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The shock that the Strait of Hormuz has placed on oil markets should have forced Britain to relearn an old lesson. Energy security is not built on slogans, targets, or imported virtue. It is built on supply, infrastructure, reserves, and the willingness to keep domestic production alive when the world becomes dangerous. Europe, especially the United Kingdom (UK), has weakened its own energy position by pursuing clean energy and net zero targets before it had secure, cheap, reliable replacements.

That is why BP’s reported review of its UK North Sea operations matters. BP is a British multinational oil and gas company headquartered in London, and one of the world's largest energy firms. BP is reportedly weighing the sale of some or all of its UK North Sea assets, with a full disposal potentially valued at around £2 billion.

The North Sea remains strategically valuable precisely because the UK's clean energy pivot has not ended its dependence on oil and gas. It has merely shifted that dependence offshore, towards more fragile supply chains and more dangerous chokepoints. Hormuz should have been a moment to revive domestic reserves, not to watch capital leave.

Yet Britain has built a fiscal regime that tells energy companies the opposite. The country’s Ring Fence Corporation Tax and the Energy Profits Levy together push the effective headline rate on North Sea profits to roughly 78%, among the most demanding upstream regimes in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) – the OECD is an organisation that represents 38 developed, democratic, and free-market economies that collectively coordinate economic and social policies.

In a prolific frontier oil basin, operators might absorb such a rate. In a mature basin, such as the North Sea, with rising extraction costs and accelerating field decline, it changes the investment calculation entirely. Capital does not stay where returns are punished.

BP's position is not marginal. The company operates five key production hubs in the North Sea, including Clair, the largest oilfield on the UK Continental Shelf (UKCS) – the maritime area surrounding the UK where the country holds rights to explore and exploit natural resources. Chevron and ConocoPhillips have already exited the basin completely. Shell and TotalEnergies have restructured.

British Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has pointed to BP's global earnings as evidence that the company can afford to pay more tax, accusing it of profiting from the oil shock, and applied that justification to a tax that hits only UK upstream profits. But those global earnings come overwhelmingly from the Gulf of Mexico, Azerbaijan, and international trading. They are not generated on the UKCS. Taxing a declining domestic basin on the back of international windfalls collects revenue in the short term while accelerating the decline of the very production Britain needs over the long term.

BP is also reported to be reviewing whether to shift its primary stock exchange listing from London to an exchange in the United States (US). No decision has been confirmed, but the rationale is the same one driving the asset review. US capital markets offer a deeper investor base and a valuation framework that has historically rewarded hydrocarbon production rather than penalised it.

If BP exits both the UKCS and the London Stock Exchange within the same window, the message is unambiguous. A 117-year-old British company, founded to develop British oil interests, will have judged that Britain is no longer a competitive home for either its operations or its capital.

Hormuz exposed the cost of pretending geography no longer matters. If Britain taxes the North Sea oil operators into decline and watches its largest energy company list elsewhere, it will not have achieved climate leadership. It will have traded domestic resilience for imported vulnerability, and domestic capital for foreign markets.