The Spanish socialist nightmare that serves as a warning to Starmer's Britain

Telegraph

2 days ago

On the day of the blackouts that plunged Spain into darkness, Borja Hermoso was at work at the Almaraz nuclear plant in the west of the country. The moment Spain lost power, workers at the plant knew what to do. '[It was] something we had trained for and done simulations to prepare,' he says.
It was critical to ensure the reactor shut down safely, and it went off without a hitch. 'We achieved a perfect safe stop. This was the best test we could have had and we passed with flying colours.'
It was, to put it mildly, 'vindication', says Hermoso, 38, president of the works council at Almaraz, which employs thousands in a small town in Extremadura. Extraordinarily, it is also first in line for closure under the socialist government's dogged pursuit of net zero. For Hermoso, the blackouts were proof that plants like Almaraz provide much-needed stability in the electricity system. 'This government is obsessed with renewables and it seems to have an ideological component that is destabilising the electrical system.'
When the plant closes in 2027, he will have to go elsewhere for work. 'I will have to move out of the area, my home region, which is sad for me. But it's much worse for people a little lower down the rung with less training, who simply won't find work in this area.'
State meddling
Closing nuclear plants is 'like ripping a seat out of a car,' says Izaskun García, who has been an engineer at Almaraz for 14 years. 'The investment will all be lost; the know-how that has been developed; the training.'
María Guardiola Martin, president of the region and a politician in the conservative Spanish People's Party (PP), says the government's plan to shut nuclear plants and rely on renewables is 'a strategic and social error not only for Extremadura, but for all of Spain'.
'Ideology is prevailing over science in the Spanish government,' she says. At the same time, closing the plant will mean 'wiping out more than 3,000 direct and indirect jobs in one fell swoop.
'This is our largest industry, vital to our GDP, and dismantling it seriously harms the industrialisation process in our region.'
Almaraz also generates 7 per cent of the nation's electricity, she says. Closing it would 'significantly reduce our country's emission-free generation capacity, diminish the security of our electricity supply, and negatively impact families and businesses across the country'.
Martin has written to the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, but has 'not received a response.' She has also asked for a report from Red Eléctrica, which runs the grid, seeking clarity over 'what happened on April 28, during the blackout'. She hasn't heard from them either.
To centre-right figures like Martin and, indeed, Reform and Conservative politicians in Britain, Spain is an exemplar of what can go wrong when a stridently left-wing government uses the clunking fist of the state to impose its will on a country.
In the case of the energy sector, Sánchez's government has de facto control of Red Eléctrica through a golden share and put Beatriz Corredor, a socialist politician with no experience in the field, in charge.
Its previous chief, it's worth noting, resigned over political meddling, accusing Sánchez's government of 'messianic' zeal in its commitment to pursuing a green agenda.
Net zero at all costs
You don't have to spend long in Almaraz to understand there is a human cost to all this. Eva Trujillo Jara's brother and sister both work at the plant and stand to lose their jobs. 'The closure will be a body blow to my family and a disaster for the area,' she says. 'This village lives off the plant; the day it closes, I don't know how we are going to survive. There is a lot of fear and many people will end up migrating away. The village will be emptied out, like so many in Spain.'
But there is a political cost too, an ideological battle which has echoes far beyond Spain, in the UK too.
The blackout 'shows the system is not ready to run only with renewables,' says García. 'The transition has been too rapid and the planning insufficient. We need another 10-15 years to work out how to use only renewables and in the meantime, we cannot do without nuclear energy.'
The Spanish Prime Minister doesn't appear to agree.
What may or may not have caused the blackouts that hit on April 28 and lasted 23 hours is the subject of intense speculation in Spain. Many have pointed the finger at the government's insistence on accelerating the grid's reliance on renewables. A report has claimed Sánchez's government ordered the national grid operator to intensify the use of renewables a week before the power failed 'in order to present itself to Europe as a pioneer country', as reported by the conservative newspaper ABC. The paper claimed that 'unstable programmes' had been deployed, feeding the grid with as much renewable energy as possible.
Spain's target is an electricity mix in which 81 per cent is derived from renewables by 2030. Last year renewables accounted for 56.8 per cent of the mix. On the day of the blackout, according to the report, Spain was approaching 73 per cent. A government spokesman has denied the claims, saying 'no order was given for any experiment or so-called unstable programmes'.
If the plan was indeed to present Spain as a 'pioneer', it had the opposite effect. As 49 million of his countrymen were left in the dark for hours in scenes which many described as being reminiscent of the Second World War, Sánchez's Spain presented itself as a poster child not for sustainable prowess, but for what really happens when a net zero ideology is pursued at all costs. In Almaraz, a large solar park is being built, even as the nuclear plant prepares for shutdown.
