Westminster's net zero consensus is about to collapse and it's not a moment too soon

Telegraph

14-03-2025

As the latest (non) growth figures show, the economy is moving very slowly, if at all. In consequence, politics is moving fast.
In policy towards defence and security, housebuilding, welfare spending, NHS England, immigration, foreign aid, shedding useless civil servants and two-tier sentencing, Labour is moving fast to the Right. It has been spooked by the failure of its first six months.
This change may be more rhetorical than real, driven by the imminent Runcorn by-election. After all, in its attitudes to property rights, farming, inheritance, small businesses, independent schools, academies and House of Lords reform, Labour remains hostile to property, enterprise, tradition, and free-standing institutions. Its underlying belief that government, not people, is the secret of success, has not changed.
Nevertheless, the Blairites are now in charge of Sir Keir Starmer. He seems grateful for their protection, whether in the dangerous imperial arena of the Oval Office or the bearpit of the House of Commons.
The young Blair invented New Labour 30 years ago in times of economic boom. The vibe was Things Can Only Get Better. Today, Western civilisation is falling apart, so the tone is different – Blair post-September 11 2001, not tender Tony blushing in the May dawn of 1997 – but it is Blairism all the same, complete with Sir Jonathan Powell and Lord Mandelson.
That means, among other things, 'triangulation' – the magic trick that elevated the politician's habit of saying one thing to one person and something else to another into the status of a dogma. So three parties are contesting for the Right. We already have a serious fight between Reform and the Conservatives. Now Labour's triangulators are muscling in, too. As Diana, Princess of Wales, put it in quite another context, it is 'a bit crowded'.
In my view, Kemi Badenoch has been wise to defy the expectations of both her most ardent supporters and her critics that she would, after winning the Tory leadership, start pronouncing fiercely on all subjects. Shouting does not earn you the right to be heard.
As I learnt from my biographical studies of Margaret Thatcher, the later-to-be-legendary Iron Lady spent her more than four years as Leader of the Opposition battling to win respect from her doubting party and from voters who had seen the previous Conservative government collapse under its own economic mismanagement. Despite the ardour of her personal beliefs, she knew she must progress step-by-step.
All the same, any opposition needs to indicate a direction of travel, and Mrs Badenoch is doing so, and planning to announce her policy groups next week. When it has become the opposition after a period in government, the defeated party must work out how much error to admit before it can move on.
Strangely, it can be harder to break with a bi-partisan policy than one of your own. In the 1970s, both main parties usually adhered to the belief that inflation must be held down by 'prices and incomes policies'.
Government, business and trade unions, assisted by a specially created board of worthies, would adjudicate how people's wages should be adjusted in the light of price rises.
This approach did nothing to stop inflation and handed political and industrial power to often militant trade union leaders. Mrs Thatcher understood, at least from 1974, what nonsense it was. She began to advocate quite different policies, such as 'monetarism' and reform of trade union law, but she moved cautiously to avoid blaspheming against the bipartisan pieties of the age. The strikes of the Winter of Discontent of 1978-9 convinced enough voters that her new approach was right.
The equivalent bipartisan nonsense of today is not strictly economic, although it has dire economic effects. It is net zero, first legislated for by Ed Miliband' s Climate Change Act of 2008. With the support of all but five Conservatives (the most important Tory to oppose it was Peter, now Lord, Lilley), it passed. Mr Miliband then set the 2050 target of reducing by 80 per cent the UK's carbon emissions in excess of their 1990 level.
In 2019, the Conservative government, led by Theresa May, hardened that target to 100 per cent. It was able to do this by statutory instrument, not new legislation, so one of the most momentous set of costs ever imposed upon the British taxpayer was agreed, without a vote, after only 88 minutes of Commons debate in which Tories and Labour fell over one another to be the greener.
We live with the consequences. These include the highest energy prices in the developed world, the decline and sometimes collapse of our remaining heavy industries (eg, aluminium), the closure of the Grangemouth oil refinery, a nervous breakdown in the car market, heat pumps that don't work, a shareholder revolt against green BP, risk to continuous electricity supply and a sentence of death upon our remaining fossil fuel extraction, mainly North Sea oil and gas. Mr Miliband – for it is, again, he – is trying to build 5-6,000 pylons by 2030 to facilitate the march of progress by wind power.
Because Britain leads the way, we are suffering from 'first mover disadvantage', making ourselves uncompetitive against comparable countries and outsourcing higher emissions by importing things (including wind turbine parts) produced by fossil fuels.
Mrs Badenoch has always been sceptical about wilder green claims, and now the mood among both voters and the party is with her, so I would be amazed if the Conservatives do not quite soon come out against the current date and stages towards net zero. How they do so will make a great difference.
Such a change would break the main-party consensus, so the Tories must be ready for the deluge of posh ordure which will be poured upon their heads by the usual experts.
The unaccountable Climate Change Committee created by the 2008 Act is no longer, I am glad to say, the force it was, and is having trouble finding a permanent chairman; but you can be sure that almost 100 per cent of the public-sector/professorial classes paid to have opinions on the matter will denounce the Tories with 'risking the future of the planet'.
The best answer is not to contest 'the science', nor deny the existence of climate change, but to weigh the costs of current policy against the benefits. The first are extremely high, the second, speculative.
As Lord Lilley points out, even the high priests, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), do not predict the imminent catastrophe you hear from Mr Miliband, the BBC etc.
The IPCC 2018 assessment report stated that 'for most economic sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers' such as 'changes in population, age, income, technology, relative prices, lifestyle, regulation, governance…'
Its most recent assessment report suggested that global economic impacts of climate change might be higher than estimated in 2018, but that it had 'low confidence' in this point.
It seems rational, therefore, to suggest that our heavy public investment in immature technologies wastes money. Our incredibly expensive effort to prevent climate change – which Britain, being responsible for only 1 per cent of global emissions, cannot materially affect – would be better replaced by spending, probably lower and slower, on the necessary adaptations required by global warming, in which free enterprise can lead.
Existing climate change legislation puts British business and British taxpayers on a treadmill in which we must work much harder for each megawatt hour consumed. The simple question the Tories can ask once they have broken with the orthodoxy is: 'Why?'