In the wake of Boris Johnson’s exit from Number 10, Tory MPs, including former ministers, have created a sea change in the public conversation about U.K. climate policy. For years, perhaps decades, the cross-party Westminster consensus on climate change has been a suffocating orthodoxy that limited debate about energy and other policy agendas, leaving Britain under-resourced and facing the consequences of energy prices that are out of control. But then, just a year and a bit after the U.K.’s hosting of the COP26 meeting in Glasgow, and following energy price spikes caused by lockdowns the world over, a small number of MPs began to question green dogma. This new energy and climate realism is a long overdue and welcome development. But if politicians want realistic policies, they are going to have to go much further.
The number of critics of the U.K.’s green agenda in Parliament has until now been very small. In the final Commons vote on the Climate Change Bill in October 2008, just five MPs, including the two Tellers, voted No. Outside, snow lay on the streets of Westminster for the first time in October in 74 years, in an ironic gesture from Nature herself that brought chaos to travel and power networks. The Bill, now an Act, would lock criticism of green ideology out of British politics for the next 12 years because what MPs had agreed to was in effect to hand what decision-making power they had not already transferred to the EU to the Committee on Climate Change that the Act created. In 2019, the Climate Change Act’s 80% emissions reduction by 2050 target was upped to ‘Net Zero’. But our democratic representatives had yet to find their feet. It wasn’t until the beginning of 2022 that a formal presence of the Nez Zero Scrutiny Group (NZSG) took the form of open letters to the Prime Minister and other briefings to the press.
Between Boris Johnson declaring that the U.K. would soon be the “Saudi Arabia of wind” and the formation of the NZSG, natural gas prices on European markets rose by around 1,000%, that is to say, 10-fold. Britain should lift the ban on fracking, urged the disobedient MPs. But the Government, and nearly the entire British political class, was still glowing from the buzz of Glasgow. The then Chancellor, now Prime Minister, declared at COP26 that financial institutions with $130 trillion in assets under management had been brought into alignment. “Make no mistake,” said former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney to the assembled delegates, “the money is here.” The great and the good cheered. The following year, thanks to the lifting of lockdowns increasing demand, gas prices nearly tripled, leaving Britain’s households and industries facing ruin.
The rising prices and inflation were blamed on Russia, which wasn’t where the blame belonged. The real culprits were the lockdowns and various green policies, including a commitment to ESG, which the Bank of England and successive U.K. Governments had used their power to promote. Both lockdowns and many years of green policy failure had created scarcity, with Britain and many other European governments taxing, restricting and even prohibiting oil and gas production. Green ideological utopianism thus rolled on, but this intransigence has finally produced a response, the NZSG. Finally, it was PM Johnson vacating Downing Street and his Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat, thereby triggering a by-election, that would be the first test of green ideology and a boost to the significance of this group.
The contest to select the constituency’s MP became something of a referendum on London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez) expansion, championed by the Labour Mayor, Sadiq Khan. Labour had signalled its even greater commitment to the green agenda. But it went down badly with voters, who in July last year narrowly returned an anti-Ulez Conservative candidate to Westminster – all the more surprising, given that Ulez was a policy introduced by Johnson when he was Mayor. Former Home Secretary Priti Patel became perhaps the most senior Conservative Party figure, albeit no longer in the Cabinet, to read the political runes. “Pause drive to Net Zero, the public are not ready,” she warned the new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
Patel was followed by former Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and Leader of the House of Commons, Jacob Rees-Mogg. Now a regular host on GB News, Rees-Mogg refers to Net Zero as a “fallacy” responsible for the U.K. having the most expensive energy prices in the world. The idea that Net Zero is “affordably achievable”, he argues, is a “fundamental untruth”.
These challenges to Net Zero have surely had a small but significant impact on Number 10’s decisions. The infectious realism has in the last year caused the Government to press pause, but not quite U-turn, on the gas boiler tax and the petrol/diesel car sales ban and to announce the commissioning of new gas-fired power stations. But though these are the first signs of the climate agenda suffering any meaningful setbacks in decades, they are clearly not enough. Worse, the next election is unlikely to be a referendum on Net Zero, and the Conservatives’ unpopularity is likely to bring in a Labour Government with a huge majority by default.
However, there is something that Conservative politicians with genuine concern for the future of this country can do to hasten the end of Net Zero. It may not save their Government or their seats. But it may change the debate far more radically than has so far been possible.
