Trump wants critical minerals. So do Cornwall’s MPs.

LONDON — World powers are deep in a fight over critical minerals. 

It has driven Donald Trump eyeball to eyeball with NATO over the future of Greenland.  Western allies are scrambling to strike deals which would freeze China out of the global minerals market it currently dominates.

But for a clutch of lawmakers in quiet Cornwall, southwest England, critical minerals play a different role. They are all about votes.

Labour MPs are betting that local mining for copper, tin, tungsten and especially lithium — all valuable because of their use in new tech and the push to net zero — will help them keep their seats in the U.K. parliament and survive Labour’s nosedive in the polls.  

Pulling in investment linked to critical minerals is “my number one pledge … for jobs and prosperity in the constituency,” said Noah Law, elected in 2024 in St. Austell and Newquay.  Good jobs in the industry would create something “clear, measurable, and actually evidence-able to people,” he explained. 

“The only way this will translate into votes at the next election is if people can see that the spoils of the industry are being shared with local communities,” Law said.  

Critical minerals are about “bringing new industries into the area,” agreed Jayne Kirkham, who represents neighboring Truro and Falmouth.  

Kirkham wants, she said, to “make Cornwall rich again.”  

Think lithium 

Ministers used November’s Critical Minerals Strategy to set a target for the U.K. producing 50,000 tons of lithium per year by 2035. The mineral is central to supply chains for electric car batteries, fuel cells and energy storage. 

“Critical minerals are essential to the U.K.’s economy, national security, and clean energy transition,” the strategy declared. 

Cornwall’s two biggest lithium extractors, British Lithium and Cornish Lithium, estimate they could produce 45,000 tons per year combined. Both companies have demonstration facilities up and running, with plans to begin commercial production before the end of the decade.

An aerial view of old mine workings at St Austell in Cornwall, where Cornish Lithium plans to extract the critical mineral. | Hugh Hastings/Getty Images

This sort of domestic production will help the country “wrest control” of critical minerals from China and other countries, Energy and Industry Minister Chris McDonald said in December.  

Law was in the U.S. last week at the behest of the Foreign Office to meet firms in the supply chain there, just as the U.K. signed a critical minerals partnership with the White House. Donald Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, has pitched to establish a U.S-led critical minerals bloc with 54 countries, including the U.K. 

That is an opportunity, Vance said last month, to “never have to rely on anybody else, except for each other, for the critical minerals necessary to sustain our industries and to sustain growth.”

The Cornwall Four   

Labour’s new wave of Cornish minerals enthusiasts, who entered parliament in the 2024 landslide general election win, also includes the MPs Anna Gelderd and Perran Moon. 

Kirkham dubs them the “Cornwall four.”  

The region has for too long ended up at the “sharp pointy end” of government decisions, she argued, especially since losing EU funding after Brexit. Now they are pushing collectively to get Cornwall into the critical minerals game. 

Critical minerals jobs are not a “silver bullet” for locals jobs, Gelderd said. Nonetheless, she argued: “I do think that the critical mineral strategy, and the jobs and growth that it brings, is going to be a crucial part of what people think of when [they ask]: Have our MPs delivered?”

Moon wants the government to set up a scheme styled on the $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund set up in Norway to harness the proceeds from Big Oil. Although this would be more like a local fund redirecting cash from the minerals industry to help Cornish voters —  and worth rather less.  

“[T]here has to be a direct kind of sovereign wealth fund for Cornwall, so there must be a direct benefit going back into the community in Cornwall from this investment,” he insisted.   

Moon has held talks with Chancellor Rachel Reeves and Downing Street economic adviser Varun Chandra. He toured Cornwall’s up-and-running lithium pilot plants with McDonald, the energy minister, last November.  

Law has been into 11 Downing Street, too, to talk up critical minerals at a roundtable with officials from the National Wealth Fund, UK Export Finance, and the British Business Bank. 

“I think that Whitehall is starting to listen, which is brilliant,” he said.  

How to spend £28B

The MPs also have an unlikely backer in former Conservative Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, who published the U.K.’s first Critical Minerals Strategy in 2022. Any focus on domestic supply chains was “sensible” in “an increasingly volatile world,” Kwarteng said.  

Treasury officials waved away Moon’s idea of a sovereign wealth fund but have talked up cash already going directly into critical mineral production in Cornwall — £80 million invested by the National Wealth Fund, a government funding vehicle for backing clean energy projects with £28 billion over the next five years. 

One industry figure familiar with discussions with government, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive Whitehall decisions, said officials must now make a call on how much more support to give. 

“If it was easy and cheap to do, it’d have been done by private sector already,” they said.  

After that £80 million commitment, the latest signs are less encouraging. Critical minerals were missing from the NWF’s ten ‘priority sectors’ for future funding when they were published last month. They have been relegated instead to a secondary list of 15 technologies, along with industries such as artificial intelligence and alternatives to traditional jet fuel, which may still receive cash but where NWF will not have its “deepest role.” 

NWF Chief Executive Oliver Holbourn said he “hoped to do more” for the sector. But there are other, newer technologies where NWF cash could make more of an impact, he stressed.

The MPs “were not actually asking for staggering amounts from the NWF as a percentage of its overall portfolio,” Law argued.

Between not much and none 

Meanwhile, experts warn that it could be fanciful for MPs to imagine cheerleading for critical minerals mining will save their jobs as the country turns on the Labour government.

Local campaigns have “varying success” in persuading voters, said Julian Gallie, head of research at Merlin Strategy. They generally produce only “small effects,” agreed JL Partners Founding Director Tom Lubbock.   

“If the links to voters’ personal situation — mainly on cost of living — is not explicit, then there will be limited-to-no impact on bucking the national trend,” Gallie warned.  

One former Treasury official said future U.K. decisions on critical minerals investments, driven by national security as well as hopes for economic growth, will only become “more complex as geopolitics fluctuates.” 

And the Cornwall four?  

“The Labour MP lobbying … shouldn’t have any bearing on [the Treasury]’s technocratic assessment,” the same former official said.