British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak appears to be wobbling on the “Net Zero” that a previous Conservative Prime Minister but three – that’s Theresa May, in case you’d lost count – got through parliament with barely a cough of disapproval back in 2019. Sunak is mumbling about “proportionate and pragmatic response”, at the same time that British holidaymakers are having to be flown back from Rhodes and Corfu, and while so many climate records are tumbling that it is hard to keep up. The Conservative Environment Network and others are trying to stiffen his spine, but Sunak appears minded to appease those on the ‘right’ who are opposed to anything green. This is both surprising but also, if you take a global and historical perspective, less so.
The UK story
The modern environment movement can roughly be dated to 1969 (1). There had been oil spills (the Torrey Canyon) and books (Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb) but the oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, where rich people lived, was the spill that broke the camel’s back. In September 1969 British Wilson Harold Wilson gave the first ever speech to a party congress that mentioned “the environment”
“First, our environment. There is a two-fold task: to remove the scars of 19th century capitalism – the derelict mills, the spoil heaps, the back-to-back houses that still disfigure so large a part of our land. At the same time we have to make sure that the second industrial revolution through which we are now passing does not bequeath a similar legacy to future generations. We must deal with the problems of pollution – of the air, of the sea, of our rivers and beaches. We must also deal with the uniquely 20th century problems of noise and congestion which will increasingly disturb, unless checked, our urban life.
Wilson then appointed one of his ministers – Tony Crosland – as a kind of Environment supremo, with a central scientific unit that was to roam across the whole of government, and set up a standing “Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution” (abolished by David Cameron in 2010). The first ever Environment White Paper was released the following May, and made a glancing reference to a possible problem with carbon dioxide buildup.
Visiting the US early the following year, Wilson proposed a new special relationship, based on environmental protection. Far from decrying this, Conservative leader Edward Heath accused Wilson of being too slow. When Heath became Prime Minister he created a huge Department of the Environment, that had some teeth to it. While “the environment” faded from the headlines thanks to the first Oil Shock, high inflation (sound familiar?) and other issues, neither Tories nor Labour backtracked. In 1979, new Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher even mentioned the greenhouse effect while in Tokyo for a G7 meeting.
She told a BBC journalist “we should also be worried about the effect of constantly burning more coal and oil because that can create a band of carbon dioxide round the world, which could itself have very damaging ecological effects.”
However, Thatcher took an obstructive line on acid rain, something the Swedes were especially exercised about, since sulphur from British coal stations was altering their lakes and rivers. It was only in 1988, after persistent lobbying from scientists like John Houghton and diplomats like Crispin Tickell that the lady was for turning – and in spectacular fashion. Her September 1988 speech to the Royal Society about the ‘experiment’ humanity was conducting in tipping so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, is regarded as the starting point for modern climate politics. In a reversal of 20 years previously, it was now Labour (including a young Tony Blair) calling for more action.
Thanks to switching from coal to gas, and moving industry offshore, the UK could for a long-time boast of reducing its emissions and speak nobly of sustainable development. In 1997, Tony Blair said the UK would exceed its Kyoto target, meeting few grumbles from the Tories. In the late 2000s there was a fierce “competitive consensus” around passing a climate change act. David Cameron, trying to repair the Conservative image, had taken a trip to the Arctic and was now saying “can we have the bill please.” Very very few Conservative MPs voted against an 80% reduction in emissions by 2050, and 5 year carbon budgets. Once in power, Cameron supported fracking, nuclear and opposed onshore wind and generally ‘cut the green crap’, [which has proved costly] but did not attack the Climate Change Act.
After the Paris Agreement in 2015, which the UK signed, it became clear that 80% would not be enough of a target to have the UK meet its obligations to do its part to keep warming under 2 degrees, and pressure built (including from prominent Conservative backbenchers) for a “Net Zero” by 2050 target. This was one of Theresa May’s last acts, and was enthusiastically endorsed by Labour, Boris Johnson and the like.
So what’s going wrong, and what does it mean?
Politicians tend to like targets that are far distant, round numbers like 2050. They get the glow, without the pain of upsetting either vested interests or demanding ordinary people change what they drive, what they eat, where they go. Bipartisanship is easy under those circumstances.
What we are seeing now, I believe, is a collision between what the promises were and what the immediate action has to be. Boris Johnson for a while, was able to defy gravity, but the failure of any actual spending on “Levelling Up” (recently Michael Gove returned a lot of money unspent) is a smaller version of what we are seeing here.
And, crucially, this is not unique to the United Kingdom. There have been periods of bi-partisan consensus around environmental issues in Australia (from the late 1960s to the early 1990s) and the United States. But once in power, Conservative governments have tended to prioritise “free markets” over what they label as irksome or socialistic environmental regulation. The main motor of climate denial, and framing green concerns as like a “watermelon” (Green on the outside, red on the inside) has been, historically, the United States.
One way of looking at what is happening in the Conservative Party now is that the same imported “culture war” tropes that gave us an un-evidenced “voter registration” panic and other concerns is now turning to climate policy. This is what is behind the recent Just Stop Oil action at Policy Exchange, which has received a lot of money from anonymous American sources.
The recent Uxbridge bye-election result has likely whetted the appetite of right-wing Tory strategists, seeing this as a way of “wedging” Labour (certainly Grant Shapps sees it that way) and either winning the next election by weaponising climate policy, or at the very least reducing the losses to “manageable proportions.”
Meanwhile, the emissions climb, the ice melts and the waters warm, and everyone will be holding their breath for every food harvest from here onwards.
Footnotes
- I haven’t read it yet, but this new book ooks fascinating – All We Want is the Earth: Land, Labour and Movements Beyond Environmentalism By Patrick Bresnihan and Naomi Millner. The blurb says “traces a counter-history of modern environmentalism from the 1960s to the present day. It focuses on claims concerning land, labour and social reproduction arising at important moments in the history of environmentalism made by feminist, anti-colonial, Indigenous, workers’ and agrarian movements. Many of these movements did not consider themselves ‘environmental,’ and yet they offer vital ways forward in the face of escalating ecological damage and social injustice.”
Further reading
Barnett. A. 2023. Populists are feeding the climate to culture wars. The Lead, July 22.
https://thelead.uk/populists-are-feeding-climate-crisis-culture-wars
Barnett. A. 2023. Climate denial sharks are circling since the Ulez by-election. Don’t feed them. The Big Issue, July 27
https://www.bigissue.com/opinion/climate-denial-labour-conservatives-ulez-by-election/
Harper, P. 2023. The Tories think their war on traffic rules is a vote magnet. Here’s why they are wrong. The Guardian, July 28