Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
The claim—that opposition to “climate action” stems primarily from conservatives who personally dislike liberals, rather than substantive disagreements—is a reductive framing often pushed in academic or activist circles. It attempts to pathologize dissent as tribal animosity instead of engaging with policy, economics, science, or risk assessment. Polling and real-world outcomes show a clearer picture: a large, persistent partisan gap exists, but it’s rooted in differing priorities, views on government intervention, economic trade-offs, and skepticism about alarmist framings and specific prescriptions—not mere “dislike.”
“… reducing hostility toward the other side (particularly among conservatives) may facilitate cross-ideological climate coalitions. …”
Climate policy isn’t partisan — research suggests more on the right support it than oppose it
Published: April 29, 2026 2.09am AEST Emily Huddart Professor of Sociology, University of British Columbia Tony Silva Associate Professor of Sociology, University of British Columbia
Climate change has become entangled in partisan politics. In Canada, as in other countries, climate concern and support for climate policy are often coded as left-leaning positions. Meanwhile, climate change skepticism or denial is more likely to be espoused by those on the political right.
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However, we found that having ties to the oil and gas sector did not significantly predict their support for climate policy. Likewise, the degree of conservatism — whether someone identified as centre-right or far-right — didn’t make conservatives less likely to support climate policy either.
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What mattered most was affective polarization.
Negative feelings toward the left and positive feelings toward the right were by far the strongest predictors of climate policy attitudes, and explained the most variation in support.
In simple terms, people on the right who felt the most hostility toward the left, and the most warmth toward the right, were more likely to oppose climate policy.
Conservatives are more likely than liberals to oppose climate policies, resulting in political polarization over climate change. Most research treats this gap as if it reflects two cohesive blocs on opposite sides of an issue. Drawing on original survey data from a probability sample of Canadians (n = 2,503), we find that while liberals are highly uniform in their orientation toward climate policies, conservatives are far more heterogeneous. Further analyses reveal conservatives’ policy positions strongly correlate with their partisan affect—both the extent to which they dislike opposing liberals (negative partisanship) and the extent to which they like fellow conservatives (positive partisanship). These findings highlight the importance of considering variation within, and not just between, political sides. The results additionally suggest that reducing hostility toward the other side (particularly among conservatives) may facilitate cross-ideological climate coalitions.
The study appears to assume conservatives who oppose climate action are irrational. From the first paragraph of the study – “… Climate mitigation policy in democratic nations requires coordination and compromise between political elites, scientific experts, and citizens. Yet sound public policies are often rejected due to partisan or ideological divides. …”
The determination of whether someone was conservative was based on self identification – “… We use “liberal” and “conservative” to denote respondents’ self-placement on a 0–10 ideological scale (0 = extremely liberal/left, 10 = extremely conservative/right), rather than formal party affiliation …”. This introduces some obvious potential biases.
The unsupported assumption that climate policies are “sound”, and by implication that opposition to climate policies is irrational, is the key mistake which led the study authors to an erroneous conclusion.
When I first heard of the climate crisis I was concerned. It was when I heard the absurd proposed solutions – solar panels and wind turbines – and heard and read claims that nuclear power was too dangerous, that I started digging deeper.
If the world was truly on the brink of a climate catastrophe, how could the risk of a few nuclear meltdowns possibly be worse than a global warming mass extinction event?
It didn’t long to discover the truth of the situation. The reality is claims we are in the midst of a global warming crisis are just as irrational as green opposition to nuclear power. The world is in no danger of overheating – our world has been locked in the Late Cenzoic Ice Age for the last 34 million years, an ice age which shows no sign of ending.
Why would awareness of these facts lead to feelings of hostility towards climate activist politicians?
The ongoing affordability crisis in renewable enthusiast regions like Europe more than demonstrates a world with energy systems dominated by wind and solar would be a world locked in a permanent economic great depression, with industries crushed by the cost of unreliable energy, by having to continuously start and stop the engine of society depending on hour by hour changes in the weather. Not the kind of world most people would want to leave to their kids.
The study authors considered none of this. By blindly assuming climate policy proposals are sound, by inferring respondents who opposed climate action did not have rational reasons for that opposition, without bothering to ask what those reasons are, the study authors confused cause and effect. The study authors leapt to the false conclusion that opposition to climate policy is motivated by emotional prejudice against liberals, without considering the possibility those negative feelings are motivated by reason.
This is the text of Lord Glasman’s recent speech to the Global Warming Policy Foundation (watch here). To understand the first part, you need to know that the current Chair of the GWPF is Lord Mackinlay, formerly Craig Mackinlay MP, who had all his limbs amputated following a battle with sepsis, but who is nevertheless an active (and extremely mobile) member of the House of Lords.
This is the text of Lord Glasman’s recent speech to the Global Warming Policy Foundation (watch here). To understand the first part, you need to know that the current Chair of the GWPF is Lord Mackinlay, formerly Craig Mackinlay MP, who had all his limbs amputated following a battle with sepsis, but who is nevertheless an active (and extremely mobile) member of the House of Lords.
Thank you for your invitation to speak here tonight. The story of my acceptance is a good lesson in the limits of liberalism and of choice. The best way to tell the story is that all I knew was that there was a man, with prosthetic arms and legs, who walked around Parliament with resolution and purpose. I had no idea who he was. All I knew was that I loved him for the strength of his stride. The fact that I had no idea of who he was tells you rather more about me than I would wish you to know. That I don’t read newspapers or watch the television. As a politician I am deeply aware that journalists, on the whole, have no idea what they’re talking about and the ones that do ring me up. If it’s important I’ll hear about it, and I prefer to waste my time in other ways.
