I’m not a climate sceptic. I’m a disciple in that regard of a great friend who died recently, James Lovelock. He used to say that climate science is inexact, but if it has a bias, it’s probably towards underestimating the speed of climate change. He thought that climate change would consist of sudden jumps and it could transform things quite quickly, in a couple of decades. We might be in the middle of it. That’s my view — I’m not a climate sceptic.

What I am very sceptical about is net zero, and the kind of conventional green policies that are being launched. Firstly, they were launched before the infrastructure was there — before the technology was developed that could make them work. No consideration was given to the fact that many of the raw materials that were needed for the inputs, the batteries and so on, were now substantially or even largely controlled by China in Africa and elsewhere. It’s in Africa that the Great Game of the 19th century is being refought.

Now, they might be found in other countries; in Sweden and America, various deposits have been found. But they are not easily developed. And in the meantime, these programmes can’t go ahead. Nor were the economic costs of these green programmes properly assessed. There was a constant insistence that they would be job-creative. Even in America, they haven’t been that job-creative. And remember, America is very big, and can throw very large amounts of money at these things — the Green New Deal is largely a protectionist scheme. We can’t do that because we’re too small; we’re too exposed to flows of international capital. The idea that in Britain or in Europe these programmes could ever possibly work — it’s a bit like suffering from cancer and using candle therapy.

Some people might say: “But we’ve got to, we’ve got to show that we’re on the right side, we’ve got to accomplish it, even if other people don’t do it.” I think that’s the politics of narcissism: “I want to feel good.” But in the meantime, you’re wasting resources and you’re wasting time. There is a serious possibility that we’re now in the early stages of runaway climate change. We should be focusing everything we’ve got — not on having an infinitesimal impact on global carbon levels, which would be the case even if the whole net-zero programme was implemented, but on policies of adaptation. And adaptation is not going to be easy. Remember, most climate scientists agree that once human-induced climate change is in the works, it goes on for decades or even centuries. You can’t just stop it. There’s a general idea among environmentalists that we started this so we can stop it. They are wrong. We started it, probably, but we can’t stop it.

I’ve said previously we’re living in an age of tragedy. I’m not too sure about that anymore. I think we’ve advanced further than tragedy. We’re entering an age of absurdity. Consider German climate policy. Germany, as we keep hearing, is incomparably more adult, more advanced, more modern, and in every way superior to bungling Britain. But in Germany, the result of their closing down of nuclear and going for renewables has been an increased reliance on the dirtiest kind of coal. Well, this is tragic, but it’s even more than tragic. It is completely absurd.

And it’s difficult to put these arguments forward because people start shouting at you or they start crying or they say they can’t get up in the morning. I rather brutally suggest: “Well don’t. Stay in bed until you get a better reason for getting up. And if you don’t, well, there we are. Progress always has casualties.”

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How conservative is Net Zero?

By Robert Saunders

One of the great books of the last century in English was by the American scholar, Philip Rieff, called Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. He quotes a wonderful letter of Freud’s, in which he describes how his aim in therapy was not to enable people to realise themselves or to achieve happiness — his aim was to change hysterical misery into the everyday suffering of normal human life. Today, that’s been somehow forgotten.

Rieff later wrote a book called The Triumph of the Therapeutic, in which he said that a therapeutic model of behaviour was spreading through every part of society. Rather than using moral terms or even political terms, people started using psychoanalytical terms. “What do you want out of this? I want closure.” Well, the thing about Freud is there’s never any closure. Closure is impossible for Freud. We bear the scars as well as the good things from infancy, whatever we do. I think conventional climate policy is for therapeutic people to feel good. They don’t want to feel powerless, so they deceive themselves.

But with these policies, there is also the question of political legitimacy. And what’s being discovered now is that there are limits to political legitimacy for policies that severely disrupt the practical lives and incomes of large numbers of people in society. So, if you impose a Ulez scheme in an area where there’s practically no public transport, that has a severe impact on people trying to get to work. And there’s also the subjective feeling, which is very important, of being imprisoned in one of these 15-minute cities — of somebody doing something to you which you resist.

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In London, there are reports of people going round and smashing or disabling Ulez cameras. What will happen is that these numbers will build and either the policy will eventually be overturned or you’ll have a period of anarchy. I remember when Thatcher, having tried and failed to impose the poll tax in Scotland, introduced it in England. And this happens to all leaders, whether they are liberals or not. They tend to become anti-empirical. They double down instead of learning from their mistakes. For Thatcher, this resulted in riots and her being toppled. And something similar could happen with these green policies — because not only is it a huge blow to the worldview of the technocratic elites who support it, but also to our perception of their competence.

So what’s the solution? In Britain, I have a tiny sliver of hope. I’m hoping for a hung parliament, which might not happen because Labour has been rejuvenated in Scotland. But if it doesn’t get a working majority, there is a realistic chance of electoral reform. The only way you can really have any new ideas filtering into politics is by creating new incentives, which involves the destruction of the existing party framework. And the parties would split immediately. Perhaps two or three parts of Labour will split: you could have a real socialist party (hopefully non-Corbynite); you could have a green party but not not a not a conventional green party; you could have a liberal party; you could have a libertarian party. You could have a variety of parties, and that would be a much healthier situation. I think that’s still possible. There’s a sliver of hope.

The full discussion with John Gray will be available shortly on UnHerd’s YouTube channel. John Gray’s new book, The New Leviathans, is published by Penguin.

For the political and academic clerisy, the energy “reset” is like manna from heaven. It gives them a licence to impose the kind of “technocratic social engineering” that makes poor people poorer while stripping away working-class aspirations, as we already see in places like California and Germany. In Spain, 10% of all households cannot adequately heat their homes during the winter months; and in Italy, electricity bills jumped by 55% by January 2022. In the United Kingdom the number of homes that cannot pay their energy bills is set to triple by April 2022.

