Tories vs Miliband – The Phoney Climate War

BEN PILE

In the Telegraph this week, former Theresa May aide now MP Nick Timothy writes that Ed Miliband’s “policies bring serious dangers to Britain”. Rightly so. But, adds Timothy, “he aims to reach Net Zero by 2050”, “decarbonise the grid by 2030”, and “reduce carbon emissions by 81%, based on 1990 levels, by 2035”. While this questioning of Net Zero is of course welcome, this belated Parliamentary scrutiny has some serious shortcomings.

“There is more joy in Heav’n,” and all that. And so I do not wish to appear to be making the perfect the enemy of the good by taking us on an ideological purity spiral. But Net Zero by 2050 is a cross-party policy priority, not Ed Miliband’s own personal policy agenda. The Climate Change Act (CCA) was made law in 2008 with just five MPs dissenting on the final vote. The CCA’s 80% emissions reduction target was raised to Net Zero by Statutory Instrument in 2019, after just 90 minutes of deliberation in the House of Commons, with no Noes being recorded – and hence no vote. Moreover, the CCA created the Climate Change Committee (CCC), which gives advice to Parliament, which the Secretary of State with the climate brief is obliged to consider. It is the CCA’s advice that the target should be 81% by 2035.

The point here being that even if Ed Miliband were to wake up tomorrow and decide to read every climate article on the Daily Sceptic and agree with us about the looming catastrophe that is Net Zero, it would make little difference. The architecture of the CCA is such that it binds governments, and a significant Parliamentary majority is required to alter it. It seems unlikely that the other 410 Labour Party MPs would have much sympathy for Miliband’s hypothetical epiphany, sufficient to join whatever number of the 121 Conservative MPs would join Timothy’s Net Zero sceptic camp.

A deeper problem exists, which is epitomised by this cross-party consensus that has long dominated Westminster. It’s not just about what MPs think: it is that they have deferred thinking, full stop. The CCA takes decision-making out of the hands of MPs, in much the same way as the earlier Labour Government gave autonomy – “independence” – to the Bank of England, to determine monetary policy. As sensible as that may have ever sounded, the problem of putting policy decisions beyond politics is that it deprives the voter of choice, and thereby dismantles democracy.

Furthermore, what room there is left for political deliberation on the climate agenda, such as Parliament’s rubber-stamping of the CCA’s advice on carbon budgets, is dominated by the broader Green Blob. By “Green Blob” I mean the nebulous ecosystem of state and intergovernmental agencies, NGOs, think tanks and charities which are also nearly all one way or another indebted to green philanthropists. I point out this alignment to contrast with the principle of democratic representation, which created the expectation that MPs would represent their constituents’ political views and interests. But what tends to happen instead in debates about climate and energy policy in the House of Commons is the tragic spectacle of MPs reading scripts written for them by Blob-funded think tanks, scripts that rehearse the litany of falsehoods and factoids standard to the genre, such as ‘wind power is nine times cheaper than gas’.

It was after intense lobbying by the Blob in the 2000s that the CCA was made law. In fact the Climate Change Bill and an earlier draft of it from the preceding Parliamentary session were drafted by Friends of the Earth (FoE) activists. As now Baroness Bryony Worthington revealed, she had been charged with mobilising an FoE campaign to support a climate bill, and later was appointed to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs under David Miliband. Similarly, as I have pointed out elsewhere, the U.S.-based ClimateWorks Foundation, which pools hundreds of millions of dollars in grants from green philanthropists, was invited to draft EU climate and energy legislation out to 2050. With its vast budget, it was able to mobilise and even create countless civil society organisations in support of this agenda, to lobby MEPs, align other NGOs, flatter journalists and harass opponents and critics. Civil society was simply bought, wholesale, in some cases off the shelf

The last 18 months or so have seen a remarkable sea change in the climate debate. It began with a few Conservative recently-demoted former Ministers being frank about the likely impact of climate policies in public. Then a steady trickle of commentary, often published by the Daily Telegraph, turned into a wider stream, and a small number of MPs organised a more formal representation in a Net Zero Scrutiny Group in Parliament. Whatever influence this had, however, the Sunak Government did the absolute minimum to steer a corrective course: it relaxed the ban on domestic gas boilers, and moved the final date of the abolition of new sales on petrol and diesel cars. But by then, the voter had had enough of the party, which had put climate and other preoccupations far before the public interest. Any lessons that the Government had learned about the liability of Net Zero, it learned too late. The public, faced with such a bland binary choice between equals, opted to punish Conservatives.

