The Critical Minerals Strategy is a chance for Labour to rediscover ‘securonomics’
The resources underneath parts of Britain offer a unique opportunity to secure the country’s future as well as re-empower working class communities
Written by Frederick Harry Pitts, Associate Professor in Political Economy & the Future of Work and Head of Humanities & Social Sciences at the University of Exeter’s Cornwall Campus, Deputy Director of the Centre for the Public Understanding of Defence & Security and a Co-Investigator of the UKRI Critical Minerals Challenge Centre and ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures.
Power in the age of unpeace increasingly rests on creation and control of physical resources and products. But in the context of a national political economy whose contradictions seem too substantial to solve, the Budget epitomised the tendency of the government to lapse back into the Labour comfort zone of chopping and changing who takes what rather than who makes what.
Labour advanced in opposition what Ben Glover calls a ‘politics of production’ based more on reindustrialisation rather than redistribution, on power rather than poverty. The Chancellor called this ‘securonomics’, informing a policy agenda focused on rebuilding Britain’s industrial base. This was underpinned not only by the promise of economic security for working-class communities but national security in a geopolitical order increasingly shaped by competition for ownership and production of assets and materials.
However, as Andrew O’Brien has argued, in power the scale of the task of renewing Britain’s economy has sometimes seen the party of government shrink inward on itself, rehashing familiar arguments about from where and from whom to shake out any savings or spare cash. As the Budget loomed, the publication of the new Critical Minerals Strategy at the end of last month is a reminder of the sense of direction that the government sometimes seems to have lost as it has lurched from one reset to another.
The previous government’s Critical Minerals Strategy – the UK’s first – was published in 2022. With supply chain insecurity having been exposed by the COVID pandemic, tensions with China and the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the document made the stakes clear. It set the scene for increasing recognition of the importance of metals and materials - but did so ultimately from a perspective of managing global risk rather than comprehensively repositioning Britain’s economy.
With recent news about the US-China scramble for resource supremacy, there is still a pervasive tendency to see critical minerals as something sourced from overseas principally to support greater sustainability - support for a revival of domestic mining being something of an afterthought. The timing of the new Critical Minerals Strategy – launched to coincide with the COP summit in South Africa – suggested some superficial continuity with this approach. But the new Strategy - “Vision 2035” - in fact marks the kind of substantial stepchange in positioning that ‘securonomics’ once signalled. Building on the identification of critical minerals as a ‘foundational industry’ in the final iteration of the Modern Industrial Strategy, the Strategy is more discriminating in articulating the purpose to which critical minerals must be put.
Moving from managing risk to seizing advantage, the new Strategy strengthens support for sovereign capability in the domestic production and processing of georesources, here in the UK - with an ambitious target that 10% of national demand be met domestically and commitments on stockpiling for defence. It pitches the sector’s promise as being as much about national security as environmental sustainability, and promotes the possibility that it can provide opportunity to places seeking to escape decades of postindustrial decline. As I am exploring in ongoing work with Progressive Britain and the Foundation for European Progressive Studies, the sector is a natural testbed for securonomics, neutralising some of the teething problems that have undermined the agenda in other arenas.
This ‘proof of concept’ potential is the outcome of a virtuous circle. The centrality of critical minerals to decarbonisation, digital transition and defence innovation means that the country cannot do without them. But the requirement to account for geopolitical, ethical and ecological risk in securing supply means that the UK and its allies must source them from closer to home. And the UK’s world-leading reserves of certain minerals are geologically fixed in places where it is politically and economically impossible to pass up the opportunity for the pay, power and prestige associated with reindustrialisation.
As argued in a briefing for the Critical Minerals Challenge Centre, Cornwall - where I am from and live and work today - is a case in point. Our granite landmass is home to globally significant concentrations of tin, lithium and tungsten each with digital, green and defence applications - the basis for what the Strategy calls an ‘industrial renaissance’. The election of an unprecedented four Labour MPs in July 2024 has seen a tremendous political effort to promote the pivotal contribution Cornwall can make to the country’s resilience, rewarded in the starring role the Strategy grants what the MP Perran Moon calls the ‘Cornish Celtic Tiger’.
