IT’S right that decarbonising energy should be a government priority.
Climate chaos is already driving erratic weather, storms and flooding, with enormous costs in terms of management and clean-up. It is already seriously disrupting agriculture: widespread crop failure due to inundated fields saw the total income derived from farming drop by more than 20 per cent from 2022-23, one reason anxieties run deep enough in the sector for Labour’s inheritance tax reforms to have provoked such a bitter response.
Farmers’ protests have been seized on by the far-right Reform UK, which is sceptical about any action to reduce emissions — as, increasingly, are the Tories.
Across Europe, farmers are often identified with reactionary politics on climate and biodiversity: protesting, often successfully, at “green” taxes and pesticide bans.
It’s ironic given the devastating impact a changing environment and the collapse of pollinating insect populations is likely to have on agriculture. But it stems from a more general dilemma: if the immediate impact of environmental policy is to make people poorer, the right will succeed in mobilising opinion against it.
This is particularly so because so many people feel poorer already. Since the bankers’ crash Britain has endured the longest spell of wage stagnation since the Napoleonic wars. Proposals to limit next year’s public-sector pay rises to 2.8 per cent abandon any ambition to see pay levels restored to what they were worth a decade ago.
The “cost-of-living crisis” has not gone away. Energy bills are double what they were just three years ago. Rents and mortgages have risen sharply, and millions of households now live hand to mouth: a Resolution Foundation survey early this year found over a third had less than £1,000 in total savings.
So it is no use Ed Miliband explaining that bills will drop from 2030 in line with plans to rely on “95 per cent clean energy” by then, but may rise in the meantime.
The Tory lie of austerity promised short-term pain for long-term gain too, but simply drove down living standards and crippled public services. Labour needs to reckon with a deep-seated public cynicism about politicians and their promises that the conduct of its own pledge-breaking leader has helped feed.
It needs to do so quickly: it came to power despite a shrinking vote, and has nothing in the tank when it comes to public goodwill. Polls show the Tories and Reform UK individually polling neck-and-neck with Labour or even ahead of it. Labour needs to make a tangible difference to people’s lives, and fast.
A start would be to treat the climate emergency like the emergency ministers admit it is. Put up the money for the planned mass insulation of homes that has been steadily downgraded (from a target of 19 million homes over 10 years, to five million over five years, and now 350,000 over three years): people will thank it when bills start to fall. Nationalise the National Grid, and plough its lucrative profits back into assistance with bills: better still, nationalise the whole sector and lower the bills direct.
Action on climate change should entail a far more radical reshaping of the country’s infrastructure and transport habits, including sharply cutting the cost of train and bus travel to ensure it is more economical than driving a car or taking a domestic flight. Of course raising the cost of driving or flying is unpopular: so tackle the problem from the opposite end first.
Unions need to demand a policy overhaul by the Labour government, including through the kind of costed policy blueprints for projects like energy nationalisation produced by Unite and through public campaigning and protest. Tolerating Labour’s lack of ambition is not just a problem in itself: it all but guarantees the election of a disastrously right-wing, climate-denialist government in a few years’ time.