Blackouts and joblessness: the town has come to represent what life looks like after eight years under a socialist government fixated on renewables, and with the power to impose its ideology on companies and households. If there was ever a warning to Ed Miliband and Labour as they approach the end of their first year in power, it can surely be found in this remote town in Extremadura, where 3,000 people are on a countdown clock to unemployment.
Striking parallels with Britain
Spain has not historically been a natural test case for Britain. Our cultural sensibility and climate are a world away from that of the Iberian peninsula; our economies and international heft are not comparable (Spain's GDP is $1.8 trillion to our $3.8 trillion). And yet, as we hurtle further down a road laid by the Miliband, Reeves and Rayner vision for Britain, Sánchez's leftist state has never looked so familiar.
On energy, the parallels are particularly striking. Britain could only dream of the kind of nuclear power Spain has long boasted and is now primed to scrap. And yet, in Ed Miliband's time in office, plans for a new nuclear power station on Anglesey have been thrown into doubt, and the £300m investment pledged by the Conservatives which was meant to make the UK the first commercial producer of advanced nuclear fuel outside Russia has fallen by the wayside. Meanwhile, the planned shutdown of four of our own nuclear power stations was delayed in December by French operator EDF amid fears that the government's pursuit of net zero could increase the risk of electricity price hikes and shortages.
But Miliband's efforts to run full pelt in the direction of decarbonisation don't appear to be going especially well. Last month analysis by BloombergNEF revealed that he is likely poised to miss his 2030 offshore wind targets amid a lack of appetite from investors. The week before, a report suggested that it was becoming increasingly unlikely that Miliband's claim that net zero would reduce energy bills by £300 by 2030, could be achieved.
Not only is a net zero crusade expensive, it could also be unsafe. Last month Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, warned that the Energy Secretary's push to achieve clean power by 2030 and net zero carbon emissions by 2050 played into the hands of China, which provides much of the technology needed to convert Britain's grid to renewable energy. 'You've got the ideological Ed Miliband pursuing zero carbon without a thought for the impact on national security,' he said.
'He probably thinks: 'I'm dealing with a more serious problem, which is climate change, and that comes first.' It's so irrational. It is seriously problematic.'
Irrational and problematic. Two words that could equally be applied to various government policies in both Britain and Spain. If Spain is the canary in the coal mine (or the sparrow in the solar farm) when it comes to energy, then you only have to look at their approach to taxes, growing migrant problems, unemployment rates and failing rail network to see there are plenty of other areas gasping for life after eight years in the grips of socialist rule – and there are lessons to be learnt here in Britain.
Tax raids on second homes
Woe betide anyone who enjoys enough success to have a holiday home, whether in Sotogrande or Somerset. The Spanish government is determined to saddle non-EU citizens with a 100 per cent tax when buying holiday homes in a bid to tackle its housing crisis. Foreigners make up 15 per cent of the Spanish housing market, with Britons owning the largest proportion. That's 15 per cent of the housing market also, you could safely assume, contributing to builders' wages, to local economies, to the country's tourism revenue.
Even for those who live in the country on a more permanent basis, Spain has become a 'tax trap', as one international law firm puts it. Expats are being 'fleeced' by Spain's authorities, says Amsterdam & Associates LLP, which launched the 'Spanish Tax Pickpockets' campaign, highlighting the 'punitive tax claims' that foreigners who move there fall victim to.
It's a trend which should 'cause panic in any country with like-minded governments,' says John O'Connell, chief executive of the Taxpayers Alliance, who says the Spanish approach to taxing foreign homeowners is tantamount to 'economic self harm', while Labour seem to be singing from the same hymn sheet with their own efforts to target second home owners. Where in Scandinavian countries, O'Connell says, owning multiple properties is 'celebrated and encouraged', 'here we seem to think it's a sign that you're particularly evil somehow.'
'It's this really basic misunderstanding of economics,' he says. 'If you tax something you just get the revenue from it. Well, actually, what might happen is people might sell up.'
The 'second and third round effects' of taxes like this are skimmed over, he says. 'They think they're small low-level tax tweaks but actually they have a huge impact on economic decision making, not just of businesses but of individuals too.'
It leads to 'capital flight … and you don't end up with the tax receipts you intended in the first place.' Meanwhile, in Britain, he says, the chancellor is likely to come back for 'more tax rises later in the year.' And where will she look? In all likelihood, 'people who are more mobile with their capital.'
What is happening in Spain should serve as a warning to us, says O'Connell. Taxes like this 'send a very strong signal that the country is not open for business, that we don't celebrate growth and we don't encourage prosperity and wealth creation'.
'While other countries are going in that direction, we should be considering going in the exact opposite and saying hey, hang on, Britain is open for business and we do value private enterprise and we're not just an enormous public sector with some taxpayers who pay for it.'
General decay
Eventually, things just stop working. Miquel Vila is a political consultant from Catalonia. He is based in New York but travels home regularly. Every year, he notes the various ways things in his home country have grown 'progressively worse'.