The new regime of expensive, often intermittent energy also threatens to make permanent the poverty of the developing world, which already suffers from a lack of cheap and reliable energy. The fossil fuels now being targeted by Western policymakers and financial firms like Blackrock are critical for industrialisation, and it is unlikely they can be replaced by wind and solar alone: fossil fuels still account for 81% of all energy supplies, and even if every country meets their climate promises, they will still account for roughly three quarters in 2040.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that in Africa there is a growing scepticism toward Western policies of “sustainability” — even though these policies, draped in the language of socially conscious “stakeholder capitalism”, pledge to address “systemic racism”. Already in 2015, for example, the president of the African Developmental Bank stated that “Africa cannot function because we have no power” and affirmed the continent’s need for “renewable and conventional” energy, including “natural gas and coal”.

Similarly, in the lead-up to the UN Climate Change Conference last year, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari warned that the climate policies favoured by Western governments investors and aid agencies could lead to an Africa-wide energy crisis. Just last month, the president of Senegal made it clear ahead of the EU-African Union summit that Africans are not prepared to pay for Europe’s carbon levy. South Africa’s Energy Minister, meanwhile, criticised NGOs and universities that promote “climate-driven solutions” with money from European think tanks.

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And African leaders have every reason to be concerned about the dangers of expensive energy. Fuel riots have occurred in the recent past in Senegal, Malawi, South Africa, and Nigeria, while energy costs were a catalyst for the Arab Spring, when a spike in oil prices drove up the price of grain. Earlier this year in Kazakhstan, soaring energy prices nearly sparked a revolution.

Given that more than half of all Africans live in energy poverty, perhaps their politicians have every right to be worried. Even relatively advanced South Africa no longer produces adequate and reliable electricity and now faces opposition to developing its own fossil fuel and nuclear capacity. The resulting crisis — the country’s manufacturers are closing shop in the face of high electricity prices, leaving two-thirds of young adults are out of work — is threatening the stability of South Africa’s democracy.

In the rest of Africa, meanwhile, in population centres such as Nigeria, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, energy supplies are woefully inadequate to meet daily needs. Without more reliable energy supplies, the continent will remain mired in poverty — and civil strife is bound to follow.

No doubt aware of this, some governments, such as those in Senegal and Ethiopia, have set ambitious targets for full electrification by 2025. Similar plans are underway across the continent, with the African Developmental Bank promising to help finance electrification by 2030. How likely that is to work remain unclear. It’s striking, though, that while Africa cripples itself in pursuit of eco-friendly energy, Western-backed environmental activists are protesting offshore gas exploration in South Africa’s poverty stricken Wild Coast region.

Contrast what is being recommended for the developing world with the behaviour of the United States and a tale of hypocrisy slowly comes into focus. Thanks in part to the rise of fracking, the US is slated to become the world’s largest producer of liquified natural gas. This growth in the American energy supply has coincided with falling greenhouse gas emissions, largely driven not by environmental regulations but by the replacement of coal with natural gas.

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The socialism America needs

By Joel Kotkin

The natural gas boom has been particularly important for those who have suffered from the loss of manufacturing, driving an industrial renaissance in economically hard-hit regions such as the Midwest as well as historically poor parts of the South. Low natural gas prices, notes the Cleveland Fed, have been critical to the manufacturing job growth now transforming large parts of the nation’s heartland. By contrast, green policies have driven high prices in states like California, harming the once thriving industrial economy and driving up the cost of basic necessities like electricity.

It seems odd, then, that President Joe Biden and most Democrats are insistent on ignoring these lessons. Biden and most of his party favour utilising the Federal Reserve and other executive departments to enforce “net zero” policies. Everything from gas pipelines to new leases for offshore oil are being cancelled, while new regulations are making it harder to build new fossil fuel plants. The green-dominated media, meanwhile, is trying to blame energy shortages on climate change and the hated fossil fuel companies.

These policies, both in the US and the rest of the world, are the product of the view that anthropogenic global warming is as an existential threat to life on Earth rather than a long-term nuisance that will have to be managed gradually via adaptation, particularly in light of China and India’s continued fossil fuel growth. To the extent the apocalyptic as opposed to pragmatic view is adopted, the policy agenda moves towards “de-growth”,  which seeks to reduce consumption, effectively lowering the living standards of the masses to “save the planet”. This may seem a small price to pay for affluent people in Europe and America, but one doubts that the governments of the developing world will be willing to tell their poor that environmental piety matters more than basic survival.

Does this mean that we’re doomed to an eco-apocalypse? Not necessarily; it is possible to gradually decarbonise the developing world without hamstringing its economies. On the nuclear front, for instance, there is currently talk of Small Modular Reactors (SMR), which are theoretically smaller and easier to build than existing reactors. But even proponents admit these technologies will take significant investments and a few decades to mature. Some suggest that lithium batteries will allow us to make renewables more viable by vastly improving grid storage technology, but these batteries require enormous amounts of rare earth minerals.

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Perhaps the most promising technology is geothermal energy. Thanks to the advances in deep drilling technology from hydraulic fracking, two pilot projects are in progress in Serbia and Canada that might allow for the heat of the deep hot biosphere to be exploited at an affordable cost.

But as the Africans recognise, in the short run we are left with a choice between a net-zero regime based on expensive solar and wind power and one relying on the only energy sources we know are cheap and reliable — fossil fuels. Coal, nuclear power and especially natural gas are here to stay; the imperatives of Greta Thunberg won’t be adopted by people in the slums of Africa’s cities or rural Chinese looking to share in their country’s prosperity. Outside of the talking shops, in the real world, net zero remains a distant prospect. But the mounting energy crisis is already here — and sacrificing the world’s poorest countries, and many in the West as well, in pursuit of a green agenda won’t make it disappear.

But unlike the social democracy movements that followed World War Two, the New Socialism focusses not on material aspirations but on climate change, gender, and race. While the old socialism sought to represent the ordinary labourer, many on the Left today seem to have little more than contempt for old working-class base and its often less than genteel views on issues such as Critical Race Theory.

