The Heathrow Fires: Accident, Incompetence, or Accelerationism?

At 01:43 (GMT) today, Heathrow Airport in London closed and cancelled all flights until at least 23:59. Residents nearby reported hearing an explosion just before midnight, before pillars of smoke and flames filled the sky. 70 firefighters and 10 fire engines worked to extinguish the blaze at the North Hyde electrical substation, powering the airport. Power was cut for over 67,000 homes in Hayes, Hounslow, and surrounding areas, and 179 residents were evacuated as a precautionary cordon was put in place. Over 120 flights already in the air were rerouted to land in other cities or countries. Hundreds more flights were cancelled, or redirected for takeoff from London Gatwick. 291,000 passengers are expected to be affected. By 08:17, the London Fire Brigade announced that the fire was out, and the National Grid began restoring power to the airport and surrounding properties.

Waking up to the news, passengers trapped in a pitch-black airport lounge and across the rest of the country asked the same question: how could this happen? Heathrow services more than 83 million passengers each year. As such a critical piece of national and global infrastructure, how could this fire have brought the country to a halt?

An HVAC and electrical engineer whom I spoke to expressed confusion over why back-up generators were not online in order to keep power flowing to the airport. A Heathrow airport spokesperson said:

“We have multiple sources of energy into Heathrow. But when a source is interrupted, we have back-up diesel generators and uninterruptable power supplies in place, and they all operated as expected.

As the busiest airport in Europe, Heathrow uses as much energy as a small city, therefore it’s not possible to have back-up for all of the energy we need to run our operation safely.”

Energy Secretary Ed Miliband told Sky News this morning that the back-up generator was also affected by the fire:

“As I understand it from the National Grid, there was a backup generator but that was also affected by the fire, which gives a sense of how unusual and unprecedented it was.

There is a second backup which they are seeking to use to restore power so there are backup mechanisms in place but given the scale of this fire the backup mechanisms also seem to have been affected.

But obviously with any incident like this we will want to understand why it happened and what if any lessons it has for our infrastructure.”

A National Grid executive explained that two transformers were damaged during the fire, but a third was available and being brought online.

These lessons will, of course, be ignored if they prove inconvenient for Mr. Miliband’s net-zero narrative. Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice MP has blamed the decarbonization targets for the insufficient provisions at Heathrow, claiming its net-zero compliance initiative caused the airport to replace its diesel back-up generators with a biomass generator with inadequate capacity to replace the downed grid. Despite Britain receiving only 1,403 sunshine hours a year, Heathrow is doubling-down on extortionate, intermittent renewables before 2050 by installing solar panels on Terminal 2.

Were Britain to make a transition to a fully-renewable national grid now, without the use of nuclear, it would cost over £3 trillion, require critical minerals and battery-storage capacity which is not available, and still meet less than a third of consumer energy demands — with no protection against blackouts. This figure has been corroborated by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, and the National Grid. In the three decarbonization scenarios modelled by the National Grid, there was only a 7% difference between the most (£3.02 billion) and least (£2.82 billion) expensive options. But despite the infeasibility, threat to energy security, and eye-watering cost, the 2050 net-zero target remains. It was signed into law in 2019, under Theresa May’s Conservative government, by former minister Chris Skidmore, via an amendment to the Climate Change Act 2008. With as little as a ninety-minute debate, without primary legislation, and with no budget or plan provided, the government committed mine and subsequent generations to diminishing quality of life, costing trillions.

The Heathrow Airport fire might give the Labour government pause, then, before embarking on Miliband’s plans for Great British Energy: a taxpayer-funded renewables investment body, which will receive £8.3 billion by 2029. But, without irony, Miliband announced today that GB Energy will spend £200 million on rooftop solar panels for schools and hospitals, and £10 million on “local government”. The government insists that it will save an estimated £400 million over 30 years — while on the same day, admitting to having to borrow £15 billion more than previously forecast in order to forestall a recession. Tax receipts are now £11.4 billion less than expected by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), and borrowing is £20.4 billion more. Reminder: after Liz Truss supposedly “crashed the economy”, the OBR’s £30 billion “fiscal hole” forecast was revised to be an unexpected £30 billion surplus — meaning the OBR’s modelling was wrong by a factor of £130 billion.

The lesson here could be that a Gordian Knot of government Quangos are an inefficient way of running an increasingly complex state. It could also be that investing in weather-dependent renewables, while cutting £20 billion in planned investment into safe and abundant nuclear power, is indistinguishable from actively sabotaging your energy supply. But I wouldn’t hold my breath for the ideologues on Labour’s front-bench to learn either, as I would inhale more carbon than their multi-trillion-pound plans will offset. Britain is set to continue paying the highest energy bills in the developed world, with no safeguards against this sort of power outage happening again.

