After many years of vindictively, vexatiously and maliciously plaguing innocent people, it seemed in February this year that disgraced and deranged former policeman Lynsay Watson‘s campaign of terror might be finally beginning to draw to a close.

Attending the Civic Justice Centre in Manchester as part of an ongoing attempt to persecute the feminist journalist and author Helen Joyce, Watson was intercepted by Greater Manchester Police and arrested in connection with allegations of harassment of several people, one of whom was myself.

Watson had been evading justice for a long time. He provides false addresses to the police and courts (which is a crime in itself), and despite numerous criminal complaints against him he manages to dodge arrest because police forces endlessly ping-pong the complaints between each other (“He lives in YOUR area!” “No, yours!”) and allow him to repeatedly arrange voluntary interviews which he never turns up to, stalling and hiding until the six-month limit on harassment cases times out.

And guess what, readers?

We have no more answers to all the obvious questions arising from that email than you do. (Not least why police still insist on taking the side of transwomen in terms of pronouns, even when talking to the victims of their crimes. That’s not a neutral stance, that’s gaslighting – even while investigating your complaint of harassment from a massive and aggressive bloke, they’re telling you he’s a lady.)

When I made my complaint last year I briefed GMP in detail from the outset about his evasion tactics and suggested several powers they could exercise to locate him, yet none were deployed and he was allowed to get away with it again, dodging several voluntary interviews for several months until I finally told them he’d be at the CJC on the morning of 12 February and they managed to get a couple of officers down there.

Despite time being a critical issue by then, they failed to use their discretionary powers to ask the Crown Prosecution Service to expedite their report (called an “emergency charging decision”) after interviewing him.

(We should note at this point that the email only refers to my own complaint. He was questioned and bailed on at least one more on the same day, and we don’t know whether that one remains live.)

Much of what you’re about to read below is taken verbatim from my detailed and exhaustive initial complaint to the police last year. They cannot credibly claim not to have known what sort of person they were dealing with. Whether their failure to act effectively is down to incompetence, overwork or sympathy with a former officer is a matter for speculation.

Watson is a male who identifies as a female, and has done so for approximately 25 years. His campaign of harassment against me began in February 2023, when he reported me to GMP over some pretty innocuous social media comments about the tragically-murdered teenager Brianna Ghey.

By this time three years had passed since the judgment in Harry Miller vs College Of Policing had been handed down (and over a year since the unsuccessful appeal against it), confirming the rights of “gender-critical” people – those such as myself who observe and acknowledge the reality of biological sex – to express their views freely on transgender issues, even if that caused offence to others.

Watson was sacked from Leicestershire Police in 2023 for gross misconduct after conducting a long campaign of harassment against Mr Miller on the basis of Mr Miller’s holding of those beliefs. His attempt to appeal against aspects of that decision – although he accepted the charge of gross misconduct – was rejected in the High Court in August 2025.

Watson’s complaint against me therefore had no reasonable chance of success, and GMP duly rejected it. Watson forced several internal reviews of the decision, all of which had the same outcome confirming the original decision, and he then applied for a judicial review in April 2024, which was refused.

Watson sought to appeal that decision on 14 August 2024 and was granted permission by HHJ Bird on a single ground. That appeal was heard in February 2025. Judgment was duly handed down by Mrs Justice Hill, who refused the application and also refused Watson leave to appeal in April 2025.

Watson filed an application with the Court Of Appeal anyway, which was rejected on 1 April 2026. (“On the papers”, which is a legal term meaning that there was no oral hearing, the judge simply read the documents and reached a decision.)

The downside of that is that because it wasn’t heard in public, we can’t show you any of the numerous mind-bogglingly demented submissions Watson sent to the court during the process, which is a tremendous shame.

I had not been informed by either Watson or GMP of the existence of the complaint until an email sent to me by Watson on 19 February 2025 – two years after the report had been made and despite the obvious fact that I was an Interested Party in the judicial review (and the person he was attempting to have jailed).