From the moment I saw Craig, I was stirred by instant admiration. I did have a couple of ideas as to who he might be. One was that he was a Brigadier in the Afghan war and had his limbs blown off extirpating a Taliban cell in a distant outpost of the Kandahar hills.
He only lost consciousness after the mission was successful and his first words on emerging from multiple amputations was “when can I return?” I detected something military in his gait, but I was wrong. The second scenario was that he was an Ulsterman who was nearly killed by an IRA bomb and was in Parliament in order to ensure that no further concessions were made. I love the Armed Forces and the people of Ulster so, whichever one of those two were true, I only loved him more. And imagine that this man, who had in my mind reached the status of a Parliamentary superhero, let’s call him ‘Prosthetic Man’, so to speak, walks up to me and asks me if I would give a talk to his foundation, which I immediately assume is some kind of military veteran’s thing. How can the idea of choice have any role? I was obliged to say yes.
Certain alarm bells started ringing in my inner ear when he said the words Global Warming Policy Foundation, but what are alarm bells compared to the heavenly chorus of the angels? I had never heard of this organisation, and I decided not to delve too deeply. And then this man wrote me an email, confirming dates and times and asking for a title.
At last, I had a name, and I could do what I don’t like doing, which is googling people. My Wikipedia page is a travesty of the truth, and I assume that is true for everyone else. I was also attending to a rather insistent inner voice that was telling me to cancel. Aristotle said that courage is the middle way between cowardice and recklessness. And I tend to follow Aristotle in most things, particularly as concerns virtue, judgement and reason. I am not with Plato and the perfect forms in the caves. I prefer to start with the common sense of the people and work from there towards the good. We are all of us fallen, and all of us sinners. I prefer to start from there.
And I began to think that maybe this was a reckless move. I am intensely involved in conversations within my party and government on fundamentals of political strategy. Immigration, the armed forces, the police, industrial strategy, Al and welfare reform, to name a few. To open up a whole new front on energy and the environment when we have not prepared or organised around it began to look unwise.
The progressive Left is firmly wedded to guilt by association and conspiracy. All you need to do is read Byline Times to know that my conversations with Peter Thiel on artificial intelligence and Steve Bannon on the political strategy of MAGA reveal me as part of a far-Right conclave that wishes to destroy the rule of law, democracy and justice. The Global Warming Policy Foundation would then expose me as a ‘climate denier’ to boot.
A tribute to Craig and Kati
As my fantasies of Islamist terror cells and IRA bombs were exploded, and Parliament’s ‘Prosthetic Man’ turned out to be Clark Kent in the form of an accountant who supported UKIP, I moved harder towards that option, but then sepsis and Kati (Craig’s wife) entered the story. And it was a covenantal story where the hardship only strengthened the bond. Kati and Craig endured the grief together and they pulled through for each other. The circumstances changed but their commitment was eternal.
Oh no, my inner voice cried into the night. It was a love story. A true love story. And as a superhero, that is my green kryptonite.
For me, the greatest glory on God’s earth is love and family. Amor vincit omnium, love conquers all. That is truth for the ages, ever ancient, ever new. If you wish to know a good definition of Blue Labour, and I will say more about this, I would say that we are all sinners and we are only redeemed by love. That is what makes the world go round. The love of a good woman is the most sublime gift a man can receive, ever. Craig you are truly blessed, and I honour you both with a humble heart and a certain devotion.
Given all that, I couldn’t exactly cancel. What I am saying is that I do not consider that I had any choice in this matter. I had a duty to honour Craig and his family before any political considerations or personal preferences. This talk is just my way of showing my respect for you and your family and I hope it is acceptable to you and to hell with them.
Blue Labour
So given that from my side this has all the features of an arranged marriage, where obligation overrides choice, and we have never met before, I should tell you a few things about myself.
The first thing is that I studied history at university, and this remains my first love. I studied Anglo-Saxon, Medieval, Early Modern and Modern and one thing that struck me, in all different times and different places, is that so many people thought the world was about to end. Whether it was the alignment of the stars, a passage from scripture, an earthquake or famine, or simply the numerology of the date or the name of a particular king, it seems that most people lived their lives walking through the valley of the shadow of death. The idea of the end times and the impending apocalypse, coming either through fire or water, seems to be prevalent as a shared belief across time and space. No matter how many times it didn’t happen, the belief was consistently maintained as a deep and cosmic truth.
The notion of the world hurtling to destruction came to be described by academics as eschatological, revolutionary or messianic belief but I prefer to the word apocalyptic. It was carried in Shia Islam, in all forms of Christianity, in certain traditions within Orthodox Judaism in which a messianic figure, Greta Thunberg perhaps, emerges, who survives the apocalypse and builds a world where the lion lies down with the lamb, and we will know not of war.
None of this made any sense to me. All of their most sincerely held predictions were wrong: the world continued to exist through it all. And yet the belief in imminent apocalypse is a protean thing, like a cockroach, it endures through all changes. I was 18 and I went to university in 1979, the year Margaret Thatcher was elected. And when I got there, I realised that eschatological apocalypse had leapt out of the confines of religious faith and into the realm of science, or as I preferred to describe it, science fiction. I was told that given the present data and extrapolating from that, the world would end in the year 2000. And then there was the offer you could not refuse, either agree and follow me or be guilty of destroying the whole world.
Messianic, eschatological, apocalyptic faith had secularised itself, and with the collapse of revolutionary socialism had found its safe space in the environmental movement, on the revolutionary Left and still retained its energy on the Christian Right. When I was in America for the inauguration, there were many people who didn’t seem to know if they would see the end of the day. President Trump is still President; it doesn’t always work out.
