Hands up! Your fish or your electricity. Macron threatens to cut interconnector to UK

The UK wants to get back its fishing territory as part of a Brexit deal. The French aren’t too happy about that, but since the UK is heavily dependent on French interconnectors Macron can hold the UK electricity grid hostage. The French interconnectors under the Channel are needed both to import reliable nuclear power and to sell off the excess fluffy green kind of unreliable electricity that UK wind power makes at random times. The “value” of energy sales is more than the value of the fisheries (at least in hard currency). But UK imports are larger than the exports, and the UK electricity grid is so fragile it fell over last year leaving people stuck in underground trains for hours, and cutting off a million customers in an instant. The biggest weakness is probably the reliance on a foreign power to just keep the lights on. The cost of unplanned blackouts would trump everything else.

Green Energy puts the UK in a much weaker negotiation position.

Macron in last-ditch Brexit punishment with threat to devastate UK with energy blockade

Oli Smith, Express.co

Emmanuel Macron reacted furiously to Boris Johnson’s claims that trade talks are “over” […]