It is not enough merely to argue that Net Zero policies are wrong. What the public needs to hear is an explanation of how such bad policies, from Low Traffic Neighbourhoods and Ulez through to wind farms and car and boiler bans, came to dominate the political agenda, despite there being no clamour for them from the public and no test of the public’s willingness to accept the consequences. Regressive and anti-democratic policies have been imposed on the public through Westminster by what former Environment Secretary Owen Patterson a decade ago called the “green blob”.
Opposite the NZSG, but on the same benches, is a much larger caucus of green-ish Tory MPs, which includes the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero Claire Coutinho. The Conservative Environment Network (CEN) was founded by Ben Goldsmith, brother of Lord Zac (whom Boris Johnson made a peer when he lost his seat, so he could remain in Government). And it is funded through the European Climate Foundation (ECF) and the Clean Air Fund (CAF) – both philanthropic foundations controlled by British billionaire Sir Christopher Hohn. Ben Goldsmith is also a trustee of Hohn’s philanthropic outfit, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), which is the major grantor to both the ECF and CAF. The Prime Minister himself was a partner at Hohn’s hedge fund, The Children’s Investment (TCI), where he, along with Hohn, was implicated in the collapse of RBS, with the public footing the bill for the £45 billion bailout.
The resources made available to green campaigning organisations by such billionaires are but a fraction of their net wealth, but well beyond what political parties or any other organisation can hope to raise from the increasingly hard-pressed public. In 2022, for example, CIFF made grants of £174 million to green organisations – a figure that vastly exceeds the total spending by all U.K. political parties each year, bar 2019 (as I point out here). And that’s just one billionaire. Another, Michael Bloomberg, spends about the same amount. Throughout the West each year, billions are pumped by the world’s wealthiest individuals into ersatz civil society organisations as seemingly diverse as Extinction Rebellion and the green-wet Tory caucus, but all in the service of the same agenda. It funds organisations like Carbon Brief – the green news outfit that came up with the lie that “wind power is nine times cheaper than gas“, which has been repeated in Westminster countless times.
Even the London Mayor is Chair of a Bloomberg-Hohn-funded outfit, C40 Cities, from where he and other politicians learn to put green ideology before the public interest and democracy, and no doubt secure future roles for themselves in the green blobocracy. Entire university research departments are funded by rich greens, such as Jeremy Grantham who funds the eponymous ‘institutes’ at LSE and Imperial College London, which enjoy direct working relationships with the Climate Change Committee. The effect of this money has been to make the Westminster parties ideologically indistinct and to align successive governments, state agencies and so-called ‘civil society’ with business agendas. The Deputy Mayor for Environment and Energy Shirley Rodrigues came directly from CIFF, where she managed grants. Last year, Rodrigues was caught by the Telegraph instructing scientists at Imperial College – itself the beneficiary of more than £5 million in grants from City Hall – to try to silence critics of the Mayor’s policies.
The scandal is not merely that Net Zero policies are wrong; the scandal is green politics. It is anti-democratic and corrupting. At all levels of government, from the parish council, through Westminster and the European Union, to the United Nations, the limbs of the green blob shape the agenda. ECF grantees organise local lobbying for LTNs and candidly boast that they drafted both the EU’s climate policy roadmap to 2050 and the 2008 Climate Change Act. Once this is explained to the public, the zombie-like persistence of failed green policies is far more easily explained. The fact that even Conservative Cabinet members have been far more interested in meeting Extinction Rebellion for a sit-down than in hearing from the public about green issues, as well as the absurdity of wind farms, boiler bans and wet car prohibitions, would be far more readily understood.
Tory MPs have helped to shift the debate. The last year or so has seen conversations in the public square that were almost inconceivable in the late 2000s or early 2010s. But in order to bring realism and democracy back to policymaking, MPs must take an even bigger risk. They must explain how democracy, civil society and institutional science have been captured by the ‘green blob’ – in reality, a handful of billionaires. They were there. They saw the lobbying. They saw constituents, businesses and industries’ needs being ignored. And they saw their colleagues being brow-beaten into green utopianism. They saw billionaires’ cronies use state agencies – such as the Bank of England – to further their ideological and commercial interests. Now, if they mean what they say, it is time for them to explain what they have seen.
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