Wounded by globalisation at the end of a long and protracted period of industrial decline, in 1998 South Crofty was the last working tin mine in Cornwall to close. Overnight before closure, the outer wall of the site was daubed with white paint spelling out the words to a Cornish folk song: “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?”.
Yesterday, the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, visited South Crofty to help answer that question. In truth, whilst the jobs and industry went elsewhere, the tin stayed right where it was. Atop a vast reserve of it, Reeves celebrated tens of millions of pounds of investment via the National Wealth Fund in Cornish Metals, through which the government takes a stake in the innovative company looking to restart tin mining in Cornwall.
Alongside other resources abundant in Cornwall’s granite bedrock like lithium and tungsten, tin is one of several minerals and metals seen as critical to the UK’s security and sustainability. The designation of ‘criticality’, in this case, is determined as much by geopolitical constraints on supply as it is by the physical availability of the materials themselves. Cumulatively, Cornwall’s world-leading mineral wealth represents a breadbasket of the georesources of the future, with applications in everything that powers and protects the country from energy infrastructure to defence technology. There is also considerable potential for resources like tungsten – pivotal to advanced manufacturing and defence production but whose supply mostly comes from China and Russia- to play a key part in trade deals with trusted allies like the US.
Meanwhile, the intrinsic connection between geology and geography means that the mining revival epitomises the possibilities of place-based industrial policy – as outlined in a recent paper for Progressive Britain and the Foundation for European Progressive Studies. The presence of resources forged deep in Earth’s past means that these industries are tied intrinsically to the places that host them.
For the peripheralised working-class rural locations where these resources tend to be, past and future combine to create a new narrative of reindustrialisation focused on a productive contribution to the country as a whole, rather than a narrative of deindustrialisation based on seeking redistributive acts of charity from the state. The prize is a new generation of local young people getting skilled jobs that occupy a strategically important position in global and national value chains, with all of the industrial power, prestige, pay and purpose that follow.
In all of these respects – from geopolitics to the geographies of good work – it is understandable that the Chancellor would select South Crofty as a destination to visit whilst in Cornwall. As I argued back when the concept was first developed, the critical minerals sector constitutes nothing less than a test case for the ‘securonomics’ that she has articulated in opposition and government.
In this context, the forthcoming Critical Minerals Strategy – expected in September – will mark an important moment in the development of a new UK political economy. Ultimately, as some commentators have recently suggested, this is as much a case of ‘statecraft’ as strategy. This requires a both a technical and a political approach, focused not only on nuts and bolts,but guns and butter.
Much of what the Chancellor has been putting forward under the banner of securonomics represents a response to a changing global order defined by war, geopolitical competition, trade protectionism and climate crisis. It is expressed in the attempt to rebalance of the UK’s industrial profile away from domestic service sector growth and dependence on global supply chains to a renewed focus on the production and control of physical goods and resources critical to national security and economic resilience. Government messaging about the upcoming strategy suggests that it will not only focus on from who and where the UK sources the minerals and metals central to the green, digital and defence transitions, but also how its domestic production can be strengthened and supported by the state.
In this sense, it will resonate with the wider reset signalled in the Modern Industrial Strategy, which built convincingly on the preceding Green Paper by including strengthening economic and national security as a priority. The relevant section of the strategy depicts a bleak prospectus of geopolitical instability, supply chain volatility and zero-sum protectionist struggle. But it also presents a positive vision of how the UK can benefit from a post-global and probably post-liberal political economy, reindustrialising at home as a source of strategic advantage and soft power overseas.
In line with this, a distinctive feature of the finalised version of the government’s Industrial Strategy was the greater prominence given to domestic production of critical minerals. As a consequence of a substantial weight of consultation responses received on the initial Green Paper, the revised version recognised the existence of critical minerals clusters in every corner of the UK, from Aberdeen and Belfast to South Wales and Cornwall – and, crucially, their capacity to generate high-wage, high-skilled jobs in working-class communities. Most significantly, the strategy also carved out space for minerals, metals and other materials through a new definition of ‘foundational industries’ that underpin the more exclusive eight growth-driving sectors that anchored the original iteration of the strategy.
