Britain isn’t going to destroy the planet, but we might just fall off it. For it’s own sake, Labour needs a better response
Rishi Sunak’s dismantling of the net zero agenda is a test of competence – not vision – for Keir Starmer
We learned last week that ‘Earth is now well outside the safe operating space for humanity’, with six of the nine planetary boundaries outside which our species cannot survive now breached. It might sound like the perfect moment for Rishi Sunak to swoop in à la 2020 with a green equivalent of the furlough scheme, but this time the Prime Minister has determined, rather eccentrically, that swerving into the skid is our best option.
The impact on the course of the apocalypse of the government’s abandonment of several real and imagined net zero measures will be negligible — but the economic consequences for Britain could be far more serious. And with the Conservative Party now doing a much better job as its own opposition than it is in office, there is a political challenge here for the Labour Party. But it is not the challenge we might assume – and sadly not one the party seems equipped to address.
Green is growth
It seems necessary to reiterate that, in the planetary scheme of things, none of this really matters. This is partly because Britain’s carbon footprint is not large enough for the dilution of a few policy measures to make a material difference to climate change.
And it is partly because, whoever wins the next election, the net zero agenda, for what it’s worth, is going to get steadily back on track, one way or another: Britain is cosplaying pariah state, but this is not quite yet who we are.
The question is, really, when we resume the path to net zero, will the British economy be even less able to benefit than it is already? (Note that the word ‘benefit’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this question: it essentially means ‘avoid accelerating economic decline’.) Whether the temporary suspension of regulatory and fiscal support for net zero directly affects a handful of industries in the short term, or more seriously, signals that we are unreliable partners for the world’s main growth industries in the long term, unnecessary damage is being done.
The cutting edge of technological innovation is essentially synonymous with the green transition: enabling production processes that use less energy, transporting people and goods more efficiently, and developing the infrastructure necessary for zero-carbon energy generation and storage. Addressing climate change is not something different to growth, and nor is it merely growth’s necessary condition — it is in many ways now its driving force.
Cost of surviving
The UK government must invest more in the relevant industries. But it can also support domestic demand for them through regulation, taxation, and public procurement. Any eschewal of this approach — as Sunak promises — is economic vandalism.
Alas, the terms of economic debate in Britain are maddeningly narrow. The main parties depict ‘the economy’ as synonymous with either how much money you have in your pocket, or how well-balanced the Exchequer’s chequebook is; they will of course swap sides every so often, depending on the political circumstances.
This is how we arrive at the absurd spectacle of a Prime Minister vowing to delay addressing climate change in order to protect the economy. Worryingly, he actually seems to believe it.
Yet Labour is only doing better by degree in this regard. The party’s green prosperity plan is commendable; the notion that its implementation must be postponed until the economy can afford it is rather less so. In response to Sunak’s announcement, Labour appears to have reasserted its commitment to the 2030 deadline for banning the sale of new petrol and diesel cars, but little else. Asked whether a Labour government would restore the 2026 deadline for beginning to phase out gas boilers, the shadow environment secretary, Steve Reed, said ‘Labour isn’t going to put up people’s bills’.
And there you have it: the pocket economy, privileged over the growth economy. Labour has learned a lot from Bidenomics in the US, but has failed to notice the Biden administration’s fusing of a green agenda with its core economic programme to support innovation and jobs, and address the rising cost of living.
Starmer’s identity is already defined
Some look at this situation and insist that Labour leader Keir Starmer should be embracing the challenge of addressing climate change in order to construct ‘a defining narrative’. In a well-received letter to the Financial Times, Michael Jacobs (environmental economist and adviser to the last Labour government) writes:
‘The Labour leader’s competence and decency are evident. But the polls and focus groups show that he lacks definition: people don’t know what he stands for.’
Accordingly, climate action can ‘give him the clarity he needs to overcome his major weakness in public opinion polling’.
Obviously, I agree with where Jacobs — and every other left-leaning commentator — wants Labour to end up on policy. But I disagree with his understanding of the political rationale. Taking climate action seriously is not about narrative, definition, vision, or whatever you want to call it. It is instead about ‘competence and decency’, two attributes which Starmer does not any longer have in the bag.
My argument here rests on three claims. First, nobody on the British centre-left is going to come up with any policy ideas on climate change, or any ways of describing these policy ideas, that have not already been conceived.
Second, there are now very, very few voters who need convincing that climate action is necessary and urgent. The sceptics are mainly attention-seekers and vested interests rather than true non-believers — I’m a climate denial denier, if you like — and the vast majority of people recognise the need for something to be done. They are just hoping and assuming it will be done by someone else, like medicine or war or jury service.
Taken together, my first and second claims imply that most people already believe that Labour is planning to prioritise addressing climate change, even if they have tuned out from the associated policy discussion. Because it would be absurd if this were not the case: as absurd as not looking up at the asteroid about to hit.
Normal people
My third and most important claim is that few people care what Keir Starmer stands for: voters might once have cared about things like this, but British politics, like Earth, is operating outside of its normal parameters.
They do care about who Starmer is: his character and conduct. For sure, he has ‘competence and decency’ vibes – and I do not doubt that people still say this sort of thing about him in focus groups, when they are searching for something innocuous to say.
But almost every move he makes lately seems to risk undermining this tentative foothold in the electorate’s esteem.
Crucially, while it is futile for Starmer to over-emphasise green credentials that are already baked into baseline expectations, it is clear that he is in fact trying to lodge an alternative account of his political purpose in the electorate’s consciousness. In this account, Starmer is a small-c conservative, albeit of the one-nation persuasion, whose mission is to preserve a quintessentially British way of life – often defining his politics in this regard against a former version of himself.