However, social media accounts run by Watson had made reference to it.

The reference in the tweet above to “our reports […] since 2019” is notable, since the Spitfire Cannon account was only registered in September 2023.

(The term “FAFO” in the tweet above is an acronym. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary it’s “an expression of warning or schadenfreude”, standing for “Fuck Around, Find Out”, a favorite phrase of Watson’s.)

In March 2024 the same account gloated about the supposed imminence of reports against myself, JK Rowling, Graham Linehan and Helen Joyce to the police after the Hate Crime And Public Order Act (Scotland) became law on 1 April of that year.

(“Shed collapse” is an urban-slang term for “mental breakdown”.)

The account also threatened to “[bypass] the police” with regard to gender-critical campaigners, an apparently threatening term which was not elaborated on.

The account had previously made numerous other hostile posts about me, using my Twitter “tag” to ensure that I saw them, undoubtedly for the purposes of causing me fear or alarm.

After I blocked the account to stop receiving these notifications, it made that intention clear, saying that I “should be” “scared”.

At this point an unexpected champion entered the arena.

(Roddy Dunlop KC, the Dean of Scotland’s Faculty Of Advocates, subsequently made good on his pledge and represented me pro bono in the hearing before Mrs Justice Hill, alongside my solicitor Elliot Hammer, paid for by the heroic Free Speech Union.)

It’s very clear that “Spitfire Cannon” is Lynsay Watson, for multiple reasons.

However, there’s no need for any supposition or conjecture regarding that matter. The account stated in March 2024 that “I have lodged a complaint with Police Scotland” regarding the actions of JK Rowling, and screenshotted the text of the complaint. It would be a simple matter for any other force to contact Police Scotland and establish the name supplied by the complainant.

What’s in no dispute, however, is that it was Lynsay Watson who filed the complaint against me with GMP and has continued to try to force them to prosecute me for three and a quarter years subsequently, despite a lengthy series of findings (seven, by my last count) from the police and courts that his complaint is baseless.

(In June 2025 he also tweeted implying that he intended to name me as an Interested Party in a separate case, which he’s provided no further details about since.)

In addition, last September he contacted me with a threat to sue me in the County Court for supposed “harassment” and “discrimination” against himself under the Equality Act 2010, demanding compensation of between £35,200 and £56,200 for an article published on Wings about Mrs Justice Hill’s judgment a few days after it was handed down, which also provided some background on him.

As a former police officer Watson will be perfectly aware that the EA2010 does not apply to private individuals, only public authorities. In any event I informed him of this fact in my reply, directing him to appropriate information sources and noting that I considered this obviously-vexatious and groundless threat to be part of a campaign of deliberate harassment contrary to the Protection From Harassment Act 1997.

No proceedings in the County Court have as yet materialised. Nevertheless he then contacted me again by email on 15 September 2025, ostensibly to notify me that I had attempted to pervert the course of justice by posting a link to a crowdfunder to provide defence counsel for Matthew Heath, who has been arrested and charged at the behest of another transgender activist, a male calling himself Stephanie Hayden.

Despite the manifestly obvious fact that any bail conditions which may or may not have been applied to Mr Heath would not apply to anyone else – something which again a former police officer of 20+ years experience would know perfectly well – Watson has already vexatiously reported myself and numerous others (among literally thousands who also tweeted or retweeted links to the page) to the Metropolitan Police for this supposed crime, as stated on his subsequently-banned Bluesky social media account SEEN Police Official Open Public Network (henceforth “SEEN POOPN”).

The only possible purpose of all of these threats, which are without any sort of basis in law, is to cause fear, alarm and distress, and possibly also force the targets to incur significant legal expenses in attempting to protect themselves. (My own case would have cost me well into five figures if not for the FSU and Roddy Dunlop KC, with no prospects of recovering the money from the penniless Watson, whose endless legal actions are paid for by the taxpayer under the Help With Fees scheme.)

