When David Cameron threw his hat in the ring to be the leader of the Conservatives in 2005, his mission was to modernise the party and, crucially, make it more environmentally friendly. He took a trip to the Arctic where he posed with a husky and committed to leading the “greenest government ever”. His campaign worked. All the political parties in Britain were, generally, on the same page: the climate crisis was an imminent threat and they needed to cut fossil fuel use as quickly as possible.
Fast forward 18 years, four elections and five prime ministers later to this week’s news that Rishi Sunak may abandon a £11.6bn climate pledge, and the picture could not be more different.
Over the years, green Tory policies have been abandoned or watered down beyond recognition. It is no longer a given that most of the party is behind pushing environmentally friendly measures – in fact the opposite is often true as the issue of the climate crisis divides the Conservatives. Rishi Sunak has been criticised by those within the party and even his own net zero tsar for falling woefully short on tackling the climate crisis – and those criticisms have only become more acute following the news that yet another pledge is under threat.
For today’s newsletter, I spoke to Neil Carter, a professor of politics at the University of York, about the Conservative party’s track record on environmental policies. That’s right after the headlines.
Five big stories
- UK news | Richard Ratcliffe – husband of British-Iranian Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe – alongside the families of other political prisoners, has accused the Foreign Office of complacency after it rejected a call by MPs to overhaul the way it goes about trying to secure the release of British nationals overseas.
- Policing | The head of the Metropolitan police, Sir Mark Rowley, has said the Stephen Lawrence murder investigation may be irreparably damaged by the egregious errors made in the first weeks after the killing. Rowley also rejected a BBC report claiming a man called Matthew White, who died in 2021, was a new suspect in the investigation.
- Lung cancer | The number of women diagnosed with lung cancer in the UK is expected to overtake men this year for the first time, prompting calls for women to be as vigilant about the disease as they are about breast cancer. Cancer experts said the “very stark” figures reflected historical differences in smoking prevalence.
- Company profits | The world’s 722 biggest companies collectively are making more than $1tn a year (£780bn) in windfall profits on the back of soaring energy prices and rising interest rates, according to research by development charities. Windfall profits are defined as those exceeding average profits in the previous four years by more than 10%.
- Threads | Meta’s Twitter rival, Threads, logged five million sign-ups in its first four hours of operation, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, as the company seeks to woo users from Elon Musk’s troubled platform. The app is freely available in 100 countries, but regulatory concerns mean it will not be available in the EU.
Cameron’s climate drift
As hard as it may be to imagine, there was a point in time when the Conservatives were trying to out-green Labour. “When David Cameron became leader in 2005 he wanted to detoxify the Tory party and get rid of the ‘nasty party’ image,” Neil Carter says. As part of this new mission Cameron made the environment one of his signature issues. During this period, there was a transformation around UK climate policy, Carter says, because “suddenly Labour found that far from getting attacked by the Tories for implementing green policies, Cameron was saying that they were not going far enough”.
Cameron set up a policy group whose mission it was to pave the way for “tough decisions” on cutting greenhouse gas nearly two decades ago. He enthusiastically backed solar power and other renewable energy methods. There was a cross-party consensus around climate policy, with competition to create the most ambitious environmental program.
After the election, things changed. Halfway through the coalition government’s term the energy began to dwindle and tensions grew. Internal opposition was voiced on onshore windfarms, green levies and subsidies for renewable energy. Cameron went from hugging huskies to famously denouncing climate policies as “green crap”.
By the end of Cameron’s time in office, the Green Bank he championed was sold; solar energy incentives were cut by 65%; promises around making homes zero-carbon were abandoned; fracking was welcomed back and programs designed to insulate homes were cut. And that’s not even all of it. “I think Cameron was a believer, but climate policies clearly drifted down his list of priorities over time,” Carter adds.
May’s Brexit dividend
If climate policies fell down the agenda during the coalition years, they only tumbled further in a post-EU referendum landscape. Not many politicians were particularly focused on centering environmental causes and policies in their talking points.
During her time in office, Theresa May largely ignored climate issues and, in fact, got rid of the Department of Energy and Climate Change created under Gordon Brown – a move that was interpreted by campaigners as downgrading climate policy on the government’s list of priorities. “There was some dismantling of climate measures – that consensus that had been developed became really fragile,” Carter says.
However, with little else under her belt but a pitiful election victory, just as she was exiting office, May tried to create a green legacy by enshrining in law a commitment to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Boris Johnson overpromises and underdelivers
Unsurprisingly, Boris Johnson’s climate legacy was, mostly, talk. During his leadership campaign, he announced a bevy of green targets, declaring that going green was at the heart of 21st-century Conservatism. Johnson promised to spend £640m on planting 30 million trees and a further £500m Blue Planet fund for protecting the oceans. The figures were impressive, but often times fell to the wayside.
It was not all bad: a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars was brought forward by five years to 2030 and targets for offshore wind were upped. But there were problems with these huge declarations, as they were often treated as little more than soundbites. There were few concrete policies that would help Britain achieve the ambitious goals that Johnson was setting out and many criticised the government for their over reliance on potentially unreliable tech as panacea.
Carter says that during Johnson’s premiership there was a big gap between ambition and delivery. “We’ve seen this in the most recent climate change committees report, Britain is losing its leadership, we’re just not delivering on the policies we need to in order to meet the [international] targets”.
Ultimately, what was hampering the government from implementing the green agenda they promised was internal strife. The divisions that emerged during the Brexit referendum became further entrenched, as environmental legislation became viewed as an impediment to economic growth, so much so that a group of backbench MPs created a net zero scrutiny group designed to systematically undermine the government’s climate effort.
Where are we now?
In the most full circle moment, Tory peer Zac Goldsmith, an environmentalist brought on during Cameron’s green crusade in the mid-2000s, resigned as a minister last week because, in his view, Rishi Sunak does not care about the environment. He wrote in his resignation letter that the government was abandoning a flagship £11.6bn funding pledge that was supposed to go to poorer countries to help them deal with the impacts of the climate crisis.
Rishi Sunak quickly denied the accusations, adding that he was “proud of the UK’s record as a world leader on net zero”, but his policies say otherwise. The UK has begun the process of giving out more than 100 new licences to drill in the North Sea. Late last year, the government gave a green light to a new £165m coalmine. The situation is so bleak that the government’s official independent advisers on climate change said their confidence that Britain would achieve its carbon targets had “markedly declined” since Sunak took office – it has not even been a year. Even Theresa May says the UK is falling behind on its environmental responsibilities.
Part of the reason is the fact that the climate crisis, like many other issues, has been sucked into the Tory culture war. Whether it is highly punitive legalisation against environmental protesters or the increasing presence of climate scepticism in the Conservative party, it is clearly not the eco-friendly party that Cameron started building nearly two decades ago.
The issue has become so polarised that even fairly innocuous policies around air pollution are now difficult to publicly support. Sunak for instance has backed a campaign against the expansion of the ultra-low emission zone to all London boroughs – despite mountains of evidence that people across the city are getting incredibly sick because of traffic. Some in his party have insinuated that there is no need for the zone to be expanded as there is no problem with air pollution in their areas.
“I guess after the election, if the Tories lose, there is a big chance that we might actually get even more polarisation on climate change,” warns Carter. “It could look a bit more like the US, where there are sharp divisions between Republicans and Democrats on climate change – and that’s a real worry.”
Source : The Guardian