Yet perhaps the most critical difference between traditional socialism and its new form relates to growth. The New Socialism’s emphasis on climate change necessarily removes economic growth as a priority. Quite the opposite, in fact: the Green agenda looks instead towards a shrinking economy and lowered living standards, seeking to elevate favoured groups within a stagnant economy rather than generating opportunities for the general population.

As a result, this new variant of socialism seems more feudal than Marxist. As Edwin Aponte, editor of the socialist blog The Bellows, has observed, Marx opposed utopian socialists, with their dreams of a return to the cohesive social order of feudal times — instead, he favoured using technology and economic growth to lift them up.

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Did critical race theory lose Virginia?

By Joel Kotkin

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may not realise that the much-admired European socialist system was built on the back of a private sector. But the truth is that virtually all the successful welfare states — Germany, Netherlands, Scandinavia — rose on competitive economies: Swedish steel, Dutch chemicals, German machine tools and cars were critical to funding socialist programs in capitalist countries. But as this model slowly crumbles, as Europe loses its competitive edge to China and elsewhere, this lesson appears to have been forgotten. And in its place has risen a New Socialism that serves Wall Street, the City and the tech oligarchy.

The usual response from environmental activists is that the rapid transition to “zero carbon” will create oodles of new, well-paid jobs. In reality, however, these jobs generally pay less, offer fewer hours and are rarely unionised. The reality facing the middle class is an acceleration of our class divides and lower living standards. It’s long been de rigueur on the Green Left to cut back on homeownership, limit use of private cars or even fly on vacation. In other words, those who will suffer most are the very people whom socialism is supposed to save. Already energy poverty is on the rise in those places — from California to the EU — where punitive fuel costs have been increased.

Elsewhere, supply chain problems and inflation are now dismissed as “high-class problems”, even if it also means high prices for essentials such as milk, gas and rent. The Atlantic, a premier voice of the gentry Left, grumbles that “America’s central organizing principle is thoughtless consumption”, echoing the kind of homily handed out by Medieval clerics to disgruntled serfs.

Yet nowhere is the hierarchical nature of feudalistic socialism clearer than in the property markets. Social democrats may have once celebrated people owning homes or cars, but new green-tinged policies would lead to those becoming an option only for the rich, while opening a vast market for financial firms to buy single family homes and turn them into rentals. Just look at California, where Green progressives wield almost unlimited power, and which is now home to rising inequality, the nation’s highest poverty rate and the second lowest percentage of homeowners.

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Of course, this mindset is not confined to the Left. In the UK, for example, Boris Johnson’s Conservatives have proposed climate-based rules that would force homeowners — their political base — to retrofit their homes for thousands of pounds, while forcing them to abandon affordable gas heaters for less effective electric ones. This reflects what one socialist neatly labels “eco-Thatcherism in Britain“.

But there can be little doubt that the biggest change is taking place on the Left. Historically, the British and Australian Labour Parties, the French Socialist Party, America’s Democrats and Canada’s Liberals evolved from a strong working-class base. But in recent years, for both economic and cultural reasons, these parties have become dominated by professionals, academics and government workers increasingly bent on introducing paternalistic, puritan policies.

Ultimately, many of the old Left-wing parties may end up losing out to the ascendant Greens, who could be the real winners of the rise of New Socialism. It is not inconceivable that they could take power across Europe — particularly in Germany where the country’s traditional industrial base has shrunk. In the US, although there’s not much chance of the Greens challenging the ruling political duopoly, there are clear signs that the Democrats could find themselves torn between the need to represent both progressives and the party’s blue-collar base.

Yet it didn’t have to be this way. The Left’s Green policies might be big on virtue, but moves to eliminate energy and industrial jobs make no sense if we are going to depend on fossil fuels for at least the next few decades. It seems futile to be shutting down domestic pipelines, curbing energy production and raising electricity prices while begging the Saudis or the detestable Putin regime to drill more.

A more traditional socialist would promote domestic production, particularly natural gas, while also trying to shift production away from coal-dependent China, the world’s primary emitter. China’s Xi continues to build new coal plants and arrange for long-term oil supplies from the Middle East. Unlike our Left-wing parties, Xi knows the grip on keeping power rests on meeting the aspirations of his subjects, not dampening them.

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To remain relevant, the Left needs to return to the basics. Social democracy, as first developed in places like Sweden, sought to bolster families, and allow for improvements in daily life. Throughout history, economic growth has been critical to making societies wealthier, while making it far easier to distribute salves to the poor, invest in environmental improvements and work to improve conditions for historically disadvantaged minorities. Good jobs and “economic expansion,” notes economic historian Benjamin Friedman, are the best antidote for “rising intolerance and incivility”.

Is there still hope for a more socially beneficial kind of socialism? Certainly, elements of the recently passed bipartisan infrastructure bill could help American industry compete with China. People, more than anything, want roads, bridges and ports fixed. But all this risks being undone if the Democrats continue to press for more extreme measures: more moderate Democrats will lose their seats, and the GOP will gain control of the House.

Many on the Left deny the electoral reality, and claim the party can only win by moving towards more assertive redistribution, anti-racist and draconian climate policies. Meanwhile, the Republicans are redoubling efforts to forge a social democratic agenda, crafting an aggressive programme of tax breaks for working families, upholding educational choice in states such as Virginia, and committing to aggressive re-shoring for industry. Florida’s Senator Marco Rubio has even called for a “divorce” with the financial and corporate elite.

It’s an encouraging sign, even though such moves will be adamantly opposed by the bearers of libertarian orthodoxy who have shaped the party for a generation and have the support of many of the party’s big funders. In the end, then, both the libertarians and feudal socialists could find themselves rejected by the majority of the population. After all, a society bedevilled by rising inequality, racial tensions, a pandemic and complex issues around climate change is as unlikely to accept honeyed words about ‘the market being efficient’ as it would tolerate an increasingly intrusive state that squashes their aspirations in the name of environmental virtue.