He appears to glory in causing, or believing to have caused, such fear.

Despite repeated warnings to stop emailing me, Watson continued to do so, which formed the basis of my harassment against him and his subsequent arrest.

The SEEN POOPN account being operated by Watson was also stated, uncontested, in open court during the trial of Graham Linehan at Westminster Magistrates Court in September 2025 and can be confirmed by the transcript of those proceedings.

While it uses collective pronouns (“we”, “our”), it is in fact the sole property of Watson. In February 2025 its corresponding Twitter/X account referred to “our” application and “our” pre-legal-action protocols in respect of an attempt to instigate another judicial review, in this case against Maya Forstater of the feminist charity Sex Matters. That application was, however, made in the sole name of Lynsay Watson.

In September 2025 Watson alleged – apologies for the unavoidable semantic tangle of the following – that I had reported “us” for harassment, stating that “we” had brought litigation against me. (He also asserted, in a vaguely threatening way, that my report was “not smart”.)

But the sole subject of my report was Lynsay Watson, and the only person who has brought litigation against me is Lynsay Watson. SEEN POOPN was therefore plainly and demonstrably, by its own admission, Lynsay Watson.

Again, while there is in reality no doubt about the matter of who operates Watson’s numerous accounts – he constantly gives himself away in all sorts of ways – it would be straightforward for police to establish who made the complaints to the Metropolitan Police, to obtain technical information about the accounts on Bluesky and Twitter/X from the respective companies, and/or to search Watson’s electronic devices for the relevant information.

(The Twitter/X account for SEEN POOPN was banned in August 2025 after publishing details about the private address of JK Rowling, but they will still hold its details. The banning of the account makes it impossible to link to some of his historic tweets screenshotted below, but again Twitter/X should be able to verify them for the police if their authenticity is disputed.)

Watson appears to blame me – “the Man with no Teeth” – for his banning, although I had nothing to do with it. He comments obsessively about my dental health on the basis of a tweet I posted years ago when an old tooth had to be removed, including a number of posts in which he referred to me as a “pyknic”, which basically means “fat”.

Watson used both accounts, and continues to use new Bluesky accounts despite a string of bannings, to issue a stream of abuse and threats against myself and other gender-critical campaigners. They interacted with the “Spitfire Cannon” account, behaviour consistent with the modus operandi revealed during Watson’s dismissal from Leicestershire Police, whereby he created a string of anonymous accounts and used them to support each other.

In August 2025, a few weeks before the murder of American political commentator Charlie Kirk, Watson called for the “ethical assassinations” of people he considers “Nazis” and “fascists” – terms he defines extremely widely to include anyone with gender-critical views and judges and police officers he feels do not take sufficient action against such people, including the current Inspector Of Constabulary, Andy Cooke, to whom he refers as a “bigoted cunt”, a “crook” and a “Nazi shitbag”.

In August 2025, he told a sitting MP that “You’re an evil arsehole and you won’t always have bodyguards around you”, which can only reasonably be interpreted as a threat of physical violence.

He continued to express this view after Kirk’s murder, and has made explicitly clear that he considers Kirk’s organisation, Turning Point, to consist of “literal, modern-day Nazis”, and therefore deserving of further murders.

And stated that “It [sic] time we stopped f*cking around with peaceful protests with Nazis”, which can only reasonably be read to mean deploying violence instead, particularly in the context of other tweets sympathising with transgender murderers.

The account openly stated that its intent was to have gender-critical people like myself “fucking living in fear”, and that “nothing is off the card” [sic] in achieving that aim, and that myself and others will “have your life ruined”.

It repeatedly spoke of resorting to “the nuclear option”, without specifying what that might be.

And Watson claimed to have “nothing to lose”.

And that his mental health has been “permanently” “destroyed”.

Such comments are particularly chilling given his previous statements that he would deliver “a grim ending” to gender-critical activists such as Helen Joyce if he wasn’t “inherently peaceful”.

