Hands up: who still supports net zero 2050? This is rapidly becoming a sensible question to ask. Kemi Badenoch for the Tories suggested three weeks ago that it simply couldn’t be done: since then her shadow energy secretary Andrew Bowie has confirmed on GB News, no doubt with her say-so, that the party has indeed dropped any commitment to it at all.
Meanwhile Labour, hitherto solid on carbon emissions, is itself under plenty of attack on that front. It is desperately trying to prevent the steelworks in Scunthorpe, a traditional Labour heartland, from closing down because the highest energy prices in Europe, which it introduced, make it hopelessly uneconomic. It also faces the fury of small fishermen, understandably unhappy at the government’s insistence on their spending large sums on replacing their boats’ reliable diesel engines with untested electric ones. And yesterday what looks like a badly rattled administration set in motion a new quango made up of the energy and computing industries, the latter of which had pointed out that if the government wanted Britain to become an AI superpower this will take a lot of electricity which the government has made very expensive. The computer giants are, one suspects, not much relieved by Ed Miliband’s bland references to AI being particularly useful for – you guessed it – building a new era of clean electricity.
The cracks in Labour are already showing. It is no secret that the knives are out at No. 10 for Ed Miliband. He is seen, with justification, as a fanatic, out of kilter with Starmer’s preferred image of competent managerialism. Nor did he endear himself to backbenchers when he insisted on squashing a Lords amendment to the Great British Energy bill that would have prevented the use of products of modern slavery, and thereby enabling the purchase solar panels from distinctly dodgy sources in Xinjiang, the Uyghur region of China.
Last week the wavering started in earnest. Posh car makers like Aston Martin, it was announced, would be immune from the duty to change production over to EVs. At the same time the cut-off date for ordinary petrol and diesel cars and vans was moved back to 2035, the government realising that for the foreseeable future tradesmen did not want, and in many cases could not afford the hefty cost of, a changeover to electric vehicles.
Put bluntly, support for net zero except as an aspiration is fast evaporating in Westminster. The Tories have recanted, Reform were never on board, and Labour is now lukewarm, leaving only the Lib Dems, the Greens and the Celtic nationalists. And it is a fair inference that this process will continue. We have not yet seen an anti-net zero movement from MPs in Red Wall seats. But these people know perfectly well that their just-about-managing constituents are strongly inclined to vote against the kind of green fanaticism that leaves them colder, poorer and less mobile. It is a racing certainty that Keir Starmer will hear from them. And it may even be that MPs for leafier southern places point out their constituents are not too happy when acre after acre of the prime farmland outside their windows is sold to get-rich-quick solar farm operators, possibly owned by some foreign pension fund, to satisfy some earnest eco-bean-counter in Whitehall
So too outside Westminster. Those who voted Labour last year might have liked, or at least tolerated, the abstract idea of reducing carbon emissions. But by now the practical downsides of green fanaticism are increasingly getting through to ordinary electors. They see the point about food security and are worried; they see their electricity bills rocket, partly from green levies. They see no reason for backpedalling on North Sea oil and gas extraction and then buying the same stuff from abroad; they read and see ever more frequent horror stories of heat pumps that cost the earth; and in many cases they can’t even afford the cost of the electric cars they are told to buy instead of the runabout that does them perfectly well. And, disreputable though it might seem to a purist, they see no sense in being used as cannon-fodder to set a good example to the rest of the world when the UK’s carbon emissions make up something like 1 per cent of global pollution.
In short, so long as Labour continues to trumpet its attachment to net zero and the changing of people’s lifestyles in unpredictable but probably uncomfortable ways, it will be painting itself into a corner. The professionals, professors and urban bourgeoisie will undoubtedly continue to support its policies: but after a time it must strike even the keenest carbon-neutrality enthusiast that their votes aren’t enough. If the party doesn’t change its mind fairly quickly on such matters, it is in serious trouble.
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