Something else is needed: policies that address the competitive economy while preserving upward mobility, economic growth and an environment improved by technological changes. In other words we need a socialism that is rooted in the needs of the working and middle classes — not one that seeks to keep them in their place.

The “soaring environmental rhetoric of the state’s affluent, largely white technocratic leadership”, she concludes, is “deepening the state’s shameful legacy of racial injustice”. Certainly, the impact is stark. California now suffers the nation’s worst cost-adjusted poverty rate; and according to the United Way of California, more than 30% of California residents lack sufficient income to meet basic costs of living, even after accounting for public assistance programmes. Those struggling families include half of Latino and 40% of black residents.

There are two main factors driving this “new Green Jim Crow era”. The first, and most obvious, is California’s energy policy, which has made the state’s electricity and gas prices the highest on the mainland, with electricity prices 50% above the national average and gasoline costs that exceed even import-reliant Hawaii in the centre of the Pacific Ocean.

This surge in prices derives from the state’s obsession — shared by the ruling tech oligarchs — with renewable energy and the elimination of fossil fuels. Yet as a recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) report has shown, over-reliance on renewables is costly, because it requires the production of massive (and environmentally unfriendly) battery-storage capacity — the price of which is invariably passed on to the taxpayer.

This is not bad news for the tech oligarchs, who have been prominent among those profiting from “clean energy” investments. But many other Californians, primarily those in the less temperate interior, find themselves falling into energy poverty or are dependent on state subsidies that raise electricity prices for businesses and the middle class. Black and Latino households are already forced to pay from 20 to 43% more of their household incomes on energy than white households. Last year, more than 4 million households in California (30% of the total) experienced energy poverty.

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These policies have also had the secondary effect of driving out many of the blue-collar industries — manufacturing, construction, energy — that have traditionally employed ambitious, upwardly mobile minority families. While the small, insulated, post-industrial urban elite bloats up on cash and stokes its virtue, over the past decade California has lost 1.6 million above-average-paying jobs, more than twice as many as any other state.

This attrition reflects in part the torpor of the state’s industrial sector; California now sits in the bottom half of states in manufacturing-sector employment growth, ranking 44th last year, easily outpaced by competitors such as Nevada, Kentucky, Michigan and Florida. Even without adjusting for costs, no Californian city ranks in the US top ten in terms of well-paying blue-collar jobs, but four — Ventura, Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Diego — sit among the bottom ten.

This is hardly surprising when you consider that California’s largest economic pogrom is directed at the state’s most important energy industry: gas and oil development. Two years ago, Governor Newsom — who has been described as “California’s champion virtue signaler” — announced plans to shut the entire industry down. His latest decree, announced in April, confirmed his intention to phase out oil extraction. Perhaps it could be considered a noble campaign, if it weren’t for the fact that California chooses instead to import its oil from such enlightened states as Saudi Arabia.

And while this shift will not cause much pain in Malibu or Menlo Park, where the wealthy can continue to tool around in their BMWs, in Bakersfield, where the industry is centered, or around the coastal refineries, the impact could be catastrophic. According to a study by the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation, these dictates threaten over 366,000 high-paying, largely blue-collar jobs — roughly half of which are held by people of colour.   

Yet perhaps inflated housing costs constitute the cruelest blow dealt by the Greens to the state’s middle and working class. As part of its climate policy, California strives to force development into transit-dependent dense neighbourhoods, a policy that has raised prices and ire in mostly minority working-class communities. At the same time, the state and the Green lobby has worked overtime, often in alliance with well-funded green groups, to stop or curtail development along the urban fringe, where land prices and regulatory costs tend to be somewhat less extreme. Some developments, like the Tejon Ranch north of Los Angeles, have been delayed for three decades.

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These and other restrictions have slowed housing growth in the state. During 2020, when national house construction was increasing 6.1% from 2019, California’s rate was down 3.7%, according to Census Bureau data. As a result, for more than half of renters in California, housing costs exceed 30% of household income, the traditional definition of unaffordability. And nearly 70% of all state households with unaffordable housing costs are people of colour.

These conditions explain why Californians are leaving; an exodus which is particularly notable among minorities. California may have the most “enlightened” policies for people of colour, but they are still leaving the state for less “progressive” states, such as Texas. San Francisco’s African-American community has declined from one in seven in 1970 to barely one in twenty today, with most now ensconced in public housing.

Even the foreign-born — the group that has transformed California over the past few decades — are staying away. An analysis of Census data by demographer Wendell Cox shows that the foreign-born population is actually declining in Los Angeles, fading in the Bay Area while growing by as much as 30% in rival cities like Dallas.

Is there any chance that these patterns can be reversed within the state? I suspect we are about to find out. Hernandez has filed a lawsuit with 200 civil rights leaders alleging that the California Air Resources Board, the supreme architect of climate policies, adopts policies essentially discriminatory towards minorities. “CARB,” the group wrote to the agency at the end of last year, “wilfully elected to increase housing costs and make it more difficult for members of our communities to close the wealth gap”.

Of course, the plaintiffs face an uphill fight in the progressive-dominated California judiciary. Even with strong support from leading minority activists, her suit has received virtually no coverage from the state’s mainstream media, which has become largely an amplifier of green agitation.

But outside the media bubble there are clear signs of growing dissent. Roughly half of Latinos, according to the most recent polls, favour the recall of the state’s eco-Governor Gavin Newsom. Recently Latino voting rights advocates openly criticised the efforts by the Sierra Club — a leading environmental organisation — to “phase out” affordable gas-powered cars. The rules, they suggest, are designed instead to make it possible for “our rich neighbors in the next town to charge their Teslas and run their air conditioners on hot days but make it unaffordable to use ours”.