When the account was eventually banned by Bluesky, Watson opened a string of replacements, including “New Model 3” on 20 January 2025, with which he continued to advocate the murder of gender-critical activists, or as Watson called them, “anti-trans extremists directly analogous to high-profile Nazis”.

The NM3 account last tweeted the day before Watson’s arrest on 12 September (it’s possible that he lost access to it when the police took his mobile phone) and has not resumed since, but remains live on Bluesky.

Prior to that it was fond of talking about rifles, particularly in the context of bemoaning American’s unwillingness to use them to kill these “Nazis”.

Something it shared with another of Watson’s replacement Bluesky accounts, “SEEN In Justice”, on which he bragged about his own alleged shooting skills.

That account chillingly called for the “decommissioning” of gender-critical activists, which again it’s impossible to rationally interpret in any other way than murder given its framing by Watson as an act of self-defence against homicide and “genocide”.

“SEEN In Justice” was banned in turn, alongside other short-lived accounts including “SEEN Police”, “SEEN Volunteer”, “unpaid-overworked” and “ado-da-diddly-yay”.

The “unpaid-overworked” one mainly vented his fury at developmental biologist Dr Emma Hilton of the University Of Manchester, who was present at his arrest and who he blames for it although it had nothing whatsoever to do with her, and attempted to incite people to harass her.

He said counter-protestors shouldn’t do so during this month’s “one year since the For Women Scotland” demonstrations because police would be present (what possible valid reason could there be for peaceful counter-protestors to avoid the police?), and that the best method would be to intercept her on her way to or from the event, which he called a “neo-Nazi rally”.

On one of his latest Twitter accounts (which has had several names including “BeKindIsFun” and at the time of writing “DrZeiuss“, and is one of at least four he’s currently operating on the platform, including “Lyn075702557299“, “Sarah Sillymore”, and the unusually blatant “LynsayWatson“), he was more explicitly menacing towards Dr Hilton, and other women who were present to witness the arrest.

Watson is so abominably bad at concealing his endless fake identities that he uses the same themes, images and text across them regularly.

He never makes any attempt to alter his modus operandi – personal abuse, threats to doxx people, physically attack people or get them arrested, and wildly delusional “predictions”, in this case his apparently imminent reinstatement as a police officer.

(His pattern of furiously denying that any new sock account is him and constantly talking about himself in the third person, only to forget himself at some point and admit it, never changes either. Much like his inability to correctly use apostrophes.)

But after a brief period of diligence Bluesky appeared to lose interest in shutting him down for violating its terms against banned users creating new accounts (Twitter has never cared about enforcing that rule), and his current active account on the site is called “Sub MOA”, which is a term relating to the accuracy of sniper rifles.

It continues his obsession with Emma Hilton.

(Oh look, those repeating phrases again.)

The account repeats his previous calls for people to undertake “direct action” in the form of “decommissioning” gender-critical activists, ie murdering them.

(Because Watson makes clear that he thinks using lawful means to take these people out of commission is a hopeless task.)

The reduction in number from 25 to 19 is curious. Maybe he’s already killed six and nobody knows about it yet. But readers may wish to imagine the response of the police if someone were to tweet even once in such a manner about “decommissioning” 25 leading Muslims or trans people or pretty much any other group. Yet Watson remains at liberty to continually escalate his threats, even after being in police custody.

In messages sent to my personal Twitter account @RevStu last year (after I’d blocked him from my @WingsScotland account), Watson threatened to show up in person at my front door, much as he’d subsequently threaten to do to JK Rowling.

And he’s certainly known to be capable of violence – while a serving police officer (still using his birth name of Alex Horwood), Watson kicked a man unconscious in the process of arrest.

As the footage of his arrest shows, he’s a large and heavily-built man and previously extremely strong, having been a boxer and member of the armed forces as well as describing himself in a January 2000 Daily Record interview as a “5 foot 11 muscle-bound policeman” and “hyper-masculine”.

