, but for electrons! The sales pitch: GBE would be the wise, patient co-investor, partnering with the rent-seeking private sector to build renewable stuff. The magic wasn’t just in generating power, oh no. It was in generating revenue. If it sounded too good to be true, that’s because it was. It was yet another misguided partnership with the private sector so that a state-owned entity can make money while saving the planet.

How could my neighbour’s vote possibly be wasted in this way? She was seduced by Labour’s promises: net-zero by 2030, clean electricity by 2030, ban on new petrol/diesel cars, quadruple offshore wind capacity, double onshore wind, and treble solar deployment. She raved about a £28bn Green Prosperity Plan, seven short years to utterly rewire a nation’s energy infrastructure, and hundreds of thousands of green jobs. Nothing like superlatives in the construction of political rhetoric to tickle the imagination of voters: MAKE BRITAIN A CLEAN ENERGY SUPERPOWER.

And so, like many Greens starved of any sign of state ambition beyond recycling targets, she gave away her tactical vote, believing that Labour was serious. The National Wealth Fund (NWF), launched by Labour to “crowd in” private money, attracting about £3 for every £1 of public investment into green energy, was nothing more than another wealth-extraction vehicle to siphon profits into the financial sector at the expense of the taxpayer. The details are hidden behind the financial engineering of equity, debt, mezzanine finance, and government guarantees, all designed to mobilise private capital by providing low-risk returns and guarantees against catastrophic losses. The Government’s equity exposure is what high finance calls the first-loss tranche, a technical term for losses being absorbed by public capital before private entities take a hit. If a project goes belly up and the assets are liquidated, the private investors will get their money back first, and government will bear the losses.

The selling point is that returns depend on “market success,” which is a euphemism for you, the taxpayer, being on the line when projects fail, while private financiers pocket the low-risk returns juiced far above boring old gilt yields that should have been the true cost of funding. It’s all a fiscal illusionist act. The entire structure is engineered to make the public risk vanish from the debt spotlight. Labour’s shiny new “fiscal rules” perform the trick: they magically offset the pretend “equity” value against the sovereign debt issued to fund it. And the underwriting risk absorbed by taxpayers? Merely contingent liabilities - conveniently parked off-balance-sheet, like a toxic asset stashed in the nation’s attic. Poof! Headline debt figures stay pristine, with any immediate political impact of a write-down or loss in asset value being delayed or diluted due to the infrequent revaluations for non-marketable public sector financial assets.

So how did we get here? After decades of Tory Private Finance Initiative (PFI) disasters – where the public purse became a permanent feedbag for private profit – why do all the major parties still peddle this wealth extraction tool as sensible “de-risking”? Why the desperate need to lure private capital with its extortionate rate of return, when the Government can borrow at the lowest market rates via gilts? Does Westminster truly believe Britons prefer paying inflated energy bills – the hidden “tax” enriching fund managers – over straightforward, cheaper public investment offset by actual, transparent taxes? The grim reality is clear: we’re stuck replaying the neoliberal greatest hits; socialism for the financial sector (which always gets bailed out), austerity for the planet, and the taxpayer is the eternal loss absorber.

This isn’t the end of the story; it’s the opening chapter of Britain’s real political prospectus: Who actually runs Britain? We often associate statist approaches to government as authoritarian. Think lockdowns. Yet, when faced with actual existential collapse - you know, the planetary kind - our Labour government, elected on a wave of Green tactical despair, suddenly discovers… fiscal constraints! Curious, isn’t it? The state can mobilise armies, bail out banks, and lock down cities, but rewiring the energy grid without handing BlackRock an obscene windfall? Apparently, that’s a bridge too far, financed by magic beans and an imaginary money tree.

What is clear is that the West’s power structure isn’t a pyramid. Finance drips capital onto media (ads, corporate debt, ownership). Dark money gushes into election campaigns: donor dinners, old boy networks and gentlemen’s clubs, who groom rising-star MPs on “how things really work” – a velvet-rope indoctrination where public service is quaint and wealth is gospel. Interest groups and think-tanks funded by Big Oil masquerade influence as research and “intelligence laundromats” to spin privatised dogma for media and MPs to parrot. Media sculpts election narratives, yes, but also runs sophisticated psychological operations: burying stories that threaten ad revenue. Academia polishes the whole rotten edifice with peer-reviewed justifications for why extracting maximum private profit from public necessity is simply efficient. These actors do not operate in isolation; they form a self-reinforcing network of control.

It is no wonder that Greens feel like they’ve traded their precious vote for a subordinated debt note in Labour’s grand scheme. They were sold an ambitious and interventionist State, but the State they got seems perpetually outmanoeuvred. Will Green MPs fare any better if they get any power? Or are they destined to be the ESG division of a government whose real portfolio is managed by the City of London?

Consider the revolving door, the ultimate insider trading. It’s not corruption; it’s career arbitrage. A regulator today, a lobbyist tomorrow. A cabinet minister pushing “partnerships,” then collecting a golden parachute from the very firms that profited. Should Rishi Sunak glide into Goldman Sachs? Why blame him, when we have made it legal? It’s the system’s exit bonus for services rendered. The rules allow it. The system expects it. Democracy’s legitimacy comes from the ballot box; its operation comes pre-loaded with systemic biases favouring those who already hold most of the chips.

This is the brutal maths Greens face: Power in the West is diversified. Not concentrated in a single dictator, but spread across a network optimised for preserving itself. Corporations, academia, banks, media conglomerates, judicial elites - they don’t take orders from the electorate; they form an unconscious political force of convenience and self-preservation. They don’t control the system outright; they are the system, constantly rebalancing their influence portfolios for cooperation to preserve the status quo while maintaining plausible deniability of grand coordination. In the world’s oldest democracy, the political system is resilient against Putin-style takeovers, yes, but utterly paralysed when asked to mobilise society against a slow-motion climate disaster that doesn’t offer quarterly dividends. The political machinery comes to a grinding halt whenever a proposed change threatens the status quo, which exists to preserve the current power structure.

Why does any of this matter? Because my neighbour’s tactical vote, seduced by Labour’s green prospectus, crashed headlong into this invisible infrastructure of obstruction. The £28bn? Dwarfed by the gravitational pull of business-as-usual. The National Wealth Fund? Another vehicle for privatising the gains while nationalising the risk, buried in off-balance-sheet accounting that will go down in British history as one of its greatest financial deceits. The “urgency” of 2030? Immediately downgraded to “ambition” upon contact with the power network’s risk-aversion protocols.

The satirical tragedy isn’t that Labour lied. It’s that they genuinely believed their spreadsheets could override Britain’s power structure. Many Labour voters swapped purity – genuine MPs committed to welfare and the planet – for the promise of strategic influence to oust the Tories, only to discover the influence was heavily leveraged against them. The system isn’t broken; it’s functioning exactly as designed to absorb dissent, repackage promises, and ensure the returns on crisis flow to the usual suspects. The paralysis isn’t a bug; it’s the system’s equilibrium state. And understanding how it works is the only way for well-meaning politicians to have a better plan to change the structure of the system itself.

This is first in a collection of articles exploring modern political power and social paralysis. Subscribe to Green House Think Tank newsletter to be send upcoming articles when they are released.

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