The other unresolved question remains: why did this happen? The Metropolitan Police’s Counter-Terrorism Command is now leading the inquiry into the cause of the fire. Politico reported a pedestrian reason: “a cock-up by an electrical engineer.” Another engineer provided a plausible explanation to the Mail: that an old oil-filled transformer was running at 106.2% capacity, and ignited 25,000 liters of cooling oil. More conspiratorial alternatives suggest that Putin is the culprit. Sabotage would be apropos for a hostile state; with Russia suspected to have sent incendiary devices aboard cargo flights to Britain and Germany last July. Arson attacks also interrupted the Paris Olympics that same month (though sadly not the opening ceremony). Israeli intelligence informed France of Iran’s intentions to attack the country’s infrastructure, but no link has been announced. One gets the impression that many interested parties are hoping for this to be an act of foreign subterfuge, as a pretext to deploy British troops — even conscripts of my age — in Ukraine.

A more disconcerting possibility is domestic terror. For what motive? In our febrile political environment, the warnings of King’s College London academic David Betz have attracted hundreds-of-thousands of views on YouTube in the last month. Betz has claimed in interviews that civil war is being made inevitable by Britain’s government. By embarking on an experiment of unprecedented levels of mass migration, from culturally distant nations, and then poisoning the integration well with racial identity-politics, politicians have created the ideal conditions for ethnic conflict. It’s not just indigestible new arrivals who might form armed militias: Betz warns that the host majority population will be cognizant of their loss of status (“downgrading”) and seek to regain it. Accelerationist movements might target critical infrastructure — including power-lines, substations, 5G towers, and water and gas mains — in order to create mass panic in densely-populated cities. “Its strategic logic”, Betz writes, “will be to cause the destruction of metropolitan centres through infrastructural attacks with a view to causing cascading systemic failure leading to uncontrollable civil disorder generating further rapid decline.” In other words: fires like today’s at Heathrow will become more common preceding a full-blown urban guerrilla conflict.

Vigilante violence will be made more likely if the government implements policies which are perceived slights against the host population: such as allowing the Sentencing Council to pass two-tier judicial guidance, sparing non-whites, Muslims, and transgender people prison time, without Parliamentary intervention. Indeed, the gaslighting efforts by the Home Office, which I have documented here on Courage Media, constitute the government trying to keep a lid on the sputtering multicultural melting pot by telling protesting British natives that they are “far right” and “racist” for raising concerns about immigration and Islam. The latest iteration of these efforts is Adolescence (2025): a Netflix series part-funded by state grants, whose cast have been invited to Parliament, and which is being used to manufacture consent for a crackdown on online speech. Nevermind the series was inspired by a black teenager stabbing a girl to death at a Croydon bus -stop: deprived working-class white boys watching “Manosphere” content are the real threat.

Nevertheless, the government’s command of the situation will be strained. As Betz predicts:

“The relative wealth, social stability and related lack of demographic factionalism, plus the perception of the ability of normal politics to solve problems that once made the West seem immune to civil war are now no longer valid. In fact, in each of these categories the direction of pull is towards civil conflict.”

The worsening economic conditions, engineered by precisely the net-zero policies that the failure of Heathrow’s back-up generators are being blamed on, will exacerbate latent cultural problems. As resources grow scarce, and culture continues to balkanize, Britain could split into factions who view the others’ existence as an existential threat.

This is already happening in the United States. 45,000 residents in Moore County in North Carolina were deprived of power after assailants opened fire on two substations on December 3, 2022. State Senator Tom McInnis said it was a “terrible act, and it appears to be intentional, willful and malicious” but offered no motive for the suspects. Since the 2024 election, liberal progressives in Las Vegas and Seattle have attacked Tesla dealerships, defaced and firebombed vehicles, and assaulted drivers. These acts of domestic terror target Elon Musk, for his involvement in the Trump administration. Despite Donald Trump winning the popular vote, and America being poised to enter a “new golden age” of economic prosperity, a sufficient number of people have been radicalized by irresponsible Democrat politicians and media to see the President as the second coming of Adolf Hitler. Unless this violent contagion is properly contained, it could play out as Betz predicts.

Whether caused by incompetence, adherence to environmental ideology, or the actions of accelerationist groups seeking to incite civil war, Britain is suffering from worn-out infrastructure and a broken culture. A government unwilling to reassess their disastrous economic policies are unlikely to address either. The country seems to be heading for decline, impoverishment, and conflict on rails — unless the train loses power first.