UK to Ban Uyghur Slave Labour in State Green Energy Project

In a major u-turn, the left-wing Labour Party government in Britain has reversed course and will prohibit the state-owned green energy project from using solar panels tied to Chinese slave labour.

After blocking attempts last month to amend legislation to cut subsidies to the upcoming GB Energy firm if evidence of slave labour was found in their solar panels and other so-called “renewables”, the Labour government has backtracked following pressure from campaigners and backbench MPs.

A government source told the Times of London that there was a “recognition of the strength of feeling” after 92 Labour MPs refused to vote in the last round on the Great British Energy Bill over concerns that the green agenda was enabling slavery, particularly in the Xinjiang region of Communist China.

“We are committed to ensuring Great British Energy is a sector leader in this area, developing resilient, home-grown supply chains free from forced labour, and will bring forward proposals shortly on this,” a government source told the paper.

The reversal has led to concern among the establishment that a refusal to use slavery-tied “renewables” may imperil the cross-party agreement to reach Net Zero carbon emissions in Britain by 2050.

This concern was even expressed by members of the so-called Conservative Party, including Shadow Energy Secretary Andrew Bowie, who said that the ban would result in a “real slowdown in the deployment of solar in the United Kingdom”.

While he admitted that there are slavery issues within the solar supply chain, Bowie demanded that the Labour government answer how they plan to meet the “self-imposed” Net Zero targets — which his party also supported — without Chinese slave labour.

Deputy Director of the Conservative Environment Network John Flesher welcomed the move, which he described as “long overdue”, but said that “the government must now act to ensure that this knee-jerk U-turn doesn’t damage our environmental goals and the solar industry.”

A 2021 report from the Bitter Winter human rights magazine claimed that more than 80 per cent of the world’s production of the solar pannel component polysilicon is “produced in China, overwhelmingly in Xinjiang.”

The report found that four factories in the Xinjiang region, also known as East Turkestan, produce around half of the global supply. The paper noted that the Xinjiang factories were “located suspiciously close” to the concentration camps where millions of Uyghurs have been interned.

The communist Chinese government has been credibly accused of using the camps to subject the ethnic minority to forced abortions, sterilisation, organ harvesting, torture, and slave labour.

Last month, criticising the government’s past failures to root out concentration camp labour, 89-year-old Holocaust survivor Dorit Oliver-Wolff remarked: “The renewable energy sector is stained with the blood of Uyghur forced labour.”

Follow Kurt Zindulka on X: Follow @KurtZindulka or e-mail to: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.