If you doubt my words, take a look at Zack Polanski, the leader of the Greens. He is the perfect Platonic form of the archetype. A maniac who believes that men are women, that the boats are full of women and children and that we will be imminently destroyed by flood and fire, rising sea levels and the burning rays of the sun unmediated by the protective lens of the ozone layer unless we vote for him.
I built my entire life, my family, my politics and my ethics around opposition to this assumption, that the world was ending and the only alternative was revolution. I believe, in contrast, that the world will endure, and that nature and our institutions will adapt and flourish if we treasure our inheritance, natural and civic, so that it may be a blessing to future generations. The fact that I even exist is a remarkable testimony to the durability of the human race: that we should always think in an inter-generational way and that tradition should be consciously strengthened rather than carelessly discarded.
Chesterton’s Fence is always in my mind. You could say that Blue Labour is a counter-revolution against progressive orthodoxy in the private sector as well as the public. A resistance against the pieties of the lanyard class. You may think that this is a matter purely for what is called the Left, but I urge you to think again. Corporate capital is as infected with this doctrine as public sector unions and management. HR departments and the professional managerial class more widely are entirely committed to this ideology; we see it in both the public and private sectors. One way of putting all this is that I am much too conservative to ever be a member of the Conservative Party. We are only just emerging from the fog of progress in which up is down, bad is good, weird is normal; in which human rights mean you can’t tell the truth, justice is the defence of corporations, democracy is liberalism, sovereignty is obedience to multi-national treaties, freedom means compliance, creativity is marketing and diversity is homogeneity. Two generations have been sacrificed to this idiocy masquerading as reason, and universities have been the main incubators. And by the way, men are women. And if you don’t agree with all of that, we’ll take away your lanyard, and you won’t have a job. Honestly. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is an ideology of kindness.
The limits of the market
The Conservative Party, a great political party, is effectively dead. Conservatives are like ghosts, they speak to us, but we cannot hear, they live amongst us, but we cannot see them. They were born to resist the market and ended up as its butler. “All that is holy is profaned, everything solid melts into air,” to quote another great Conservative thinker. Nothing is sacred. The big crumbling factories turned out to be their mausoleum, unvisited and unmourned. Margaret Thatcher was a revolutionary, and revolutions are not only impossible they are also stupid and dangerous because they are blind to the continuities of memory and matter that of necessity endure through time, whatever you think.
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” is the first line of holy scripture, but Conservatives now think God made a design mistake and should have privatised it first. That seems to be where the Conservative Party has got to theologically. And I can tell you, fiscal responsibility will not raise the dead to a restored Kingdom.
If the Conservative Party has died from an overdose of economic liberalism, then the Church of England has also been colonised by political liberalism and it always ends this way. Diversity before solidarity, process before action, choice before tradition – and its energy is only really found in acts of desecration.
Pope Francis said that we are not living through an era of change but a change of era. His words were prophetic and we are living through a volatile moment in that transformation.
Before I begin to describe the era that is forming now, it is necessary to describe what it is replacing.
I speak here very plainly to the memory of Nigel Lawson, so forgive me. It was a period of historical time that was mercilessly initiated by Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and immaculately consummated by Tony Blair in 1997 and I call it the Era of Progressive Globalisation. It was the common sense for 40 years and its assumptions still dominate our economy and government.
The problem is that no-one, except perhaps the Parliamentary Labour Party and the leadership of the Conservative Party, believes in it anymore. The tragedy for progressives is that the future is not what they thought it was going to be. The least true thing you can ever hear in your life is ‘things can only get better’. It’s just not true at any level. The more the future slips away the more they double down on their greatest weaknesses and follies. The more liberal, the more authoritarian, the more diverse, the more homogenous of thought. The future is dissolving before their eyes and so they fight to preserve their power by forcing through legislation based on their values and beliefs. And the more they do that, the more unpopular they become. The truth is not kind for them.
Restoration
This is an era of restoration; I call the era we’re in now the era of restoration. It really came home to me at the inauguration. I had never realised before the importance of the ‘Again’ in ‘Make America Great Again’. It was about a restoration of pride, a restoration of order, civic order, a restoration of police, of politics. It was a resurrectionist thing almost. And so I call this era one of restoration. I believe the people of our country want the integrity of Parliament to be restored, of our armed forces, of our police, of our borders, of our sovereignty, of our universities and our schools. They don’t want a revolution. They want a restoration. And this age of restoration is paradoxical: dark and light, loving and hateful, violent and holy, fearful and hopeful.
Let me try to explain by way of contrast the scale of the transformation we are living through. The old era was contractual, the new is covenantal. The old era was characterised by the domination of financial services in which money became the ultimate measure of value, whereas the new requires industry and a priority for national security. Free movement will be replaced by borders, corporate social responsibility by a national economic strategy, innovation by invention, reform by restoration, process by courage, diversity by solidarity, students by soldiers, TV production by weapons production. Most importantly, the old era was progressive and the emerging era is tragic, the previous era was procedural, legal and administrative, the new era will be political, democratic and volatile. It is also a shift from Protestant to Catholic, from individualism to institutions, from self-definition to the authority of tradition.
The election of Donald Trump was the final confirmation of the end of the old, which had been brewing for two decades, but it is only the beginning.
The fantasy is over and the truth is kind; only our delusions make us tremble. It enables me to say to you, without fear of being called nostalgic or outdated, that the first point to be made, ever ancient, ever new, is that the free market did not create the world. I think it’s very important to get that straight.