Nick Timothy, an MP now but formerly of Theresa May’s office, the passing gift of which was, of course, Net Zero, talks a good sceptic game. “Miliband must know that what he says about these objectives, and the policies he pursues to achieve them, is dishonest,” he explains. I can share in his incredulity. I was saying the same about Conservative opposition MPs in the 2000s, when David Cameron was hanging out with Greenpeace, rebranding the party with a logo of a green tree to detoxify the “nasty party” (Theresa May), and engaging then-Editor of the Ecologist and eco-millionaire playboy Zac Goldsmith to draft the party’s reformulation of environmentalism with John Gummer in the Quality of Life Policy Group. As Worthington points out, Davids Cameron and Miliband were in nothing less than an arms race to be the champions of the green agenda. When the Coalition Government was formed in 2010, it declared itself “the greenest Government ever”. But I find Timothy’s scepticism hollow.

Timothy joins Ed Milband’s Tory predecessor and now opposite Claire Coutinho in accusing Miliband of putting ideology before pragmatism and the country’s interests. And herein lies the problem. There is nothing that Timothy can see in Miliband that could not be seen, in spades, in his colleagues just months ago – colleagues who were promising to make the U.K. the “Saudi Arabia of wind” in a “green industrial revolution”. The Labour party’s climate policy agenda is nothing but continuity Boris Johnson. At the time, though Timothy was critical of climate ideology, his reply to his colleagues’ excesses was: “That climate change is real, and is caused by human activity, is not disputed by anybody credible and does not need to be subject to political debate.” We “need to be honest that the threat from climate change is real,” he argued, predicting that “we will see more extreme weather events, such as flooding and fires, rising sea levels and the loss of plants and wildlife”.

The problem, then, is not merely that Timothy is wrong on the science, but that the object of his incredulity, Net Zero, is rooted in the same formulation of the ‘facts’ as he remains committed to. This makes untangling his ‘pragmatism’ from Miliband’s ‘ideology’ an impossible task. Ultimately, such ‘pragmatism’ is far more bound in ideology than anyone wants to admit. Though it is easy to see ideology in the scruffy activists who block roads and vandalise artworks, it is far harder for Westminster to identify ideology at work in Westminster. It’s not enough to say that “Miliband must know” that his claims are “dishonest”. We cannot know that, because we do not know what exists in Miliband’s mind. And we cannot say that the contents of his mind are all that different from Timothy’s.

What we can know and what we can see is that green ‘facts’ and formulations persist in media, politics and academia by virtue of the Green Blob’s billions. We can know and we can see that British politics has followed the colonisation of institutional science by being hollowed out, deferring to faceless quangos and intergovernmental agencies. We can know and we can see that what remains of British politics has been dominated by wacky ideologies that do not resonate with the British public. And we can see and can know that politicians, even when they sense the problem, are impotent to deal with what they see.

Timothy may well be reluctant to launch a full-frontal attack on climate science. That is understandable. And it is not the course I would advise for him, either. But there is an alternative between ideology and pragmatism. Timothy could point to the extent to which the Establishment and its institutions have been captured by green ideology and have evicted the public from democratic politics. He could take us back to 2006, to the greening not just of British politics but his own party. After all, as a No. 10 insider he must have seen it for himself, up close.

Before we can know what ‘science says’, we must know what it has been told. In today’s terms that is equivalent to knowing what science and everyone between institutional science and government have been paid and by whom. In other words, in order to know what kind of problem climate change is, we have to understand what green ideology is, in its full expression. It is green ideology that has moved politicians’ hands to sign cheques worth billions of pounds to researchers to identify the risks of climate change, while handing precisely £0.00 to academics to scrutinise green claims. It is Green Blob-funded civil society organisations that have engulfed politicians and harassed sceptics off campuses and off the airwaves. And it is green billionaires’ cash that has dismantled British democracy.

That is the scandal that Nick Timothy and other newly self-identifying Net Zero sceptics in Westminster should be highlighting. The factoid-tennis about inevitable policy failures and the ‘excesses’ of climate alarmism are now for the birds. At best, they can only lead to a slightly watered-down version of Net Zero. Hence, the Tory climate sceptic offering is no more than ‘clean power by 2035’ rather than the Government’s ‘clean power by 2030’. Can you see much difference? I can’t.

This article (Tories vs Miliband – The Phoney Climate War) was created and published by Daily Sceptic and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Ben Pile