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Ultimately, the Greens will have to confront such criticism. Some may seek a way out by shoving the displaced working class into permanent dependency with the introduction of a universal basic income. This could allow the state to reduce energy consumption— but comes with an eye-watering price tag. The Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transit Commission recently proposed a $205 billion statewide universal basic income program, but that only covers a $500 monthly payment to all households — a pitiable amount in a state where rents average $1500 a month .

Meanwhile, Hernandez is calling for “climate equity”, where the rich, rather than the poor, pay the biggest price. After all, wealthy neighbourhoods generate up to fifteen times more greenhouse gas emissions than average and lower-income ones.

What’s certain is that to succeed over time, in California and elsewhere, environmental policy must not sacrifice what Michael Shellenberger has described as “the goal of universal prosperity”. Environmentalists need to win over the population not by terrorising them but by showing that we can protect nature without stomping out human aspirations. If minorities are able to force the green establishment to confront the economic implications of their policies, that might be a start.

The first approach has been heavily linked to Symonds, who is seen as a social liberal in the Cameronite mould, and who wants to emphasise environmental issues: evidenced by past campaigning activities and a close relationship with Zac Goldsmith. It also advocates a change in political approach, too. Symonds, along with Allegra Stratton, the PM’s new spokesman, is seen to want a less confrontational approach with “the Establishment”, an end to artificial “culture wars”, and to bring more backbench MPs into the fold. This camp hopes to see Johnson return to his policy platform as Mayor of London – “greener, kinder, gentler and more female pitch to a more familiar Tory audience”, as Paul Goodman described it.

In the rival corner, quick to the stump was Jake Berry, the former Northern Powerhouse (remember that?) minister and head of the new Northern Research Group, a lobby group of around 55 Conservative MPs who want a post-Covid recovery roadmap for the North of England. Members of the NRG “voiced concerns that overtures from the prime minister to socially liberal voters on green and cultural issues risked jeopardising their seats.”

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Tory voters say: spend, spend, spend

By David Jeffery

Who’s right? Well, let’s look at the data.

I’ve taken as my source the British Election Study — a large scale survey of voters across Great Britain. I’ll be using waves 17, 18 and 19 — conducted between November and December 2019 — to explore the views of four distinct group of voters:

1. Those who voted Conservative in 2019 in a Red Wall seat
2. Those who voted Conservative in 2019 outside the Red Wall.
3. Those who switched to the Conservative Party in 2019 in a Red Wall seat
4. Those who switched to the Conservative Party in 2019 not in a Red Wall seat.

The first area of interest is environmental protection. When asked whether they think environmental protection has gone too far, Red Wall Tories are more likely to think it has gone too far compared to non-Red Wall Tories, and the result is statistically significant. However, it’s important to note that both groups still lean towards “not gone far enough” (2.6 vs 2.7, with 1 = not gone nearly far enough and 5 = gone much too far). The same is the case for those voters who switched to the Tories.

OK, green sceptics might say, that’s fair enough — but when we’re recovering from Covid-19 we can’t sacrifice the economy or economic growth at the altar of green policies.

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Well, when asked which should have priority — economic growth or protecting the environment — all groups of Tory voters lean towards protecting the environment. On a scale of 0 to 10, with 5 being the middle option, the average Red Wall Tory position is 5.1, compared with 5.2 for non-Red Wall Tories. For switchers, the gap is bigger: non-Red Wall switchers place at 5.5 compared to 5.0 for Red Wall switchers. Yes, it’s a relatively large gap between the two groups, but it still places the Red Wall switchers slap-bang between economic growth and environmental protection in terms of their priorities. Damian Green was not far off the mark when he said “to assume that no one in the North cares about the future of the planet is patronising nonsense”.

Finally, even when it comes to the more emotionally-charged phrase “climate change”, 63% of Red Wall Tories and 67% of non-Red Wall Tories agree that the world’s climate is changing due to human activity, while among switchers the figures are 68% and 65% respectively.

So, the data shows there is significant scope for Johnson to push for a bold environmental agenda — ideally combining economic growth with “green jobs” — as argued for by the assuredly non-woke, pro-Brexit Ben Houchen.

What about the woke agenda?

Unfortunately, the BES doesn’t ask much about trans rights or the role of the BBC — two hot button issues on Twitter — but it does ask about views steps towards ethnic minority, female and gay equality, and whether attempts to secure it have gone too far. This can give us a flavour of how these voters see issues of equality and whether there’s much mileage in Theresa May’s burning injustices agenda.

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In all three cases, Tory voters and switchers, within and without the Red Wall, hover between “about right” and “gone too far”, although they are less hostile to measures for female equality than for ethnic minorities and gays and lesbians.

The differences between Red Wall and non-Red Wall voters (and switchers) is marginal across all three topics though, suggesting “going woke” isn’t a unique threat to the party’s new electoral coalition any more than it is to their voter base in general.

Finally, public spending. When asked on a scale of 1 to 4 how necessary reducing the deficit over the next three years was (and bear in mind, this was pre-Covid), all groups were closest to “It is important but not absolutely necessary”. There were no statistically significant differences between the groups either. When we couple this the fact that all groups thought cuts to local authorities had gone too far, we can see an easy win for the government: end austerity for local authorities.

This finding is complemented by polling carried out by Survation on behalf of the Local Trust. They asked 1,003 voters in 250 “left behind” areas about the government’s spending priorities. When asked if they thought their area got more or less than its fair share of spending resources, 4% said more and 42% said less.

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Can the Tories cling on to the Red Wall?

By David Jeffery

But these voters gave mixed messages: 54% said they believed local people should lead decisions about how money should be spent in their area, but only 33% of the people said they would be interested in getting involved in making those decisions — they want to take back control but not use it!

From this analysis, it seems that Red Wall Tories – even the switchers — aren’t really that different from other Tories. Johnson should dismiss lazy stereotypes about what will and won’t wash in the party’s new heartland. These voters are not climate change deniers, they are not deficit hawks, and woke identity politics doesn’t get them fired up.