The second thing to bear in mind concerning why I am so contemptuous of the idea that the world is about to end in an apocalyptic blowout, is that I believe in God. I consider the Bible to be the greatest book of our shared civilisation, and the King James Bible the supreme achievement of our language. That means I hold certain things to be beyond price, in other words, sacred. I hold this to be true of Parliament and the common law, the monarchy and our armed forces, our liberty and our democracy. I also hold this to be true of human beings and nature.
The important Bible story for me in relation to this is that of Noah and the flood. After God had created creation, he rested on the seventh day because he thought that it was good. Turned out he was wrong about that. Before he could blink, Adam was blaming his wife for eating the apple and it is worth remembering that the original sin was not eating the apple but blaming your wife. The next thing we know, one brother is killing another, and when God enquired of Cain why Abel was lying in a pool of blood he answered: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Not only did human beings have a tendency to not tell the truth and take responsibility for their actions but the worst thing about us was then to blame others and claim victim status.
Mitigating circumstances seem to be as eternal a malady as apocalyptic certainty. God did not know about that when he rested on the seventh day and thought that it was good. And it got worse from there; greed, vanity, stealing, violence, bearing false witness were so bad that it says in Genesis that evil was so widespread that it grew out of the earth and even the plants and vegetables were contaminated by it. That was the meaning of the flood. God was so disgusted by the human race that he wanted to utterly destroy his creation and for 40 days and nights the rain did not cease. It was like Manchester, but all over the world.
And then the rainbow appeared, and it was a sign of his promise that He would never again try to destroy the world. Que sera sera. Unlike Putin, God renounced the nuclear option. The rainbow was a sign of God’s eternal commitment to the continued existence of the world. One of my political missions, by the way, is to reclaim the rainbow from the ownership of transexuals. A rainbow is a miraculous thing that looks beautiful even when witnessed from the Holloway Road. The story of the flood assured me that my historical analysis was correct. The future is assured, the world will survive, but only we can make it a good one, that keeps people warm and honours the sanctity of creation and our traditional institutions.
Nature, subsidiarity and solidarity
As I have mentioned, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” is the first sentence of Holy Scripture. Without following Aquinas too closely, we can define Creation as ‘human beings’ on one side and ‘nature’ on the other. The definition of capitalism is to turn both into a commodity. It is in the pressure to turn things that were not produced for sale, like human beings and nature, into commodities of fluctuating price in competitive markets in order to generate quick and maximum profit that the distinctive feature of capital is found. That is the definition of capitalism. It desecrates the human status of the person and most particularly the worker. It does the same to nature. The highest return at the greatest speed is its objective and the status of a worker as more than a commodity blocks that return. As I sometimes say in other places, capitalism is like diarrhoea, it liquidates solidarity.
Once again, I have to be the bearer of bad news. The free market did not create the world. Something of greater value existed prior to that and it is a common good, a shared inheritance. Nature and our natural inheritance belongs to us all. I cannot in good faith stand before you here and say that we are not all sinners, that all of us, me and you, share a responsibility for our present predicament. One of the more nauseating and infantile aspects of our present polarised politics is that neither side sees the sin in themselves.
The second truth is that the state did not create the world either. The preservation of the sacred status of human beings and nature is the primary role of politics. Subsidiarity, the exertion of power at the lowest level commensurate with its function, is the best way to temper the Pharaonic tendency of centralised state power. Sovereignty is necessary to resist the domination of capital, subsidiarity is required to resist the tyranny of the state, and all this is predicated on democratic solidarity as the fundamental ethic of society. Cain made a very big mistake. He was his brother’s keeper; we all are. This is the political position of Blue Labour in British politics, and it is based almost entirely on Catholic Social Thought.
The fundamental teaching of Catholic Social Thought is that tyranny is a real threat in the economy, in Amazon warehouses, in the way workers are treated, and it is present in the economy and in the state. Only a democracy founded upon solidarity, a genuine sense of neighbourliness, of fellow feeling, the sharing of the burdens of this hard and merciless life, can generate a virtuous politics through domesticating the demonic energy of the market and of the state.
Solidarity, the status of the person, subsidiarity and stewardship of nature are the four legs of this particular table of wisdom.
It is not only the Bible; our own English romantic tradition speaks to this. I love nature, I revere our countryside, its rivers, its lakes and its fields. I think the privatisation of water has been a catastrophe. I am resolute in the pursuit of clean water as a vital common good that should never be subordinated to profit – and certainly not owned by foreign companies. Blue Labour does not only read the Bible, Machiavelli, Karl Polanyi and George Orwell. We also read Coleridge, Wordsworth, John Ruskin, Wendell Berry and William Morris. We believe that we are of nature, and that each person flourishes by having a real relationship to the land and a share of the glory of our inheritance. We would describe ourselves as romantic realists, and that is what is required.
The new era is also an era of industrial production. It is an era of war and of weapons production. It is a time of the restoration of an effective sovereign state. It is also an era of artificial intelligence. The move to industry will require a new institutional settlement. For example, we have argued for a very long time that we should close half the universities and turn them into vocational colleges. The relationship between government, local government, the unions, universities and the church will be transformed by this.
Skilful action is a necessary attribute and working within the frame of subsidiarity will require strong vocational institutions embedded in particular places. My definition of virtue is not do-gooding, but good doing as in being a virtuoso, and the whole obsession with transferable skills that was the basis of the university system means that we now have two generations that can’t do anything. I mean, you go to university and what’s your reward? Email jobs, HR. That’s the reproduction of the lanyard class. Respect for labour and the dignity of labour is central to this.
