One news story defines this summer: the fact that average global temperatures have recently reached record-breaking levels. Baking European weather is now seared into our consciousness in the form of those heat maps coloured red and orange; as wildfires spread across the Greek island of Rhodes, thousands of people have been evacuated. In the US, China and no end of countries besides, the idea of planetary heating as a looming threat whose worst effects might yet be averted feels like it is turning to ash.
In the UK, unfortunately, the past 48 hours has seen a political story whose parochialist absurdity is off the scale: Conservative voices undermining the fragile cross-party consensus on reaching net zero by 2050 and calling for many of the UK’s tilts at climate action to be either slowed or stopped. The reason? The results of three parliamentary byelections – and, in particular, the views of 13,965 Conservative voters in the outer London suburbs.
According to some Tories, Thursday’s defeats in North Yorkshire and Somerset highlight the public’s exasperation with Rishi Sunak’s government, which is inseparable from the impossible cost of living. But the Conservatives managed a wafer-thin win in Uxbridge and South Ruislip by mobilising opposition to the expansion of the capital’s ultra-low emissions zone (Ulez) and its levy on older cars – and here, we are told, lies a route to the party’s revival: abandoning such Tory policies as phasing out new petrol and diesel vehicles by 2030, and relentlessly attacking Labour’s increasingly embattled range of green proposals, centred on its £28bn-a-year climate investment pledge.
The former business secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg says that “high-cost green policies are not popular”. Taking aim at supposed climate-related “costs, charges [and] taxes”, the chair of the Net Zero Scrutiny Group of Conservative MPs, Craig Mackinlay, insists that “there’s a lot to learn from Uxbridge – that a way to create some significant blue water between us and Labour is to rethink these charges and the net zero pathway” (note the disingenuousness of these messages: the Tory ban on onshore wind actually costs UK households £180 a year).
The biggest intervention so far has come from the the levelling up secretary, Michael Gove, who used an interview with the Sunday Telegraph – and its front-page splash – to lay out his opinions, advising against “treating the cause of the environment as a religious crusade”, warning of a backlash from the public and suggesting what he calls a more “thoughtful environmentalism”.
Gove’s is a mild, somewhat coded take. But among Tories on the hard right, hostility to climate action is a big part of what they have imbibed from Donald Trump and his populist fellow travellers in Europe. Rejecting big moves on carbon emissions also speaks to a certain kind of Tory’s devout belief in laissez-faire economics. Across the party, moreover, there is an increasingly madcap drive to fold the climate crisis into a kind of school-play version of the US’s culture war – something made plain last week when the overexcited energy secretary, Grant Shapps, wrote to Keir Starmer demanding that Labour pay for damage caused to his department’s building by climate activists, because it is nothing less than “the political wing of Just Stop Oil”.
There are two big reasons why all this is so dangerous. First, even if the Tories lose power next year, there is a perfectly realistic chance of their return to government circa 2029 – possibly under the leadership of Suella Braverman or Kemi Badenoch, who have both expressed sceptical opinions about net zero. And that possibility highlights a much bigger point, which applies not just to the UK, but democracies across the world: the plain political fact that unless the necessity of meaningful climate action is understood on both the right and left, the sense of deepening disaster will only worsen. This is a lesson from the 20th century that the polarised mindset of the 21st seems to have almost completely sidelined, but it remains inescapable.
There are at least modest flickers of hope. Tory supporters of climate action may tend to put too much faith in the wonders of markets, but the way that they counterbalance the anti-net zero crowd is undeniable. The membership of the Conservative Environmental Network, which exists to support “net zero, nature restoration and resource security”, includes 150 peers and MPs. The voguish Tory thinktank Onward has launched a “getting to zero” programme, centred on “developing practical and politically possible ways for the UK to meet its net zero ambitions and lead the world in decarbonisation”.
Even if his actions barely matched his words, the reason Boris Johnson made a lot of noise about the climate was in keeping with his talent for self-promotion: here, he well knew, lay the key to styling himself as a Tory leader in tune with modernity. Such senior(ish) Conservatives as the former minister Chris Skidmore and Alok Sharma, the chair of the Cop26 summit, share that belief, but have a much more sincere and serious approach. Not that Tory MPs are known for taking advice from Guardian columnists, but the gravity of the situation surely demands that one of them stand in the next Tory leadership election, and make their points loud and clear.
If they don’t, their party’s tendency to ignore the imperatives of a burning planet and oppose climate action for the most cynical reasons will only worsen, with consequences for the entirety of politics. In the wake of the Uxbridge result, for example, Starmer claimed that “in an election, policy matters. And we’re doing something very wrong if policies put forward by the Labour party end up on each and every Tory leaflet.” Beyond Ulez, there is a bigger context for that quote: the fact that the Labour leadership has already postponed and diluted its party’s green platform, and there are clearly people around Starmer who want rid of any emphasis on climate action, for fear of the exact attacks that Tories are now suggesting.
Therein lies the increasing awfulness of the UK’s climate politics, but amid the summer’s awful heat, any solution needs action from both sides – which means that Conservatives with a conscience will have to find their voice, and fast.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