During his Police Appeals Tribunal hearing in August 2025, Watson told the judge that he “rightly does not seek to excuse [his] online misconduct” and “is now embarrassed by [his] tweets” during his harassment of Harry Miller, but blamed them on being “mentally ill”, at the time, using the past tense.

However, since there has been absolutely no change in his online conduct between then and the present day, it must reasonably assumed he still is mentally ill, and as noted above the SEEN POOPN account recently claimed that Watson’s mental health has been “permanently” “destroyed”.

What we therefore have is a man who by his own admission is mentally “destroyed”, has “lost everything” and has “nothing to lose”, has a known capability for violence, who believes that anyone holding gender-critical beliefs is a “Nazi” and a “fascist” who deserves to have their lives “ruined” and to “fucking live in fear” (and spends every waking moment on a relentless campaign to achieve that end), and that it is morally acceptable, even admirable, to “assassinate”, ie murder, such people.

As one such person, who has been the focus of Watson’s fury for two and a half years, who is currently still frustrating his attempts to have me imprisoned, and who he’s threatened in a menacing manner to visit personally, I believe it to be a considerable understatement that Watson has deliberately carried out a course of action designed to cause me fear, alarm and distress, and has succeeded in doing so.

(Partly because I’ve previously been victim to similar utterly baseless, ludicrous and vexatious complaints on the basis of my political beliefs, which nevertheless saw me arrested and my belongings impounded for months, causing me thousands of pounds of unrecoverable expense – because I had to replace the seized equipment to continue to do my job – and trauma before being dismissed without charges. Even several years later my heart rate still leaps if the doorbell rings when I’m not expecting anyone, and I’m still sometimes accused of the allegations on social media because they were widely reported in the press.)

I not only believe that he has done so and intends to continue to do so, I also believe there’s a very real chance he’ll attempt to do me and/or others physical harm. He repeatedly refers to being in some sort of life-or-death struggle against evil, to being at the limits of his endurance, and to holding the law in complete contempt for what he perceives as its institutional transphobia and bigotry. He is manifestly dangerous, and by his own assertion.

I know of, and have spoken directly to, at least six other people whom Watson has targeted for similar harassment and who have filed criminal complaints against him, and yet the police have taken no action in any of their cases, denying knowledge of his address and batting responsibility for investigating him back and forth between each other endlessly, despite the fact that he’s required to give a current and valid address to the countless courts and police forces he submits reports and applications to, and it being a criminal offence to provide a false address for such purposes.

He claims to be in receipt of state benefits (it’s highly unlikely he has a job), which also require a valid address, and our understanding is that he drives a vehicle of some kind whose number both Lincolnshire and Greater Manchester Police (at a minimum) are aware of, which also requires a genuine address for registration and insurance on pain of committing an offence.

Instead, as in my case, he’s merely been contacted by email and invited for voluntary interviews, which he agrees to but then fails to turn up for, wasting weeks at a time until the six-month statute expires and the warrant is cancelled. From his career in the police, he’s clearly well acquainted with all the loopholes in their procedures.

He even brags about the police’s supportive gratitude towards him, and claims that they have “advised [him] to carry on [his] lawful work”.

Yet at the same time he accuses GMP of trying to have him “stitched up”.

And openly disrespects the law and those who uphold it, constantly advocating mass “100% non-compliance” with the law as established by the Supreme Court.

Including violent assault on police officers attempting to carry out their duty.

Watson has actively solicited and incited people to disobey the law and physically assault police officers attempting to uphold it.

Which has resulted in dozens of trans-identifying men making such declarations in response to his request.

Including open threats of violence against officers.

These comments are an open deliberate threat to public order. The shocking dereliction of duty of police forces in pursuing complaints against Watson has attracted a growing amount of unfavourable media coverage in the UK and international press, which is doing considerable damage to the reputation of the British police both at home and worldwide.