In this new era the reality of war is inescapable. It is a tragic era. Without the capacity to defend ourselves, our borders and our allies we will become a colony of the United States, and that is not a good place to be. Ernest Bevin is a key thinker here. And modern industrial production requires a developed system of Al as a means of restoring state capacity and effectiveness. It is indeed a Rerum Novarum, a new thing. And in the same way as church teaching, the Arts and Crafts movement and the Labour tradition itself responded to the machine and industrial production by resisting the commodity status for human beings and nature through the resurrection of ancient virtues and institutions, through a defence of the human person as longing for love and relationship, through a defence of private property and freedom of association, through a deep defence of the dignity of labour so it is imperative to bring all that to bear now in relation to Al.
Energy sovereignty
Which also brings us to the issue I take it you are most concerned with. Energy and the generation of heat. None of what I have talked about is possible without that. It is not only keeping the lights on, it is the defence of our borders, our sovereignty, our prosperity, our industry that is at stake. China is not a friendly power. We cannot rely on it for our Green New Deal. We need a national economic strategy in which cheap and abundant energy is a constitutive feature of our self-sufficient system.
The stated goal of Government policy has been amended in the last year so that the goal is to have decarbonised electricity by 2030 and Net Zero by 2050. Although this could be seen as a step in the right direction it is still fantastical and incoherent.
In order to understand why, let’s begin with an object lesson in how not to pursue a national energy policy. Let me present to you the case of Germany. After the war, even my beloved Ernest Bevin accepted that West Germany should retain its industry and be the powerhouse of the Western European economy. Its industrial relations became part of its constitution and West Germany enjoyed three generations of unprecedented civic peace and prosperity. There were workers on boards, regional banks, a flourishing artisan or ‘handwerk’ sector tied to a remarkable vocational training scheme. Bingo. At last Germany was peaceful and stable. Let’s set aside the very significant fact that Germany pursued an EU policy that was entirely at odds with its domestic economy and was destined to undermine it. That is an important aspect of the German tragedy, but not our concern here.
What is of interest is that the most energy demanding industrial economy in Europe then decided, with a resolute political will that would brook no contradiction, to eliminate all of its domestic sources of energy. And being Germany, it delivered ahead of schedule. All of its mines have been closed. All of its nuclear power stations are now decommissioned. As well as being a human rights superpower, it was also the supreme European champion of the ‘Green Transition’. The beauty of its morality was underwritten by a constant supply of cheap and plentiful Russian gas, coal and oil which became the centrepiece of Schröder’s and Merkel’s energy and industrial policy. A fundamental reliance on President Putin’s goodwill came to define the German economic model. What could possibly go wrong? Germany committed industrial and potentially political suicide in front of our eyes and we all commended them for their morality.
What morality? Externalising your pollution to poorer countries, compromising your security and sovereignty, underwriting a tyrant and a gangster. To me the whole spectacle was one of posturing, reckless vanity. While all around me applauded, I sat in awed stupor at the intensity of its stupidity. While it does open up space for us to move into an industrial strategy built around weapons and medical production, ultimately this will not go well for anybody. The AfD is marching one way and the Greens the other, the pillars of the post-war settlement are crumbling with the Social and Christian Democrats lost in the rubble. One might say it is a condition of progressive super nuclear palsy and that is a very bad condition indeed. I do not suggest that we follow its example.
As concerns electricity, it is still reliant on gas, which is expensive and scarce, which makes the decision to scale down North Sea gas perplexing. The goal should be to reduce the dependency on gas, but this leaves the problem of the lack of effective grid-level storage.
Our country is blessed with wind, particularly on the east coast, but the structural incapacity to effectively store it means that there is a five-hour cut-off point. Even China, the world leader in this, still has an upper limit of five hours if fossil fuels and nuclear are excluded. This explains China’s rapid expansion of coal mining, as it is cheap and efficient.
The a priori elimination of coal as an energy source should at least be reviewed. It was the origin of industrial power, and I honour all the miners who kept us warm and made us strong, and coal should be back on the table, at least as an interim measure. Now this is a Left-wing meeting!
The Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal plant should be maintained until the policy is clarified. We’re just about to eliminate the major coal processing plant. While I understand that fossil fuels should be reduced in the energy mix, their eradication is impractical and counterproductive.
Further, the National Grid should be placed under the control of the Ministry of Defence as a matter of national security. It requires urgent restoration and expansion. My experience is that it is an opaque and taciturn institution utterly captured by the lanyard class and reluctant to fulfil its mission of cheap energy for the nation. The increase in defence spending must be shared with the National Grid so that its effectiveness and capacity are viewed as central to our national defence. At the moment, to coin a phrase, it is not fit for purpose.
This is a colossal national task that should also be integrated into the renewal of vocational training and industrial strategy.
The third of the three sources of energy is nuclear, which should be at the centre of the heat generation we require, but that is now very expensive and slow. My beloved Ernest Bevin built an entire national network of oil pipelines in two years between 1939 and 1941 that are still the oil pipelines that we use today. It was a time of war, and it indicates what can be done with effective political leadership when the need is clear. Compare that to the speed and cost of Hinckley C or HS2.
Our energy needs are immediate and severe. In order to intensify and speed up nuclear provision we should recognise that there is a war and we are involved in it. There is a need to eliminate consultants and consultation and present an immediate plan. We will not be able to lead Europe in Al, re-industrialise and pursue the volume and scale of weapons production required to restore the integrity and effectiveness of our armed forces without a radical change in state effectiveness. ‘Many are cold, but few are frozen’ cannot be the fate of our kingdom. Warm and cozy is the English way.
Heat and the generation of heat is a cornerstone of our civilisation. Nature is a sacred inheritance that should not be viewed as simply a source of profit. Cleaning the rivers and the air should be a priority for all of us. Generating clean, cheap energy should be a source of solidarity not of division, as we speak to restore the sovereignty and strength of this green and pleasant land. I thank you once again for the invitation and Craig, I honour you and Kati as always for your love and your courage.