Whilst china clay has continued production, local extraction of metals and minerals finally succumbed to a long and protracted decline in 1998, with the closure of Cornwall’s last operational hardrock mine at the iconic South Crofty. The lyrics to a Cornish folk song were daubed overnight on the wall outside: “Cornish lads are fishermen and Cornish lads are miners too, but when the fish and tin are gone what are the Cornish boys to do?” I remember the white letters gradually fading as I grew up, along with the prospects of the local economy.
Today, however, the globalisation that saw world-leading reserves of tin left in the ground has gone into reverse, making newly viable the plans of owners Cornish Metals to restart mining on site. The new Strategy presents tin as a ‘growth mineral’, committing to further work to fill the so-called ‘midstream’ of smelting and refining capacity so that more of the value chain can be captured within Britain’s borders by supplying a processed and thus higher price product.
Marshalling an array of policy interventions that show willingness to put money where the government’s mouth is, the new Strategy surpasses the previous focus on exploration by pledging to scale up domestic production, processing and stockpiling of minerals. For instance, lithium - whose prime mover in Cornwall is the company Cornish Lithium - now has an explicit domestic production target to be reached by 2035, with the Strategy committing to greater integration of domestic extraction and national battery and e-vehicle production projects.
Cornwall also has strategically important reserves of tungsten, a resource whose supply is largely controlled by geopolitical rivals and whose fortunes historically rose and fell with the threat of war and conflict. Local companies like Cornwall Resources are set to see significant international interest as the struggle intensifies to stockpile tungsten for use in arms and advanced manufacturing. Setting out plans to stockpile for the purposes of our own defence, the Strategy’s expansive definition of ‘growth minerals’ commits to unlocking finance and other support for tungsten producers in order to ensure UK sovereign supply is prioritised.
The minerals sector is both strategically vital and subject to speculative dynamics, and so given the centrality of security it is welcome that the new Strategy positions the state to safeguard supply through a more activist industrial policy. Both Cornish Metals and Cornish Lithium have seen the government take a multi-million stake in their operations via the National Wealth Fund.
The ambitions of the scheme have been somewhat dialled back when compared with the bold promises about strings attached made in opposition. Nonetheless, such investments represent a tentative step towards the interventionism that increasingly defines the governance of sovereign supply of resources among allies and rivals alike. The National Security Strategy names critical minerals as one of the areas where other states are using national champions to compete for control over the future of science and technology. It remains to be seen whether the UK can support and in some cases subsidise national champions of its own, and the £50m committed in the Critical Minerals Strategy needs to pick winners in order to avoid being spread too thinly. However, the Strategy undoubtedly represents a step forward.
Locally in Cornwall, this investment will sit alongside more place-based forms of support. The government has been slow to recognise Cornwall’s specificity in its policy provisions. Cornwall is a corner of Britain whose polity is historically based in a national minority people, making it an ill fit with the existing geographies of mayoral devolution. But its coastal and geological character means that it also home to a concentration of strategic assets and critical infrastructure relative to its size that is probably unprecedented in these islands. This spans not only mineral wealth but sun, waves and wind for our energy supply, clear skies for space and satellite innovation, and telecommunications installations and undersea cables.
The contribution that Cornwall can make to the future security of Britain as a whole has now been recognised and buttressed by a bespoke devolution deal, enabling access to various policy and funding levers, and the creation of the Kernow Industrial Growth Fund, announced at the budget and geared towards unlocking the local opportunities of reindustrialisation.
From people and skills to energy and transport, there is still work outstanding to establish the right social and economic foundations for the mining revival. But, just as for the Labour Party, reindustrialisation provides Cornwall the possibility of putting behind it a decades-long dependence on redistribution. Its critical minerals are strategic assets for the future security and prosperity of these islands as a whole, but are inseparable from the working-class communities beneath which they are found. There is an opportunity for the granite bedrock to ground a politics of production where place becomes a source of power recognised by the state, rather than a plea for support.
The challenge is for the Labour government to bend the British state towards a similar embrace of what it came into office calling ‘securonomics’ - investing in skills and critical infrastructure in places like Cornwall not because of their weakness, but because of their strength.
The resources and assets that will define who makes and who breaks the future of global order must always be somewhere rather than anywhere. This means that the political stakes – at home and abroad - are too high to do place-based industrial policy on the cheap.