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Britain is an ideas superpower. While other nations compete on production costs and capital markets, our enduring advantage lies in innovation. From the steam engine to the jet engine, penicillin to the World Wide Web, British ingenuity has shaped the modern world.
Today, we stand at the edge of a new industrial revolution. Artificial Intelligence is reshaping economies, while defence, energy, and aerospace have become national priorities. The government’s industrial strategy rightly identified these as “frontier industries” – the technologies that will underpin our industrial and economic strength for decades to come.
But a genuine industrial strategy should not just be about backing our best companies. It must also be about building the ecosystem that turns world-class innovation into global businesses of commercial clout and impact. Few technologies embody this challenge better than nuclear fusion – the “holy grail” of energy, offering not just limitless, clean power, but also a foundation for technological and geopolitical leadership.
As minister for fusion in the last Conservative government, I’m proud that we recognised this potential: launching the STEP programme to build a prototype Magnetic Confinement Fusion (MCF) plant by 2040, and establishing UK Industrial Fusion Solutions (UKIFS) to drive the West Burton site as the UK’s sovereign fusion business park and investment hub.
I’m also proud that as minister of state for science at BEIS I oversaw the UK’s development as the first nation to establish a legal framework for fusion energy. Having done all this in a deliberately non-partisan way to signal long-term all-party support, I was delighted with the new government’s £2.5 billion commitment to fusion in the recent spending review.
However, we are in a global race. To avoid losing our advantage, we need to move at pace with agility, but I’m concerned that we are not moving quickly enough to consolidate our position as a global fusion powerhouse. We can’t afford to let UKIFS become bogged down, overly focused on being the delivery vehicle for STEP at traditional Whitehall procurement pace rather than as the moonshot I intended.
Britain is one of five nations with fusion capability – the others being the USA, China, Germany and Japan – however, we are the only one betting everything on MCF. That is a strategic risk. If we stay wedded to a single fusion technology approach, we risk losing out in the global race for sovereign fusion industrial leadership and the all-important momentum in a race that is becoming increasingly key to defining global power in the 21st century.
To secure our sovereign strength in science and technology, we must also back inertial fusion energy (IFE) – a field where Britain already leads the world.
In September, First Light Fusion (FLF), the UK’s leading IFE company, unveiled its new FLARE approach – a major leap for Britain’s fusion ambitions. Today, they launched their Future for Fusion Roadmap, which utilises FLARE to provide a pathway for commercial fusion within a decade.
FLF’s work builds directly on Britain’s strengths in pulsed power, lasers, sensors, computation and materials science. This is not just about clean energy; it’s about the sovereign technologies that will define the next era of global advantage. IFE could power data infrastructure, remote military bases and space systems – all critical to our security and competitiveness.
Britain’s scientific strength has always given us a geopolitical soft power edge. In the changing geopolitical landscape of 2025, the ability to deliver fusion energy is a massive industrial and geopolitical opportunity. Fusion is the next great test of that advantage. The countries that master it will not only lead global energy markets but also shape the technologies they power. We remain world-class in research but risk losing the commercial race. If we fall behind, we risk ceding ground to authoritarian rivals such as China, allowing them to set global norms in AI, data and defence. But if we act decisively, we can once again make British innovation the engine of global progress.
As a longstanding advocate of industrial strategy, I support the new government’s industrial strategy as a clear commitment to this vision. We won’t be a global fusion hub playing one club golf. The UK Fusion Strategy cannot be simply sole funding for STEP. We need to be using STEP to anchor a broader fusion cluster to include both IFE and MCF, expanding West Burton into a multidisciplinary cluster and giving companies like First Light the regulatory and financial environment they need to grow.
Fusion is no longer a dream – it’s a defining strategic lever. If we don’t seize the opportunity of the industrial strategy to change pace and ambition, we risk losing decades of industrial advantage. If we act now, Britain can lead a new wave of innovation – strengthening our defences, powering our economy, and securing a new era of national prosperity.
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The post George Freeman: ‘Harnessing fusion is the ultimate test for Labour’s industrial strategy’ appeared first on Politics.co.uk.
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