Starmer has now ruled out new or higher taxes, and made clear Labour will not reverse some of the most punitive and damaging Conservative welfare policies. He regularly emphasises wasteful public spending as much as the good government can sometimes do. He thinks rights for minorities, such as self-ID for trans people, might now have gone too far. His critique of the government’s ‘small boats’ and Rwanda policies is in fact founded on the same, flawed trope that illegal immigration into Britain is too high. He sees no case for rejoining the EU and argues Brexit is not to blame for Britain’s economic woes.
And as the latest drama signals, his support for net zero and decarbonisation in a general sense is matched by a commitment that it should not unduly impact anybody’s day-to-day life.
Give the people what they want, unless they don’t really want it
Unlike the Jacobs argument, this attempt at definition at least has the benefit of being based on hard-headed electoral calculation.
Let’s assume, for a moment, that Labour’s campaign advisers are onto something. This version of Starmer is of course fixated not on the whole electorate, rather the 2019 Tory switchers who Labour believes it needs to regain.
The problem is that, even if this strategy is correct, in constructing a narrative for this group, the foundations upon which it is being built cannot take the weight. I worry that the first foundation to crumble will be competence. It started with Labour’s spectacular ULEZ U-turn, with the party leader loudly telling the electorate that the only Labour politicians actually in charge of running things, in local government, have implemented a bunch of crap policies.
People generally don’t mind being inconvenienced if they trust the motives of the person inconveniencing them. ULEZ and LTN schemes are generally designed to reduce emissions, and make our roads safer and air cleaner. Nobody necessarily wants to hear they are needed, but it is probably what they expect to hear from Labour. People know that doing nothing is not an option, so to discard ULEZ and LTN schemes without an alternative plan lands as incompetence.
The electoral upside from abandoning a policy the government has already abandoned — i.e. leaving Labour less exposed to an unpopular policy — is not as strong as assumed. Sadiq Khan is nailed on for re-election, and there was a huge swing to Labour in the Uxbridge by-election, despite the association of Labour and ULEZ. There was of course a little media-driven hysteria about ULEZ in London which very quickly died down. But Labour had already over-reacted by then, creating a significant electoral downside by creating the impression that a Labour government may be just as chaotic as the current lot.
The half-hearted resistance to Sunak’s latest announcement fits the same pattern. Even if voters were glibly opposed to some of the measures now being scrapped, they were content for the Labour Party to appeal to their better instincts. They are waiting for Starmer to explain how decarbonisation actually reduces energy bills, and how the transition to electric vehicles is based in part on projections for how much more petrol and diesel cars will cost to produce, service and fuel as the rest of the world moves ahead without Britain. They are happy to pre-sort their rubbish into multiple bins, as long as they know it makes their council tax cheaper.
Labour is being reticent because it wants Sunak’s flip-flopping, not Starmer’s, to be the story: that Sunak was causing havoc within government, rather than harming the planet, was the line the shadow chief secretary, Darren Jones, held firm to in media appearances. But Labour is upending its own policy commitments at exactly the same time. Chaos reigns, either way.
And of course Ed Miliband was eventually despatched to tell The Guardian that Labour will ‘double down’ on net zero in government. Miliband’s role in the shadow cabinet is to reassure party members and metropolitan liberals that Starmer is still one of us. But Labour knows that it is only the party leader’s words (or lack of them) that cuts through to the wider public. The message on the ULEZ and the green prosperity plan U-turns is the one that Starmer wanted the public to hear.
The danger zone
While Starmer remains silent, the decency foundation is further endangered too. Because whatever voters personally think of the net zero agenda, they know Starmer supports it (not least because he tells the international community that he supports it, irrespective of domestic message discipline). More generally voters are pretty sure that he is not actually a conservative. Why is he presenting a version of himself that we know is, at best, heavily sanitised? Why is he denouncing and demoting colleagues for expressing views that everybody knows he shares?
If all of this smooths Labour’s path back to government, then Starmer will rightly feel that the ends will have justified the means.
However, my concern is that the voters Starmer aims to appeal to are less numerous than Labour assumes and are, in fact, basically a caricature. They are assumed to be driven by simple motives rather than complex reasoning. Being Northern, middle-aged, overweight and working class, it feels rather surreal to me that the imagined electorate driving Labour’s electoral strategy tends to tick each of these demographic boxes. The Labour leadership needs to be listening a little more to people whose engagement with the actual working class in daily life extends beyond asking for a receipt.
I am confident that Keir Starmer will be as competent and decent a Prime Minister as it is possible to be in Britain. I am also confident that he will indeed become the Prime Minister, full stop, and that most of what he is doing now is driven by the desire to realise this goal.
But the current strategy is misguided; the conservative narrative under construction is a threat to how people were starting to see Starmer, as a leader and a human being.
Labour is playing a dangerous game, taking the goodwill of the wider electorate for granted while it targets a narrow demographic it believes is key to victory. The party’s poll lead remains massive, but this does not necessarily mean it is robust. Its chief component is undoubtedly the electorate’s overwhelmingly negative view of the incumbent government.
Yet Rishi Sunak, for all his flaws, is not as flawed as Boris Johnson or Liz Truss, and he may eventually stumble upon a half-decent idea. And his own U-turn on net zero has the benefit of being aligned with his own convictions, rather than electoral considerations in any straightforward sense. Voters tend to like that kind of thing.
If Labour end up entering government having promised not to do lots of things that (a) they really have to do because there are no better ideas available, and (b) everybody was already expecting them to do anyway, it could end up being, well, a bit of a mess.
The likelihood of humanity’s survival will not be significantly affected, either way. And Britain will eventually get back on the net zero train, because our participation in the world economy essentially depends upon it. But the interruption to Britain’s green transition being caused by a Conservative government raging against the dying of the light, and a Labour opposition seemingly scared of its own shadow, is the last thing our stuttering economy needs.