While conservative parties in the US, Australia and Canada have allowed opponents of action on climate change to help define their politics, thankfully in Britain successive Tory prime ministers have pushed such views to the fringes of their party. In 1989, Margaret Thatcher became the first world leader to warn the UN of the climate threat. Three decades later, as Theresa May opted to make Britain the first country to put into law the net zero goal of the Paris agreement, not one of her MPs voted against it. Apart from a brief wobble in 2013 when David Cameron, who had told voters “vote blue, go green” and went on to declare “cut the green crap”, this country has enjoyed a remarkable, and very welcome, degree of cross-party unity on the need to decarbonise.
Enabled by this consensus, a boom in offshore wind energy has allowed Britain to rapidly phase out coal use, have some of the cleanest electricity of any country and create thousands of jobs. Last winter, it also kept the lights on as the continent scrambled to find alternatives to expensive gas imports after Russia’s invasion.
For all his other faults, Boris Johnson knew voters wanted more ambitious steps to reach climate safety. He put net zero on page one of his winning manifesto. In office, he prioritised new policies to cut carbon pollution, including a law to end the sale of petrol and diesel vehicles by 2030. He offered grants to households to incentivise cleaner heating technologies to replace gas boilers, and doubled down on efforts by Michael Gove to attach green strings to farm subsidies after Brexit.
So it is alarming that a series of developments last week suggest Rishi Sunak may be preparing to break with this decades-long consensus in pursuit of a dividing line with Labour ahead of the looming general election. On Wednesday, the government’s official independent advisers on climate change, led by the former environment secretary, Lord Deben, issued a damning report saying their confidence that Britain would achieve its carbon targets had “markedly declined” since Sunak took office. On Thursday, May made a rare intervention in a speech to Britain’s clean tech sector, warning: “Where the UK once led, we are now falling behind.”
On Friday, Zac Goldsmith – the environmentalist whom Cameron brought into parliament to symbolise the modernisation of his party – resigned, citing Sunak’s uninterest in the planet. His letter of resignation revealed that the prime minister had secretly abandoned promises he made to world leaders only last year to channel billions to poorer countries to help them deal with worsening extreme weather events.
Even before last week, the signs were there that Sunak lacks commitment to environmental progress. When he set out his top five priorities for office, climate action was notable by its absence. It was only when this newspaper revealed that Johnson would attend last year’s UN climate talks that Sunak U-turned on his refusal to turn up, despite the attendance of other G7 leaders.
Weeks later, he nodded through the first deep coalmine in Britain for 30 years. Despite a rebellion from dozens of his MPs who sought to lift the ban on new onshore windfarms in the face of the energy security crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he has done nothing to unleash this cheap and secure source of energy.
It is just one of the many recommendations of a review by Number 10’s own climate tsar, Chris Skidmore, that he has chosen not to adopt. He also axed a crucial cross-Whitehall climate committee that Johnson had set up to steer policymaking.
It can be no surprise that more moderate one nation backbenchers are raising their concerns with the cabinet that Sunak seems to be abandoning the centre ground on green issues. They are correctly diagnosing that these decisions raise questions beyond those of his personal commitment to cutting carbon. They cast doubt over his broader economic and political judgment.
During the Conservative leadership contest, Will Tanner, now Sunak’s deputy chief of staff, wrote a report for the thinktank Onward with data showing that a rowback on climate ambition could cost the Tories more than a million votes. Poll after poll shows environmental concerns are among the public’s top priorities.
This suggests people appreciate how the transition to green offers huge economic opportunities, which can drive the growth we so badly need to improve our creaking public services. Despite the economic boost on offer from Britain’s comparative advantage in many of these sectors – born of our windy location, our world-leading engineering sector and our top universities and financial services industries – analysis by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) shows that Britain is investing far less in green technologies than either Germany or France.
With China dominating markets in solar power and battery technologies, and Biden investing a trillion dollars to help the US catch up, a global race is on to lead the way in building the future. Yet Sunak seems content to see Britain left behind. For what? So he and his ministers can deploy cheap jibes to try to characterise Labour as being in hock to Just Stop Oil militants? Or is he simply too weak to stand up to out-of-touch rightwingers such as David Frost, Kemi Badenoch and Suella Braverman?
The prime minister will have the opportunity to correct his course when his energy bill returns to the Commons. He should back proposals from Skidmore and opposition parties to unblock onshore wind and solar energy, block new coalmines and restore the climate consensus our security and prosperity demand.