Instead, Johnson should follow Stratton’s advice and make his main priority building bridges (not only to Northern Ireland or across the Thames). He should reject Cummings’ abrasive, confrontational style of politics, and instead bring in a diverse range of Tory voices in the policy-making process. The appointment of Neil O’Brien as chair of No 10’s new policy board is promising. But Johnson also needs to work the Commons tea-rooms and bring in representatives from the different Tory factions — the Northern Research Group, the One Nation Caucus, the Covid Recovery Group and the Common Sense Group should all feel like they have a seat at table, even if they don’t win all the policy battles.

The Prime Minister is not a details man. He is a vision man. And he doesn’t necessarily need to keep fighting the same fight as during the referendum campaign. But nor should he be listening to voices who make out Red Wall Tories are something they’re not.

Philippe’s been replaced by the little-known technocrat, Jean Castex. Once a well-respected adviser on social matters in Nicolas Sarkozy’s Élysée, Castex is an uncontroversial and capable figure. He is the perfect hire to handle the unglamorous slog ahead (there is a recession coming); the President will be able to take the lead on the lofty world stage stuff — while excitedly burnishing his Green credentials.

The greens are suddenly all the rage following the election’s “Green Wave”, in which France’s green party, EELV, snagged various major French cities. Strasbourg, Lyon, Bordeaux, Tours, Nantes, Paris, Nancy, Marseille, Poitiers, Besançon, Grenoble. All are now either led by Greens, or by Left-wing coalitions in which the Greens (who made the difference between victory and defeat) shape policy.

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Will Macron dump his Prime Minister?

By John Lichfield

The brand new Green mayors jumped into the news cycle with shock announcements. In Bordeaux, the new City Hall incumbent, Pierre Hurmic, a man who’s never managed to pass his drivers’ exam, declared he would ban all cars from the city. Lyon’s Grégory Doucet demands an end to all works on the new high-speed train line from Lyon to Turin, and also want to plants “real, big” forests in the heart of his city. (He is famous for declaring that the “only political divide” he acknowledges is “between Earthlings and extra-terrestrials”.)

But all this noise hid an incontrovertible fact: last Sunday, the Green vote in France did not exceed 10% — which means a measly 4% of the registered electorate, since abstention last Sunday broke all records at 61.4%. In fact, the Greens only won 10 of France’s 273 cities numbering more than 30,000 inhabitants. Even Anne Hidalgo’s clear Paris victory was won with a mere 18% of the city’s registered voters.

Meanwhile, Les Républicains gained 120 municipalities (52% of all towns of more than 9,000 inhabitants in France are now in conservative hands), while the Socialists, boosted and sexed up by Green coalitions, gained 58 — down from 106 in 2014. Even smallish Green contingents were often asked to front coalitions, in order to make them more attractive to the voters as “new faces” (now a known entity, Macron is no longer a choice if you want to give the establishment the finger).

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The 'green crap' lessons of 2013

By James Kirkup

Yet the illusion of the Green Wave, which Emmanuel Macron banks on riding to victory in 2022, endures because its successes were scored in all the places that resemble him, and for that matter the intellectual and media establishment: Paris and the country’s most prosperous cities.

It’s worth noting that in France, unlike in the UK, “cities” only means city centres: in, say, London terms, Shoreditch or Kensington, but reaching as far out as Croydon or Walthamstow. France’s 20 largest cities remain independent from their surrounding, more populous “métropoles”.

Métropoles are a recent creation, devised to simplify the national bureaucratic behemoth. The plan was that once a Métropole entity was forged out of dozens of towns, creating a corona of suburbs around a historic city, the whole would be amalgamated to create, say a Greater Bordeaux, Strasbourg, Nantes etc. It never happened, though: City mayors always found good reasons to avoid seeing their power diluted, or, worse, risk being ejected altogether from their job, by those pesky voters in the periphery.

In David Goodhart’s taxonomy, cities in France today belong to “anywheres” ; the surrounding coronas (the Métropoles) are where the “somewheres” dwell, who are far less enthusiastic about the environment or multiculturalism, with little love for those urban electric tram lines that terminate long before their homes.

This disconnect explains the Green-allied Socialist Anne Hidalgo’s clear victory in Paris. She won over a compact, gentrified city of Bobos and “Anywheres”, in which high house prices have shot up even faster since Brexit. I doubt many banlieusards would be wooed by her support for veganism.

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Will rural France recover from Covid?

By John Lewis-Stempel

Hidalgo represents a big threat to Macron. She has led an aggressively green policy in Paris, closing down urban highways and introducing pedestrian areas in most of the historic centre. With Olivier Faure, the lacklustre Socialist national leader, garnering only 3% voting intentions in a recent Ifop poll looking at the 2022 presidential election field, Hidalgo, who denies any interest at this stage, is an obvious Socialist presidential candidate. Macron, whose Paris candidates crated so badly that his few representatives in the Paris Assembly won’t even sit in the Conseil de Paris (the municipal “Parliament”) took her success like a punch in the gut.

The ultimate “Anywhere”, Emmanuel Macron loves grand green gestures. He constantly pushed the Paris Climate accords even though they had been signed under the stewardship of his predecessor, François Hollande. Greta Thunberg was duly received at the Élysée, with the President greeting her on the palace steps in front of a five-deep cameramen gauntlet. Last week, France closed a perfectly functional nuclear plant at Fessenheim in Alsace, to great applause from EELV — and from the neighbouring Land of Baden-Württemberg in a Germany that refuses to live 25 miles from a nuclear plant, but buys annually 11 TWh’s worth of nuclear-produced electricity from France. During his first State visit to Washington, three years ago, Macron made a long speech to a joint session of the US Congress, and a shorter one at the White House, hoping to convince Donald Trump not to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accords by adapting his campaign slogan into “Make Our Planet Great Again”. (He failed.)

Macron has vowed to make France, which accounts for 1.5% of all greenhouse gases emissions on the planet, a model green nation as well as a European green leader. Hence the series of green-inspired measures in his first Budget in 2018, including a heavy carbon tax on gas and fuel, together with a speed reduction on roads.

