Dale Vince has donated millions of pounds to Labour, but the green energy tycoon is only just getting started in politics. Having helped remove the Tories from power last summer, Vince is turning his attention from party donations to offering ministers a ready-made policy platform instead. The 63-year-old wants to champion an eco-agenda for Keir Starmer’s government via his Green Britain Foundation. The six-man outfit works to apply ‘green principles to transport, food, sport, telecoms, jewellery’ – and now the world of Whitehall too.
When we speak over Zoom, Vince is critical of Labour’s decision to press on with both carbon capture and the Sizewell C reactor. The former, he argues, will not work at scale, while the new nuclear reactor will cost more than £20 billion. Vince wants the Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ new Office for the Value of Money to review both decisions.
‘Labour has a massive mandate and inherited a country with massive problems, and all of that is a great opportunity to be bold and make big decisions. I don’t think there’s been enough of that yet.’ He harbours hopes for some of the younger Labour MPs, saying he is ‘aware’ of efforts by the new intake to ‘get themselves more clued up about green issues and green arguments and stuff. I’m keen to help with that. You know, I think that’d be very useful.’
‘If you go back 12 months, I was focused on one thing, the coming election’, he says. ‘I thought it was the opportunity of a lifetime to get the greenest government Britain ever had to, to embark on the second half of this last decade. This side of the election, I guess I’m more interested in implementation and in continuing to feed the ideas and the intelligence to the right parts of what’s now the government rather than the opposition.’ He has just finished a submission to the Treasury on a progressive tariff to end fuel poverty: other areas of focus include energy independence, heat pump alternatives and food substitutes to help save the planet.
So far, he says, Labour deserves an ‘eight or nine out of ten’ for their work in government. Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, gets singled out for praise. ‘Miliband came out of the traps early on, un-banning onshore wind within a day… I think he’s done well. I think he inherited carbon capture and storage and Sizewell but I think he should have been bold and just killed them off.’ Vince says he has only spoken to Miliband once since the election when he bumped into him at Labour party conference in September. Eight months on, he fears Miliband is ‘potentially a bit of a lone voice’ inside the cabinet and suggests ‘there won’t be another leading politician in the party that gets it like Ed gets it.’
Since July, Vince has moved away from funding Labour directly. Much of his time has been consumed by an acrimonious divorce to his ex-wife Kate, finalised in January after years of negotiation. He says that ‘It was always the intention of my ex to create the very public spectacle. Four years ago, I offered her £50 million and [in] January she walked away with 38…’ He believes that ‘it was an act of vengeance and spite as well as greed, but it ultimately failed on all fronts.’ He says that ‘the process itself was abused and I think it should be reformed because I had made an offer that was so much bigger than the outcome. There ought to be a penalty in those circumstances.’
One of the claims made by his ex-wife was that Vince was trying to finalise his divorce in ‘haste’ to prevent her from acquiring a title. Given his donations and passionate beliefs, might a peerage now be on the cards? He laughs: ‘It’s the kind of question I don’t want to answer because I don’t want to entertain the idea.’ After a bit of back and forth, he says ‘Everything I do, I judge on the basis of impact. So, if I were looking at that situation, if there was an opportunity or an offer, I would be saying to myself, “Can I make a difference? Does it make a difference?” And I have no idea because I haven’t thought about it, because it hasn’t come up – except when the media talk to me.’
After being thwarted in his plans to buy the Observer, Vince is now considering starting his own press outlet
What of future funding efforts? I ask Vince whether he will consider funding Scottish Labour’s 2026 Holyrood campaign, given the current debate over the Rosebank oilfield. ‘I haven’t thought about it’, he reflects, but adds, after a moment: ‘I think I’m bound to try and help out because I think it’s important that Labour succeed in Scotland.’ He insists that ‘it is economic nonsense to think that we need oil and gas’ and ‘dedicate billions of subsidies to an industry that hasn’t paid tax for years.’ Vince is also keen for Britain to repair some of what he sees as the damage caused by Brexit, which he says is ‘the greatest act of economic harm ever done to us.’ Will he fund pro-EU efforts in the future? ‘Maybe, yeah, I mean you know we’ve done what we can, the things that we think can make the most difference.’
Sat in front of a green Union Jack flag, Vince is keen to emphasise his faith in Green Britain’s technology too. Future designs include a generator ‘that can halve the material consumption of any given size of generator’ and a ‘plan to make quantum computing diamonds’. He wants his work to impact the lives of consumers across the country – including the nation’s schoolchildren. ‘I think there’s about 10,000 schools in Britain that have our food in them… plant-based food, free from the 13 major food allergens’.
After being thwarted in his plans to buy the Observer, Vince is now considering starting his own press outlet: ‘In the modern world, of course, being a media organisation is actually much simpler than it used to be’, he says. ‘You don’t need printing presses and distribution deals, you just set up a website and crack on, get yourself some journalists and away you go. It is interesting and we have considered it and we are thinking about it.’
Whether it is media or party politics, research or activism, Vince is determined to lead from the front on green issues. ‘There’s no shortage of missions for me’, he says. ‘And I don’t have a grid.’ For Britain, the effects of his efforts may be felt by millions.
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