To the extent that the police and government are fighting each other to disown the actions of the forces acting at Watson’s behest.

(Many of these articles directly cite Watson’s harassment of me.)

And yet incredibly, police continue to allow themselves to be used as Watson’s personal bully boys, while complaints against Watson go ignored.

And not just police. Astonishingly, despite my solicitor Elliot Hammer referring to Watson by gender-neutral terms (“the Claimant”, “the Appellant”) throughout Watson’s failed appeal attempt, Watson whined to the Solicitors Regulation Authority and they made a single finding against Elliot with regard to their rules on “encouraging equality, diversity and inclusion”.

He also attempted to bring contempt of court charges against both myself and Elliot for “misgendering” him, both of which were refused by the Court Of Appeal.

And even though the CoA’s judgment is final and cannot be further appealed, he’s now attempting to embark on a lunatic attempt to take it to the Supreme Court.

Quite aside from his openly-stated attempts to ruin the lives of individuals and cause them to live in “fear” and “Hell”, Watson’s non-stop barrage of police complaints and judicial reviews – none of them with any credible hope of success – must have cost the public purse many hundreds of thousands of pounds in court costs and police time by now, as well as interfering with the hearing of genuine cases in a system already creaking at the seams.

(He admits to having made over 100 complaints to GMP alone, and we know from the evidence above that he also bombards other forces with his drivel too, including Police Scotland and the Metropolitan Police.)

And the police know they’re failing. One of Watson’s other victims was former officer Charlotte Cadden, who he continues to defame on a daily basis. GMP also allowed her harassment claim to time out due to a failure to locate Watson, and last week they admitted that they’d done a rotten job.

GMP have also apologised to barrister Adrian Yalland, who was similarly harassed by Watson and presented them with a detailed dossier to give them the maximum possible assistance, but also had to watch as they failed to locate him until the six months ran out.

Adrian, Charlotte and four other people who’d made harassment complaints that failed because of GMP’s unwillingness to locate Watson (Maya Forstater, Harry Miller, Cathy Larkman and Helen Joyce) wrote a joint letter to GMP’s chief constable Sir Stephen Watson – no relation, we hope – in June 2025 warning him about how Lynsay Watson was habitually evading justice.

They can’t say they haven’t been told, over and over again.

I’ve now filed a similar complaint to Charlotte’s. This state of affairs cannot be allowed to continue until Watson escalates himself right over the edge and makes good on one of his numerous threats, possibly costing someone their life.

In any event it’s long past time that his campaign of intimidation and harassment against myself and others was taken seriously and acted upon. Police officers merely having “tea and scones” with him and then shrugging their shoulders when he stalls his way out of yet another prosecution is not acceptable. It’s making a mockery not just of GMP (who on Watson’s telling still regard him as an esteemed colleague), but the entire judicial system.

(We certainly know that the police’s initial advice to Watson when he was harassing Harry Miller – the gross misconduct that eventually lost Watson his job – wasn’t to stop doing it, but simply to be sneakier about it.)

Because of course it’s not just Watson who benefits from the massive double standard applied by the police and other institutions to transactivists. We could all reel off scores of stories where the most ridiculous complaints from transactivists result in people being dragged off by gangs of cops, whereas all manner of intimidation, incitement and actual violence from them results in zero consequences, often with police officers standing around doing nothing.

But, y’know, while Wings does not endorse crime, it must be nice to know that if you WERE to feel like breaking a few laws and harassing a few people without having to face any consequences, readers, there’s an easy, tried and tested way to pull it off.

Testing tidal power turbines in real sea conditions, Orkney, Scotland (Alamy)

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The government’s recent renewable energy auctions contracted the lowest amount of tidal stream energy since 2022, adding just one additional turbine to Scottish tidal capacity. At a moment when the UK should be ramping up our deployment of cutting-edge energy technology, we appear instead to be slowing down.