The Clean Energy Industries Sector Plan released alongside the Industrial Strategy gives a starring role to critical minerals insofar as domestic production and processing of lithium and nickel is seen as crucial to reducing reliance on overseas supply for battery technologies. A forthcoming Circular Economy Strategy, due out from Defra in the Autumn, looks likely to focus on how critical resources and raw materials are used and reused within the wider reindustrialisation of the UK economy. It will provide a long-term vision of circularity, with an aim to protect battery supply. The Circular Economy Strategy, existing announcements suggest, will also set out plans to create skilled jobs and enhance supply chain resilience, recognizing the need to reduce the UK’s 80% import reliance for raw materials.
However, interrogating the industrial strategy you can see a shift in emphasis from the strictly green agenda into a broader argument about the need for security. In the context of an entire section of the strategy devoted to the priority of greater security and resilience, for instance, strategic investments in supply chains such as those for critical minerals are front and centre.
To understand the broader context within which the critical minerals sector is subject to increasing ‘securitisation’ both in rhetoric and in practice, other aspects of the government’s agenda must be read and understood alongside the Industrial Strategy.
The government’s Spending Review in June set out plans to amend the Treasury Green Book so that the cost-benefit analyses used to evaluate investments would foreground national security and economic resilience. This will manifest in the how public finance institutions and sector grant funds prioritise where funding is allocated. There will be an onus on private sector recipients of state support to demonstrate how they will contribute towards national economic security, with closer measures introduced for measuring attainment of funded projects towards this end. There is further strategic rationale to foreground security and resilience in government funding in the recent NATO recommendation for members to include investments in broader infrastructure as part of the 5% GDP defence spending target.
In light of their centrality to national security and economic resilience, a new Supply Chain Centre will monitor supply and demand trends relevant to the sovereign capability and domestic capacity underpinned by these foundational industries. In the case of critical minerals, the Supply Chain Centre will collaborate with the existing Critical Minerals Intelligence Centre. Importantly, the Supply Chain Centre will inform the priorities of the British Business Bank and its £25.6bn portfolio of investments targeted at ‘crowding in’ private sector investment.
In turn, the British Business Bank will collaborate with the National Wealth Fund, UK Export Finance, UK Research & Innovation and Great British Energy by means of a new Strategic Public Investment Forum to ensure that investments reward private sector companies that contribute to security and resilience. The Industrial Strategy also sets out how UK Export Finance will support domestic critical minerals suppliers access exporters, capital, import contracts and protection from geopolitical risk. There is some suggestion that this will act as a test case for a broadening of such support to other sectors that produce strategic goods and resources, too.
There are also signs that the approach taken to steel, whereby the government has stepped in to protect the sector from global trade pressures in the name of sovereign capacity for defence and green industries, will be extended to other ‘foundational’ sectors outlined in the Industrial Strategy. Due to the important role resources like tin, lithium and tungsten will play in the country’s security and resilience, these steps could help the case for investment in mining infrastructure as well as broader investments in the value chain such as smelting and refining plants, as well as support where the global price fluctuations characteristic of resource economies risk the capacity of domestic producers to continue operating.
The new National Security Strategy 2025 reinforces the central role that critical minerals can play within a strategic reset whereby, as it puts it, ‘our statecraft needs to adapt to a world in which there will be fiercer competition and a more transactional approach on migration, defence, trade, energy, technology and raw materials’. Critical minerals are explicitly named as a key terrain on which competition to shape the future of science and technology will play out, with ‘national champions’ stimulated by private-public partnerships an increasingly prevalent model for how countries secure access and advantage.
The Industrial Strategy sets out how the state will ensure that companies that support the country’s security and resilience will face no disadvantage in the pursuit of growth and competitiveness, including by means of public finance for access to critical inputs and capabilities. Likewise, potential investors in strategically important companies and industries will receive dedicated support from the Office for Investment in addressing concerns and overcoming hurdles in domains like grid connectivity, planning and future government policy. At the same time, there is a commitment to protecting the national interest through revisiting those areas of economic activity subject to screening under the National Security and Investment Act.
Crucial to the how the National Security Strategy informs the implementation of the Industrial Strategy and forthcoming Trade and Critical Minerals strategies will be the new Supply Chain Centre responsible for monitoring how UK supply and demand of goods and services supports sovereign capability, domestic capacity and trustworthy international partnerships. The Industrial Strategy already announced the expansion of the National Security and Strategic Investment Fund to invest in companies contributing to defence and resilience, and the National Wealth Fund is being steered towards a stronger focus on civil-military applications and supply chain resilience.
