The Tories seem determined to ruin the UK with their last dying breaths of power
We cannot afford to take our eyes off the damage even a zombie Tory Government could wreak on its way out (Picture: Justin Tallis – WPA Pool/Getty Images)
A general election in May now looks unlikely, but you wouldn’t think so from the inside the Westminster Village: election fever has already taken over.
But as much as flailing poll numbers and election strategies will inevitably come under the microscope in the long months ahead, we cannot afford to take our eyes off the damage even a zombie Tory Government could wreak on its way out.
This is a party that has sunk this country into recession, decimated public services, and starved local authorities of vitally needed resources. Each day brings a new low from a party ready to stoke harmful culture wars to save its electoral skin – as the Home Secretary’s dangerous and divisive attack on multiculturalism and migrants demonstrated earlier this week.
But it is in the Government’s failure to address the climate emergency that they are leaving the worst legacy of all. Every moment counts in what the UN has termed a ‘critical decade’ for climate action.
Yet here in the UK, rather than playing a leading role in driving the transition to net zero forward, we have a government that seems increasingly prepared to turn its back on it altogether.
Just this week, any last remaining vestiges of claims to UK climate leadership were completely blown to pieces.
In Parliament, the Government doubled down on its dangerous climate culture war by passing the same, pointless Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill, which triggered the recent Kingswood by-election after Conservative MP Chris Skidmore resigned in protest at ‘the government’s decision to prioritise and politicise new oil and gas licences above a sensible investment plan for the future’.
Meanwhile, Sunak’s claim last year to be ‘proud to be a world leader in reaching net zero’ looked even more ludicrous – if not downright duplicitous – in the High Court recently as a legal challenge from Good Law Project, Friends of the Earth and ClientEarth forced the Government to finally come clean and reveal its own assessments on whether the UK’s current policies can get us to net zero by 2050.
The risk assessments lay bare a bleak picture of a government without any credible plan of action beyond merely putting its blind faith in fairytale technology that in its own words has ‘never been deployed at scale’, is ‘not… possible at current funding levels’ and is beset with ‘inherent uncertainties and risk’.
The days are long gone since the party cheered as Boris, for all his faults, at least stood at COP26 in Glasgow before the eyes of the world and acknowledged the fundamental reality that it’s ‘one minute to midnight on that doomsday clock and we need to act now’.
But now Sunak’s tired and divisive government is pivoting from empty words to actively weaponising climate change as a front in a wider culture war, which is a strategy we have seen deployed in hard-right movements across Europe and North America.
Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, Claire Coutinho, has launched an attack on ‘net zero zealots’. Former deputy chair Lee Anderson claimed coal was sustainable and it wouldn’t make a ‘blind bit of difference’ if the UK became net zero tomorrow. While business Secretary Kemi Badenoch has also hinted she was in favour of watering down the UK’s commitment to reach net zero by 2050.
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MPs of all parties must come together now to reject and thoroughly dismantle the damaging idea that it simply doesn’t matter what the UK does to tackle climate change.
It matters that the UK honours our international commitments and responsibilities and insists other countries do the same. And it matters to the millions of ordinary British people who could benefit from climate action taken now with lower bills, warmer homes, cleaner air, better health and good jobs.
The Tories will go on scraping the bottom of the barrel to the bitter end before they’re likely trounced at the next election – due to be held before the end of January 2025. We could be in store for a long and painful year ahead, as the Tories continue to run the country’s finances and public services into the ground, take aim at vulnerable people, and ignore the climate crisis to score hard-right political points.
If Keir Starmer succeeds in forming the next Government, he will inherit an economy on its knees and a country which has lost its way on net zero.
The worst mistake he could make would be to use the former to continue to justify the latter – a choice Labour already seem to be making after rowing back their flagship £28 billion annual climate investment pledge.
But this is no time to play politics – especially with the planet. The climate emergency is happening and the UK needs to step up now.
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