'It's getting worse in a way that it's gradual, but after eight years all these things begin to add up,' he says.
After the blackouts, he was confused by what seemed to be a strangely muted reaction amongst friends and family. 'No one was really angry,' he says. 'It's kind of accepting: this is the new normal. Things are going to be breaking here and there.'
He felt as though the blackouts were another sign of 'the general decay of everything'.
Adding to that feeling, on May 20, landline and mobile services were brought down across the country after a botched system upgrade by Telefónica, the Spanish telecoms giant.
Meanwhile inflation continues to rise, a problem that right wing opponents of Sánchez's government blame on excessive public spending. Similar warnings have been issued in Britain since the pandemic.
For Vila, 'using massive public spending to cope with the hangover of the pandemic' in Spain hasn't helped.
And it isn't only in the supermarkets where people are failing to get enough bang for their buck. Spain's nationalised rail system is, Vila says, deteriorating. 'Trains have been bad for many years,' he says, citing a lack of air conditioning in the baking summer months and constant delays.
Days after the recent blackouts, the country's rail system was in chaos after copper wire was taken from five different parts of the high speed line between Madrid and Seville, leaving more than 10,000 travellers suffering delays. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the PP, said they were scenes that 'do not befit the fourth-largest eurozone economy'.
'People don't deserve to be paying more taxes for worse services. Spain needs to function again and that's my aim.'
The party's economic spokesman, Juan Bravo, called for a full audit of the railway, describing the chaos as 'the new normal under an overwhelmed government.'
These are familiar scenes, but they're particularly prescient in the week when Labour's first renationalised train set off from Woking to Waterloo to great fanfare, and began with a stint on a rail replacement bus. Heidi Alexander, the Transport Secretary, declared it to be a 'new dawn'. As the Telegraph's Philip Johnston pointed out, it's perhaps more accurately described as 'a step into the past'.
Spiralling migrant crisis
In October, Sánchez unveiled his plans to make it easier for migrants to settle in Spain. 'Spain needs to choose between being an open and prosperous country or a closed-off, poor country,' he told parliament, setting out a stance at odds with much of the rest of Europe. In the first days of 2025, an influx of migrants arrived in Spain, with nearly 800 people landing on the Canary Islands between January 6 and 8 alone. Last year, an opinion survey showed immigration was increasingly a cause for concern amongst the Spanish public, with 30 per cent considering it to be one of the country's major problems.
In Britain, Sir Keir Starmer's 'island of strangers' speech might have done a certain amount to reposition Labour as being tough on immigration, but it's still the case that more voters (35 per cent according to a YouGov poll) see the PM as being pro-immigration than against it. Meanwhile, critics say it was all rhetoric. While, 'I welcome what he said,' says Alp Mehmet, chairman of Migration Watch UK, 'there is very little of substance there, which makes me wonder whether the government actually means it or whether in fact they're trying to persuade people.'
Those on the left say Sánchez's approach to migration has had a positive economic impact. Spain's economy grew by 3.2 per cent last year. 'The more people you've got actually functioning, working within the system, of course it means the economy will grow,' says Mehmet. 'But what surveys, research, studies have consistently shown in Britain is that overall migration has been a net fiscal cost going right back to the days before Tony Blair.
'Time and again there have been studies that show that ultimately the low-wage, low-skill migration that most countries in Europe have seen is a cost to the taxpayer. I don't see that it's any different in Spain to our experience here.'
Vila says it feels as though immigration has 'become worse and worse'.
'In terms of GDP it's true [Spain] has one of the top growing economies in the EU. But also Spain has added around 800,000 people in the last couple of years. [...] Spain is a good example of an economy that is growing – yes, [it's] adding to the population. [But] without any productivity powers.'
Hurtling in the wrong direction
Five miles from Almaraz, in the village of Belvís de Monroy, Fernando Sánchez contemplates what life in the area will be like after the plant closes down. He is the mayor of the village and was a radiation protection technician at the plant for 16 years. 'This village, Almaraz and others are going to die if the plant is closed,' he says.
The Spanish government is 'like a driver on the wrong side of the motorway who thinks everyone else is mad and going in the wrong direction,' says Sánchez, 42. The problem being, of course, that the driver he speaks of happens to be in power. When they decide to hurtle in the wrong direction, they force everyone to go along with them, with potentially catastrophic consequences. 'Closing nuclear plants in the current environment would be one of the biggest mistakes in the history of Spain,' he says.
His advice to the UK government? 'Look at what happened with the blackout.'
Sánchez is in favour of renewable energy, but not in isolation. 'Extremadura has sun, wind, hydro and nuclear energy. Any European country would love to have what we have in a single region, and we can export it as we have way more than we need.'
It is now clear there is 'not enough storage capacity to run the grid on renewables,' he says. 'When a plan fails, you need to make a new one.' It's advice that those in Madrid and Westminster would do well to heed.