The Conservatives complicate the politics of net zero for Labour

Good morning. It’s “risk splitting your party” week, apparently. Later today, the government will unveil its plans to reduce welfare spending, which I will discuss tomorrow when I have had time to read and digest the green paper.

For now, on other “green” topics, Kemi Badenoch has declared that reaching the UK’s net zero target is “impossible”, ending a more than 40-year consensus between the UK’s main parties on the issue and provoking upset among Tory environmentalists. Some thoughts on the politics of that below.

On thin ice

In 2024, Rishi Sunak essentially moved the Conservative party to a position of soft-core climate denial. His government was theoretically committed to meeting the net zero target, but it watered down some of the measures to get there. The politics of that approach did not work, and it continues to mean the Tory message on climate policy is frequently confused and incoherent.

Why would it work better for Badenoch? Well, one reason is that the Conservatives — who can point to a record of hitting their legally-binding climate targets, both under the 2006 Act’s terms and since moving to the bigger target of net zero by 2050 in 2019 — made a lot of progress on some of the easiest steps. (Equally, they were only easy because Margaret Thatcher had already taken one of the hard steps of tackling the coal industry, albeit for other reasons.)

If Labour wants to stay on track, it will have to do harder things, which risks straining the country’s commitment to reaching net zero. As on so many issues, British voters support radical climate targets, but are less open to paying for them.

Now, in policy terms, that’s a false choice. You either choose between a net zero world, or take steps to protect the UK from a world with a radically changed climate. Donald Trump’s return to the White House and his administration’s assault on US science are good reasons to think the world is not going to reach net zero by 2050 and that the UK needs to focus on energy security and climate adaptation. But that actually costs more money! There isn’t a painless political option here that isn’t just “slouch into crisis by the middle of the century”.

But you can see how the politics of this might work if we had a Labour government that was committed to the UK’s net zero targets and willing to take political damage to get there. It has an energy secretary, Ed Miliband, who is willing to do that, and there are others around the cabinet table who share that view. But the government’s centre of gravity — which retreated from Ulez after losing the Uxbridge by-election and supports a third runway at Heathrow — isn’t visibly committed. Sunak’s “soft-core denial” position isn’t really all that distinguishable from “in the end, sustainable aviation fuel will make the third runway compliant with our climate targets”.

One reason why Sunak’s climate pivot did not work is that he was campaigning against something that hadn’t happened yet. That is, a Labour government taking big but unpopular steps towards net zero. Badenoch underlining Sunak’s old position makes the politics of hitting the target more fraught. But it also makes it more likely that Labour will simply retreat from anything that looks politically painful.

That’s bad for the UK, but also bad for Badenoch, who risks looking a bit mad by railing against a target that commands popular support. Instead, she could and should be attacking Labour’s incompetence in failing to meet its targets over the course of this parliament. That seems rather more likely than the world she imagines, in which this government becomes known for its climate radicalism.

Now try this

This week, I mostly listened to Steve Reich’s Runner while writing my column. That, and batting off waves of envy towards Christopher Grimes, who interviewed Reich in a marvellous lunch with the FT.

Top stories today

• Tough sell | Jonathan Reynolds, UK trade secretary, will hold talks in Washington today in which he will attempt to win an exemption for Britain from Donald Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs. The digital services tax — which Trump has argued is aimed squarely at US tech giants — is set to be a source of contention.

• ‘Tech race against crime’ | London ratcheted up spending on CCTV to £30.4mn in the fiscal year ending April 2024 — an annual increase of nearly 25 per cent — according to London Councils, a lobby group, as police grapple with a surge in street crime.

• Running up that bill | Ministers plan to cancel thousands of UK government credit cards in response to concerns about waste after spending on these accounts quadrupled in the past five years to £675mn.