Baron Glasman is Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at London Metropolitan University and a Labour life peer in the House of Lords. He is the founder of Blue Labour.
I asked for some meat on the bones of Kemi Badenoch’s pledge to scrap Net Zero.
Well, Claire Coutinho has just supplied it!
Her speech starts at 34 minutes in:
Hats off to her, as she comes up with a few home truths and admits the errors by made by Tory governments.
There are two key promises:
1) Scrap the Carbon Tax
2) Scrap ROC subsidies
I have been arguing for these for years.
Together she says these will cut electricity bills by 20%, worth about £16 billion a year.
There is one part where she misleads about Reform policy though. She claims that Reform promise to lower bills by £1000 per family, even though average electricity bills are less!
Reform’s savings however are based on the overall cost to the public of high electricity prices, not just electricity bills themselves. Their costings are based on John Constable’s calculations, which show an overall cost of £25 billion a year.
Domestic users, of course, only use about a third of total electricity, so only a third of that £25 billion is added to household bills. But the public ultimately the whole of that £25 billion one way or another, whether through higher taxes, higher prices in shops, lower wages or lost jobs.
In reality, both the Tories and Reform are on the same page with this. It is a pity Coutinho resorted to this cheap shot.
Given the stance of the Conservative Environment Network, there may be battles ahead in the Tory party!
A former energy minister has quit over Rishi Sunak’s plans to boost oil and gas fields in the North Sea, ahead of a major Commons battle next week.
By Daniel Martin
A former energy minister has quit over Rishi Sunak’s plans to boost oil and gas fields in the North Sea, ahead of a major Commons battle next week.
Chris Skidmore said he was resigning the Tory whip and stepping down as an MP in protest at the legislation, which will allow new oil and gas licences. The Telegraph has the story.
It means the Prime Minister faces yet another difficult by-election. Mr Skidmore’s majority in the seat of Kingswood, in Gloucestershire is 11,220, which looks vulnerable in the wake of recent Labour victories.
In a scathing attack on the Government’s green policies, he said “the future will judge harshly” anyone who backs the Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill, which is due before the Commons on Monday.
Mr Skidmore said he had to resign because, as a former energy minister, he had signed the UK’s pledge to be net zero by 2050 into law and had also led a government review on how Britain could meet the pledge.
He said he could not vote for legislation that “clearly promotes the production of new oil and gas” and would show that the UK is “rowing ever further back from its climate commitments”.
“To fail to act, rather than merely speak out, is to tolerate a status quo that cannot be sustained,” he said in his resignation statement.
The Government’s net zero pledges have been controversial amongst backbenchers, and Mr Sunak has previously faced a major rebellion by MPs who opposed quotas on the sales of electric cars.
Mr Skidmore’s resignation may also thwart the Prime Minister’s attempt to regain the political initiative at the start of a general election year.
The Conservatives lost a string of by-elections last year, giving Sir Keir Starmer’s chances of entering Number 10 later this year a major boost.
The Tories are far behind in the polls, and Mr Sunak was booed during a visit to Stockport, Greater Manchester, on Friday.
Mr Skidmore’s majority is far less than some of those overturned by Labour and the Liberal Democrats last year. However, the Kingswood seat is being abolished at the next election, meaning whoever wins will only hold it for a matter of months.
It is understood that Mr Skidmore applied to chair the climate change committee, which advises the Government on green policy – but, 18 months later, no appointment has been made.
It was only a matter of time before the green bandwagon of pipe dreams crashed into the Jones family’s 12-year-old internal-combustion-engine people carrier with an almighty bang. The net zero target has vast social and economic costs, costs so dizzying, so deleterious to our way of life that few of its proponents have bothered to find out what they are. Well, I have, and it’s terrifying.
It was only a matter of time before the green bandwagon of pipe dreams crashed into the Jones family’s 12-year-old internal-combustion-engine people carrier with an almighty bang. The net zero target has vast social and economic costs, costs so dizzying, so deleterious to our way of life that few of its proponents have bothered to find out what they are. Well, I have, and it’s terrifying.
You may have missed it, but at the G20 summit, Rishi Sunak just breezily wrote a £1.62 billion cheque from the UK to the Green Climate Fund to “support the world’s most vulnerable to deal with the impact of climate change… And this government will continue to lead by example in making the UK, and the world, more prosperous and secure”.
Was there really nothing better at home to spend that money on, Prime Minister? You know, all those special needs children whose funding your government just cut by 20 per cent, or are 1.9 million kids struggling with talking/understanding language insufficiently “vulnerable”? How about building a couple of new hospitals and creating bursaries for 1,000 desperately-needed nurses? Or maybe put up some new houses to deal with the pressure of the 606,000 immigrants you allowed into our country last year against the very specific wishes of the majority of the population?
Sorry, you’ll have to forgive me for not understanding how our gravely indebted country can afford to splash the cash on grand, almost certainly corrupt and futile, international eco-projects: maybe helping British people during a cost of living crisis doesn’t earn sufficient greenie points with Sunak’s globalist mates?
Honestly, I wanted to slap him. No, Prime Minister, “leading by example”, as you call it, will not make the UK more prosperous and secure. The credulous pursuit of net zero by 2050 will leave us exposed and vulnerable, and very cold. We are already far too dependent on energy from other countries who are busy fleecing us for our folly. The UK pays Norway a deafening £14 billion a year for gas while our PM struts on the world stage, boasting that Britain is leading the world in “decarbonising”. Like a man snipping the cords of our last remaining parachutes while bragging that we’ll hit the ground before anyone else.