Informed by Supply Chain Centre analysis, critical minerals stand to play a major part in this reprioritisation of government support for industry. The potential defence applications of resources like tin, tungsten and lithium also mean that the many SMEs that make up the sector stand to benefit from proposals to ensure that government procurement processes – namely those within the MoD – privilege smaller suppliers.
The Industrial Strategy and National Security Strategy – as well as an expected Resilience Strategy – set the context for what will come in the Critical Minerals Strategy, expected in September. Key voices in the sector, like the Critical Minerals Association, identify several areas for further government work to advance the cause of a strong domestic supply of the resources that will define the country’s future security and resilience. It would be expected that the new Critical Minerals Strategy would have something to offer on these fronts.
For instance, in a more fragmented and rancorous global order, it is becoming more difficult to impose our will on international standard setting particularly around ESG. The weakening of these standards favours the UK’s geopolitical rivals and diminishes the potential value of products produced in a socially and environmentally responsible way by our own producers. It might be suggested, therefore, that some of the R&D and innovation effort outlined in the Industrial Strategy should be directed not only towards technical problems addressed by STEM subjects but also those social, political and institutional dynamics covered in humanities and social science disciplines. It is important to remember what governments understood in previous eras of geopolitical fracture – that the struggle is not only over material and technological supremacy, but also intellectual and ideological power, and research funding must support both these sources of strength and security.
There also remains a fixation on the role that domestic supply of critical minerals can play in battery production (which, in Industrial Strategy terms, sits within the Advanced Manufacturing growth sector). But, in line with the broader rehousing of sustainability within an expansive notion of national security, there is a wider array of instances where this supply is important to the future of the country. This includes the production of wind turbines, electronics and, crucially, defence systems.
Another longstanding issue is the need for ‘end-to-end’ support for the overall minerals and metals value chain, with investments in domestic refining and recycling infrastructure that will reduce reliance on sending our national product overseas for processing, including to countries where there is significant geopolitical risk. No matter how much can be extracted and produced domestically, the UK’s sovereign capacity in this domain will be compromised so long as it is dependent on international refining and recycling.
This points to a wider risk that the Critical Minerals Strategy confines itself to consideration of how the UK secures supply of georesources from overseas at the expense of developing a plan for how extraction, production and extraction can themselves be a supporting pillar of reindustrialisation for greater resilience within the UK itself. Here, national and international strategies need to adjust themselves to the on-the-ground realities of the places where resources are situated.
To return to Cornwall, one other issue where critical minerals puts aspects of government policy to the test is in the domain of place and devolution. It is difficult to divorce critical minerals from place. As previous work for Progressive Britain has argued, there are deep geological connections between particular geographies and the resources found within their physical foundations. Moreover, the sector is made up on many SMEs who are themselves rooted in place along with the jobs, workers and communities with whom they are interdependent. It follows that many of the key barriers that the critical minerals sector faces are strongly place-based and it remains to be seen to what extent the raft of measures to aid reindustrialisation more generally that have been announced in recent government documents will translate on the ground.
Many of the geographies within which minerals and metals are concentrated are rural and do not always fit neatly within the city regions which until recently have constituted the main framework within which government financial support to places is articulated. Cornwall is a case in point, its small size combined with its status as a historic nation with its own minority people meaning that it sits awkwardly within the models offered for mayoral devolution that anchor much of the investment plans put forward by the government. However, if a place is home to resources central to the future defence, security and resilience of these islands as a whole, then it makes no sense to limit the industrial support available based on whether somewhere has a mayor of not. Cornwall’s abundance of such resources – minerals, metals, wind, sun, seas, satellites and so on – is a rare combination unparalleled elsewhere, and it would be foolish to stem the flow of finance because it remains a Foundation Strategy Authority, for instance.