These raised the cost of driving and heating by over 25%. It hit French “Somewheres” particularly hard. Those living in houses rather than flats in small towns, needing their cars to work, take their children to school, make the weekly shop, in the absence of proper public transport. The 18-month Yellow Vests revolt that followed started in small gatherings on roundabouts close to those France Périphérique in those towns who felt Parisian elites understood nothing of their lives, and cared even less.

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Hoping to stem the rage that fuelled the Yellow Vests revolt, Macron staged a series of townhall rallies. He made a point of assembling groups of citizens, often picked by lots, to come up with solutions. This, he hopes, will counter regular charges that his ruling style is entirely top-down. Others see it as a way of defusing responsibility.

In an attempt to claw something back from his wounding at the weekend, and to remind France of his Green cred, Macron decided to put his Convention Nationale pour le Climat centre stage. One hundred and fifty randomly-picked citizens were brought together last winter to come up with 150 proposals for green measures. They were invited to present these the very day after the municipal elections. “Look at me, I’m green and humble”, was the spin.

It’s best not to dwell on the proposals, a mixture of impractical, well-meaning and the kooky — such as reducing the speed limit and the working week as well as banning domestic flights altogether and prohibiting construction of any new airports. They will be discussed with a view to possible implementation during the next five years. It’s unlikely many will make the cut.

It’s not that the French don’t care for the environment and climate change — the trouble is our specific breed of environmentalist is hard Left. So while so many politicians are keen to add a bit of green to the agenda, the people know that the EELV’s aggressive de-growth platforms will damage the economy and kill more jobs.

It is difficult to account for Macron’s cognitive dissonance in believing that his trump card is green. With recession about to bite and with a wronged former PM waiting in the wings, putting the environment before the economy may prove to be a serious mistake.

The key figures in the history lesson are none other than David Cameron and Ed Milliband.  From here, it looks as if history will remember Cameron as the gentleman amateur who bet  — and lost — Britain’s EU membership on his own charm, and Miliband — if it remembers him at all — as the Labour leader who buried Blairism and helped keep his party out of office for a decade.

In fact, both men did things in 2013 that tell us a lot about how the politics and economics of “Net Zero” would play out. Net Zero has, with remarkably little debate, moved from a fringe demand to a mainstream and almost universal political commitment. But the story of 2013 should raise questions about how durable the new consensus will be.

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The rise of the hippie conservatives

By Freddie Sayers

Start with Cameron and his environmental journey. Possibly the first thing Cameron did as Conservative leader in opposition was go to the Arctic and pose with sledge-dogs. The hapless huskies were part of his “vote blue, go green” schtick, using environmentalism to “decontaminate” a Conservative brand that a certain T May had described as “nasty”. But that was 2006. What about 2013?

Well, 2013 was the year that a “senior Conservative source” told a couple of newspaper reporters over a nice lunch in Westminster that Prime Minister Cameron had given a clear order to his ministers regarding energy bills: “Get rid of all that green crap.”

To be clear, I was not one of the reporters at lunch that day, so I cannot swear to the accuracy of that quote. But I don’t know if anyone has asked Sir Michael Fallon, then the energy minister, where he was at the time that nice lunch was taking place; perhaps he has an alibi. Perhaps.

Anyway, let’s assume — and this isn’t much of a stretch, trust me — that Cameron had indeed said something about “green crap” to his colleagues. That remark signals the end of Cameron’s environmental journey — which covered a lot of ground, but came to its conclusion rapidly.

Back in the happy, almost innocent days of 2006, greenery was, Cameron fairly calculated, a nice-to-have add-on to a politician’s offer. Saying you cared about huskies and icecaps was a way to say you were generous and decent. And that was about it. Greenery didn’t obviously entail any actual policies that would directly affect voters’ lives.

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Why the Greens should stop playing God

By John Gray

Of course, even before Cameron took office in 2010, he had started to learn that it wasn’t that simple. Greenery then meant onshore wind: turbines, often in places where Conservative voters really didn’t want them to be.

Still, that didn’t bother everyone. What bothered just about everyone in the early years of the decade was the cost of living: after the financial crisis, real wages were falling and household bills were political. Bills for things such as gas and electricity.

And one reason those bills were as high as they were was the range of environmental tariffs that the Cameron coalition and its Labour predecessor had added on. The rationale here had seemed clear enough: there were many things that governments wanted to achieve and someone had to pay for them. General taxation wasn’t an attractive option — initially too visible, and then simply impossible given the state of the public finances. So consumers had to foot the bill.

Or rather, the bills: the energy company obligation, to support energy efficiency in poorer households; the warm homes discount, meant to help with the costs of fuel bills, again for poorer households; the renewable obligation, the EU’s emissions trading scheme; the carbon price floor; the feed-in tariffs; the smart meters. All told, the Cameron government reckoned, they added £114 to the typical bill.

And in 2013, with people feeling the pinch, £114 was all it took to turn David Cameron, husky-hugging vote-blue go-green David Cameron, into a potty-mouthed pocket-book politician, intent on saving voters money not saving the planet.

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So the first part of the environmental policy lesson of 2013 is that green promises sound good when they’re first made, but sticking with them when they turn into financial pain for the electorate is far from easy. Remember Cameron’s “green crap” when you hear his successors talking about when they’ll take the country to Net Zero, and ask: who’s going to pay for that, and who’s going to tell them they’re going to pay?

The Miliband of 2013 completes the lesson about energy policy, populism and policy. At the Labour conference in September of that year, he announced that if he were made PM in 2015, he would enact a legal freeze on domestic energy prices.

For all the excitement the announcement caused — more on that in a moment — the plan wasn’t really so radical or startling. The year before, that notorious radical socialist Sir John Major had called for a windfall tax on the profits of the energy industry.