Yes, Marjorie, I’m aware that most of this stuff is deadly dull and we’d really rather not think about hydrocarbons, whatever they are. But we absolutely have to focus now before the eco-zealots who have captured almost our entire political class do irreparable harm. Take a recent report from Offshore Energies UK which warns that, by 2030, unless a fortune is invested in new North Sea exploration and production facilities, the UK will be reliant on other countries for 80 per cent of our gas and 70 per cent of our oil. In what world is that secure? It sounds criminally stupid to me.
It gets worse. Steven, a Telegraph reader who has worked as a geologist around the North Sea for a quarter of a century, says that new investment has been scared off by the EPL (Energy Profits Levy, the additional 35 per cent on oil and gas profits imposed by Chancellor Jeremy Hunt). “Before the EPL, my company ranked the UK below Pakistan on the above-ground (political) risk,” says Steven, “Not any more. Our economic models play out over 20 years. You simply cannot change taxes halfway through the game.” Steven says the UK is now “completely uninvestable”. Bountiful natural resources beneath our silver seas remain untapped so the clever fellows on the Climate Change Committee can pat each other on the back.
Boy, it really is going to be squeaky-bum time in 2030. That’s also the date when the UK bans the production of cars and vans that use petrol and diesel. “Madness,” according to Karl McCartney, the Conservative MP for Lincoln and a long-time member of the Transport Select Committee. “The Government’s electric vehicle (EVs) target is unrealistic and dangerous,” he says. “It needs to be scrapped – and fast.” (The EU has already pushed back its target to 2035 while President Macron says “France has done enough”.)
I interviewed Karl for this week’s Planet Normal podcast and he explained how government policymakers have been “led by the nose by green zealots and the metropolitan elite – the EV evangelists, as they have been called”. Karl, a delightfully sensible chap from Ellesmere Port, points out that there are 35 million vehicles on the road, a very small proportion are electric, and they’re not all going to be replaced in seven years’ time. Not when the average salary of Karl’s constituents buys them an eight-year-old diesel or petrol Ford Mondeo instead of a Tesla, and not when there’s no place to charge it even if they could afford an EV. There is already a shortage of electricity in Lincoln. People down South, the MP reckons, have no idea how much those in areas with very little public transport rely on the private car.
“I have spoken about this to senior colleagues and they know it’s madness,” Karl says. Even some members of the Cabinet are concerned, but no one dares challenge the sacred consensus. “It seems our government’s policies are based on green virtue-signalling and oneupmanship,” he despairs.
Karl had a big hand in the Transport Committee’s Fuelling the Future report which was published in March. “We remain concerned that the Government has not fully thought through, or properly responded to, our scepticism about expecting ordinary motorists to bear the financial burden of transitioning to all-electric vehicles,” the report said, “We maintain that it is realistic and fair to expect a significant number of motorists to continue using hybrid or conventional-engine cars for years ahead. Synthetic low-carbon fuels that can be used in these engines without expensive modifications should be supported as a halfway house for a significant number of private car owners.”
There was a “woeful response” to that report from the Department of Transport. According to Karl, this was “an opportunity for the Government to climb down and save face,” but realism and practicality – a grasp of the impact of your deluded, undeliverable policies on millions of lives – are unwelcome in the net zero Cloud Cuckoo Land where much of our ruling class snoozes. They’ll wake up soon. The vandalism of Ulez cameras in London will be as nothing compared to public anger when people realise the bill for net zero will run into trillions.
Even if you believe, as most of us do, that a transition to cleaner greener energy is highly desirable and will surely come in the long term (the end of the century seems a realistic goal), you can still be alarmed by this crazy groupthink and its wilful blindness to looming consequences. Covering half of Lincolnshire in solar-panel farms, and paying American firms huge subsidies to produce electricity when we should be producing food on good, productive land – who voted for that?
Not very long ago, this country went into Covid lockdowns without a proper cost-benefit analysis and with politicians bamboozled into believing there was only one possible course of action, instead of listening to a range of possibilities. I’m afraid we are in great danger of repeating that historic error. The Government should repeal the net zero legislation and switch its focus to achievable adaptations over a longer timeframe instead of coercing and bullying the British people into altering their lifestyles in order to hit a meaningless, unattainable target.
A bold change of tack may well yield electoral dividends, giving disillusioned Conservatives something we can actually vote for. “My polling suggests scepticism of expensive net zero commitments unites the 2019 Tory coalition,” says Prof Matt Goodwin. So both Red Wall and Blue Shires have well-founded doubts about the green bandwagon of pipedreams; they’ll be sticking with their internal combustion engines, thanks.
At the G20, the Prime Minister said he wanted the UK to be a world leader. Marvellous, Rishi, but who wants to be a world leader in shooting ourselves in the head?
From the late 1960s, for example, the fashion – even among most Conservatives with a big C – was that you could control inflation only by prices-and-incomes policies. True conservatives (first Enoch Powell, then Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher) saw this was nonsense, because inflation is a disease of money. By about 1982, they were proved right.
Most conservative-minded people do not expect to lead political or intellectual fashion. Indeed, we are rather proud that we don’t. Not for us the delusions of celebrity: we rather complacently boast that we are playing a longer and wiser game.
From the late 1960s, for example, the fashion – even among most Conservatives with a big C – was that you could control inflation only by prices-and-incomes policies. True conservatives (first Enoch Powell, then Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher) saw this was nonsense, because inflation is a disease of money. By about 1982, they were proved right.