It is welcome, then, that the recent Industrial Strategy shows recognition of the limits of a strict approach on this front and pledges to provide support to regional clusters as well as city regions via a new Strategic Sites Accelerator and so-called ‘Industrial Strategy Zones’ such as Investment Zones and Freeports. Particular sites are to be announced in due course but the range of interventions earmarked to follow such a designation – enhanced grid capacity and planning approval, for instance – have much to offer the critical minerals sector in Cornwall as it struggles to overcome a series of place-based barriers that will determine its capacity to contribute towards the country’s security and sustainability. Cornwall is already categorised as part of a South West ‘Clean Energy’ cluster and the ‘Net Zero networks’ associated with the future Industrial Strategy Zones sound particular relevant, in that they will drive sub-regional collaboration between industry and infrastructure providers to address energy, planning, innovation and skills challenges.
As I have outlined elsewhere, a major issue faced by operators in Cornwall that designation as an Industrial Strategy Zone could help address is grid infrastructure. Cornwall’s historical path is an unusual one, at the forefront of the first industrial revolution with its primary resources but then enduring a protracted deindustrialisation which began before most of the rest of the country had got going. This experience of uneven development leaves it bereft of some of the infrastructure that followed industrial modernisation elsewhere. Whilst there is tremendous contemporary capacity to land power in Cornwall from offshore wind energy installations on its coast, because of its lacklustre grid infrastructure electricity is one domain in which the area faces an in-built disadvantage. In this sense, the focus within the Industrial Strategy on electricity costs as a barrier to competitiveness will be welcomed – but there also needs to be a focus on infrastructure for electricity availability, too.
Planning is another area where the guarantees of the Industrial Strategy promise to unblock barriers faced by operators. The government proposes to expand the use of Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project designation as a means to encourage the development of industrial sites central to the national interest, which at least one Cornwall-based minerals operation – Cornish Lithium – has benefitted from. This strategic designation would be expected to enter into much wider usage as investments driven by security and resilience rationales see what previously may have been treated as private sector development increasingly understood as critical infrastructure eligible to be treated as part of overall defence spending in line with NATO targets. The 10-Year Infrastructure Plan paves the way for a more coherent and coordinated approach to the infrastructure pipeline.
Ensuring that a skills pipeline is in place ahead of demand, and crucially that local young people can attain the apprenticeships and qualifications they need to get on in the industry, will be indispensable if the promise of place-based industrial policy is to be made tangible to working people and their communities. There is a much-needed commitment in the Industrial Strategy and wider Skills England agenda to reinvigorating technical education within particular places based on the types of labour input their leading sectors require the most. Engineering skills are a key focal point for this, cutting across many of the foundational and growth industries prioritised in the Industrial Strategy – critical minerals included. This resonates with some of the recommendations of recent work we have produced at the Critical Minerals Challenge Centre.
However, greater granularity will be needed to address specialist skills which are in a shortage of supply in some sectors, or where the sector struggles to compete internationally for pools of highly-mobile expert labour. In this sense, there is potential in the Industrial Strategy’s proposal to produce specific workforce strategies for sectors experiencing shortages and challenges. These will establish a context for coordination between relevant departments and bodies to support sectors with their needs. The first will be for Clean Energy, which may speak to some of the key concerns within critical minerals operators. However, it will be important for these strategies to go beyond the ‘IS-8’ of growth-driving sectors and encompass also those foundational industries tied to the production of metals and materials more broadly.
Ultimately, it is in the skills piece where the rubber of place-based industrial policy will hit the road. Whether reindustrialisation passes over into tangible benefits rests upon provision of the skills required for young people to be able to build careers in the industries of the future and make a valuable contribution to the country’s security and sustainability.
If the critical minerals strategy is to be a case study in securonomics for places like Cornwall, then the government investment the Chancellor came to celebrate needs to be directed at the everyday details as well as the financial bigger picture. If the growth is abstract, rather than concrete, then the many seats that Labour won in former and future mining districts of Cornwall at the last election will become quickly susceptible to the easy explanations and solutions offered by Reform.
Reeves’s visit therefore has a political, as well as economic, significance. It is these two dimensions – strategy and statecraft, if you like – that should be reflected in both the Critical Minerals Strategy and the stories that the Labour government tells about its importance. Rather than focus solely on the need for the UK to access sustainable global supply of the minerals that matter for our national security, the Strategy needs to speak to a domestic context of coiled-up potential in places like Cornwall, too.
For more of Harry’s thinking on the centrality of Industrial Strategy to Securonomics – and Labour’s wider agenda for government – see our paper Putting Industrial Policy in its Place.
