Arthur Downing and Hettie O'Brien on Power and the People

Britain’s energy system is expensive, bewilderingly complicated and perpetually in crisis. It didn’t have to be this way.
About this Event

Join energy industry insider Arthur Downing in conversation with journalist and author Hettie O’Brien for the launch of Power and the People: A History of British Energy, a provocative history of how Britain built, nationalised, privatised and ultimately fractured one of the most important pieces of infrastructure in our lives.

Beginning with the municipal electricity companies of the early 20th century, Downing charts the extraordinary transformation that followed as publicly owned enterprises electrified Britain at breakneck speed. Power stations, pylons and a national grid changed the landscape, and transformed everyday life.

Then came privatisation. From the 1980s onwards, electricity and gas were broken apart and sold off, creating a market-based system that Downing argues has become increasingly dysfunctional.

But Power and the People isn’t simply a diagnosis of what went wrong. Downing returns to Britain’s own history to make the case for another way forward, asking whether the energy transition now required might also demand a revolution in who owns and controls the power on which we all depend.

He’ll be joined by Hettie O’Brien, journalist and author of The Asset Class, whose own work investigates the growing power of private finance over the things we depend upon.

Arthur Downing is a Strategy Director at Octopus Energy, the UK’s largest electricity supplier, and Visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics. He has worked across the energy industry, both in the private sector and as an advisor to government. Before working in energy, he was a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford University.

Hettie OBrien is a writer and journalist at the Guardian and a regular contributor to the Guardian Long Read. She formerly worked as a writer at the New Statesman, as a reporter covering the Federal Trade Commission, and as a researcher at Rethinking Economics. Her first book, The Asset Class: How Private Equity turned Capitalism Against Itself (Weidenfeld &Nicolson and Grand Central, 2026) penetrates a hidden empire of billion-dollar deals and covert financial warfare to expose how the private equity industry has infiltrated every corner of modern life, wielding debt as a weapon of mass destruction and selling out the foundations of Western societies.