Obviously, conservatives are often proved wrong – the poll tax was a famous example. But, on the whole, we are less wrong than our opponents because we are neither utopians nor catastrophists. If someone says, “Let’s abolish war!” or “Three weeks left to save the planet!”, our instinct tells us this is silly.
Therefore conservatives tend to be sceptical about climate change policy. We differ among ourselves about how to judge the scale of climate change and remedy its problems. Some of us are techno-optimists; others are romantic ruralists. But we usually agree that “emergency” timetables, targets and other measures to banish climate change will have serious unintended consequences (poverty, instability, shifts of political power against the West) and are, at a global level, unattainable. We doubt the capacity of government to set the world to rights.
The idea of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 (or any precise date) is profoundly unconservative, yet Conservative governments have chosen to worship at that shrine. Net zero demands a completeness which human society can never achieve.
We conservatives say this now and again and wait to see how long it is before hotter heads come round to our view. Under governments which, for nearly 20 years, have called themselves Conservative, we have fared badly. Climate-change dogma has been imposed on schools and become entrenched in academia. It is pretty much a career requirement for holding public office or achieving corporate eminence.
Regulators such as Ofgem, originally charged with safeguarding the interests of consumers, are being suborned by net-zero “mandates”. Since the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street fell swooning into the arms of Governor Mark Carney 10 years ago, the dogma has even been enshrined in the remit of the Bank of England. It is to the 21st century what the 39 Articles were to the 17th.
Growing impatient, conservatives have made the classic mistake of arguing that because something cannot work, it won’t happen. Politicians – Tories, just as much as any others – don’t mind about that. They exploit time lags to promise the impossible. Green measures are announced with fanfare. Their full cost is postponed into a future just too distant to damage their progenitors at the next election.
This cannot go on and yet, even after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, British politics has been agonisingly slow to adjust. In both urban and rural settings, the talk is shifting from virtue-signalling to complaint. Two years ago, your dinner-party standing was improved by boasting about your electric car. Last month, however, I sat next to someone whose brother’s Tesla had failed (just out of warranty), apparently because of water in its battery. The cost of a new battery was £17,000. He got a reconditioned one for a mere £10,000.
In London, everyone’s story is about the jams and diversions caused by Ulez. In the country, the talk is of the vast cost (well into five figures) and ineffectiveness of air heat pumps. This week, a plumber told a friend that he now removes two such pumps a month because their owners despair of them. In Germany, the banning of new domestic oil or gas furnaces from next year threatens the governing coalition.
Yet still our Government has hardly moved. Yes, Rishi Sunak is pushing for more oil and gas exploration licences in the North Sea. He also, though far too timidly, is promising to cut windfall taxes of oil and gas profits.
Sir Keir Starmer said recently that he intends to prevent new explorations. His stance, which he already seems to be backing away from, brings out a division in the Labour Party between those who live within the M25 and the rest. Labour’s bicycling London haute bourgeoisie – and their Extinction Rebellion offspring – are very different from those people, going by the old-fashioned name of “workers”, who minister to our continuing need for fossil fuels. Gary Smith of the GMB union, their eloquent spokesman, knows that oil and gas, especially gas, are the essential underpinning of any energy transition.
All those aggrieved and damaged by net zero measures add up to an impressively mixed constituency from leafy shires to Red Wall. At one end, you get landlords, now confronted with the need for revised Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) on all the properties they let. EPCs now insist on double-glazing, sealed doors and other net zero measures which, for older houses, are shockingly expensive and unsuitable. You also get country people with substantial houses who face cold cheerlessness without their wood-burning stoves. In business, you find banks and corporations hemmed in by the demands of ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance investing) which chill investment in many essential and profitable fields such as fossil fuels or defence industries.
Its shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, ditched the promise she made two years ago to spend, if back in office, £28 billion a year on green projects. Her excuse sounds sweetly innocent: “The truth is I didn’t foresee what the Conservatives would do to our economy”; but she must know that her own party’s policies would have done the same, only more so
At the other end, you get “workers by hand” (as Labour’s famous Clause 4 used to put it) and pensioners, for both of whom grotesquely high energy costs are such a problem that increasing their hardship to help save the planet is insulting.
There is an obvious benefit for the first political party to feel such people’s pain. You might have thought that the Tories, being less doctrinaire than Labour on green issues, could move faster.
Yesterday, however, it was Labour that switched. Its shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, ditched the promise she made two years ago to spend, if back in office, £28 billion a year on green projects. Her excuse sounds sweetly innocent: “The truth is I didn’t foresee what the Conservatives would do to our economy”; but she must know that her own party’s policies would have done the same, only more so.
No matter, Ms Reeves is doubly right to make this move, both because it shows a glimmer of economic sanity and because it gets there first. If Labour no longer espouses endless “green growth”, the Tories are left high and dry – or, rather, low and wet. If they try to out-green Ms Reeves, they will lose what remains of their natural supporters. And she has just stolen from Mr Sunak and Jeremy Hunt their previously unique selling point of financial responsibility.
The language needed for energy policy should come naturally to conservatives. Its key words are “security” (of supply), “reliable”, “affordable” and, but only if those prior conditions are met, “renewable”. Security also requires reasonably low external political risk. Russia is the most lurid current cause of the insecurity our net zero obsession exacerbates. China, which has not the slightest intention of hitting net zero, is the biggest long-term threat.
Climate change is presented as an emergency, when it is better seen as a long process which requires adaptation. Energy insecurity, with its threats of blackouts, soaring costs, financial instability and bullying from unfriendly foreign powers, is not far short of an emergency. Successive Conservative governments have missed these threats almost entirely. We small-c conservatives have only the melancholy comfort of being proved right.
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