The introduction of a ringfence for tidal stream in Allocation Round 4 (AR4) was a genuine gamechanger for the energy sector. It, and successive auction rounds, took tidal stream from 10MW of deployment to a pipeline of 140MW to be delivered by 2029.

Recent results, however, suggest that the momentum built in those early rounds is beginning to slip. Over the last four auctions, the contracted capacity has been 41MW, 53MW, 28MW, and most recently 21MW. The reason is straightforward: the level of support offered by the government has fallen.

As chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Marine Energy, it is difficult not to be concerned that a technology so clearly aligned with the government’s own clean energy superpower ambitions now appears to be slipping down the list of priorities.

The UK could lead the world in developing, deploying and exporting tidal stream technologies – which offer a predictability that most other renewables cannot match. Tidal stream is a reliable renewable resource that has already provided more than 80GWh of electricity to the UK grid. As we transition to Clean Power 2030, and an energy system dominated by intermittent renewables, this predictability helps reduce system cost. It provides security for the moments when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine.

Just as importantly, the economic benefits are already being felt here at home. Tidal stream projects are being deployed with more than 80 per cent UK supply-chain content, supporting jobs in coastal communities like my own and far beyond.

Orbital Marine Power’s O2 turbine, deployed in my constituency at the European Marine Energy Centre, is a good illustration of what that looks like in practice. The turbine was designed in Orkney and Edinburgh, and built in Dundee using steel from Motherwell, blades from the Solent, anchors from Anglesey and hydraulics from the Midlands. This is not just an energy story but a British industrial story.

There is also a growing export opportunity. Last year Proteus Marine Renewables deployed the first 1.1MW tidal stream turbine in Japan, designed in and exported from Scotland.

Despite our natural advantages, this is a race that the UK is at risk of losing if the route to market for tidal energy is not combined with the conditions for delivery.

The French government has announced plans to leapfrog the UK by contracting 250MW of tidal stream capacity by 2030, with a further 250MW expected shortly afterwards. Canada is preparing to deploy its first tidal stream array in the Bay of Fundy. In Asia, countries such as Indonesia, Japan and China are expanding their own programmes.

We have seen this story play out before. In the 1980s Denmark invested early in its wind energy industry, supporting domestic deployment with strong local supply chains. That early commitment gave Denmark a first-mover advantage which it still enjoys today. The Danish wind sector now generates more than £7bn annually in export revenue alone. The UK, by contrast, generates far more wind power but exports less than £2.4bn annually, and remains a net importer of wind technology, much of it from Denmark. We must not repeat that mistake.

In recent months several strategies on energy have been published, including from GB Energy and the National Wealth Fund. Disappointingly, tidal stream barely features and there is still little clarity about how these new bodies will support early-stage investment in the sector.

Despite its strong UK supply-chain content, tidal stream currently falls outside initiatives such as the Clean Industries Bonus, the Supply Chain Accelerator and the Industrial Growth Fund. That matters, because the 140MW of tidal capacity already contracted will only be delivered if the right conditions exist to gather in further investment.

There is still time to change course. The government’s decision to establish a Marine Energy Taskforce in June 2025, charged with developing a roadmap for the UK’s tidal stream potential, was a welcome step – but a roadmap on its own will not deliver turbines in the water. What is required now is practical action.

That is why I support the industry’s call for three clear steps: a clear route for funding for CfD-backed tidal stream projects from GB Energy and the National Wealth Fund; increased funding for tidal stream in CfD Allocation Round 8; and a commitment for the UK and devolved governments to implement the recommendations of the Marine Energy Taskforce.

Tidal stream is no longer an experimental technology. It is proven, predictable and ready to scale. If the UK is serious about becoming a clean energy superpower, it cannot afford to turn its back on the power in our tides.

Alistair Carmichael is the Liberal Democrat MP for Orkney and Shetland, and chair of the APPG for Marine Energy