The Miliband promise caused something approaching chaos inside the Conservative Party. I was the Telegraph’s political editor at the time and at the Tory conference the following week I did my rounds of breakfasts, lunches, dinners and drinks with Cabinet ministers. I found precisely no unity on how to respond to the price freeze promise. Some were outraged by the idea of the state trying to “fix” markets. Some thought the energy firms were a bad advertisement for capitalism and making profits that were not economically justified. And some just thought the Miliband policy would be popular so the Tories should match it.

In the end, Cameron came out against a price freeze — it was simply not something a Conservative could ever do, he thought. But nothing is forever in politics, and less than four years later, another Conservative leader, May, decided that Toryism was flexible enough to accommodate a price cap for energy.

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By James Bloodworth

Remember, in all this, that some of the bills Miliband — and May — promised to limit were driven upwards, in some part, by the environmental policies they pursued and decided that customers should fund.

The year 2013 matters so much because it offers several connected lessons for the politicians promising to lead us on the journey to Net Zero. The first is that few political promises survive first contact with voters’ falling incomes. The second is that if you’re going to do things that cost voters money, best to get their permission first — because they’ll find out in the end, and when they do, they won’t be happy. And the third is that anyone who hopes to rely politically on “market forces” to allocate the resources needed to address big issues like climate change is taking a very big gamble indeed.

Now that he’s settled into Downing Street for five years — or, who knows, 10 — it will fall to Boris Johnson to learn these lessons; getting to Net Zero by the middle of the decade will require the 2020s to be a decade of genuine transformation. So far on the environment, Johnson has belied the charges of cheap populism levelled at him elsewhere, sticking with Net Zero as a promised goal. But right now, the politics of the environment are still relatively easy: commit to a goal still many years away and if in doubt, talk about photogenic distractions like turtles and pangolins.

But if he goes the distance and approaches a decade in office, he will either have to find a way to solve the green political riddle that defied Cameron, or admit defeat, just as his old school chum did.

Indulgences turned salvation into a business model, whereby ordinary people could amortise their spiritual debt to the almighty. “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul out of purgatory springs”, was a quote that Martin Luther attributed to Johann Tetzel, one of the Pope’s most successful indulgences salesman. For Luther, one had to take personal responsibility for one’s relationship with God and not subcontract it to another, and especially not for money.

The comparison with this and Elton John paying to offset the carbon footprint of Harry and Meghan’s use of his private jet to fly to their summer holiday is compelling. The sins that Harry and Meghan have made against the environment can be paid for by someone else. Green is the colour of money. With wealthy friends, your sins can be forgiven. Those who are poorer, those who take cheap package holidays to Tenerife, they will have to account for their sins alone.

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Why do the Greens make so many see red?

By Tom Chivers

That said, in the overall scheme of things, the Protestors of the 16th century could be said to bear the greater responsibility for the current environmental crisis. For, as Max Weber famously explained in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the idea that one has to manage one’s relationship with the Almighty alone created a kind of anxiety about one’s final destination that was only mitigated by the reassuring idea that earthy success somehow prefigured heavenly access. In this way, the burgeoning bourgeoise explained their accumulation of wealth as a sign of God’s favour, and thus provided moral cover to the capitalist equation of continual economic growth with progress and success.

And the reason this is such a theological mistake, not to say environmental one, is that it flies directly in the face of a key Biblical teaching that would support the idea of sustainability: the idea of having enough.

Remember the story in the Bible of the manna that falls from heaven? The people of Israel have escaped from their slavery in Egypt, and are on their way, through the desert, to the land God has promised them. In this wilderness, God teaches a lesson about sustainable economics. There is enough bread to go around, but not enough to be stockpiled against future want.

Give us our “daily bread” goes the Lord’s Prayer. Note daily. Not enough for the next several weeks. The Egyptians gathered their accumulated grain into barns, thus to hedge against the insecurity of their dependence upon the environment. But the manna that falls from heaven goes off if stored up and is useless. The moral of this story is that there is no way of outsmarting one’s radical dependency upon God.

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Meghan and Harry are playing a dangerous game

By Douglas Murray

The sort of Protestantism Weber described was a travesty of its original intention. The misleadingly named “justification by faith” was not intended to be a justification by having the right beliefs, but rather that one’s ultimate justification is in God’s hands not our own. It is an expression of radical dependence on that which is beyond our power to manipulate – by our ‘works’ or even by our ‘faith’.

For those who get a little itchy about religion, this can also be roughly translated into a sense that there is no way of outsmarting our radical dependency upon the environment. In order to live in harmony with creation, one has to live with a sense of limit, of there being such a thing as having enough.

The relationship between religion and the environment is set at the very heart of the Biblical narrative. Though the word that religious people use is not the environment but creation. This is a word that secularists have besmirched, linking it to debates about Darwinism and a small group of religious conservatives who describe themselves as creationists. But for those of us who have long ago conceded that Darwin was correct – albeit often worryingly appropriated by those who would justify an economics of agonistic competition and continual growth – the Biblical picture of creation has much to offer of contemporary relevance.

The Bible understands the environment as offering a moral lesson about how we are to live. It provides a kind of map by which we can orient ourselves towards an appreciation of human flourishing. This map remains the way most of us pattern time, for instance. There are seven days of the week because there were seven days of creation. Our diaries are mini-expressions of creation theology.

The purpose of the sabbath – where work and economic growth are not the order of the day – is to orientate one towards an appreciation of the fecundity of nature as a gift to be treasured. The theologian Ched Myers describes what he calls Sabbath economics as a teaching about “gift and limits: the grace of receiving that which the Creator gives, and the responsibility not to take too much, nor to mistake the gift for a possession”. Sabbath economics is an alternative to the capitalist paradise of abundance for the few, not the many.

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Why the Greens should stop playing God

By John Gray

Sabbath, of course, is the original holiday, holy-day. Not that this connection features much on the travel plans of those who would spend a couple of weeks in the sun thus to ‘re-charge their batteries’ so as to be more effective workers on their return – a point well made by the historian and columnist Tim Stanley on his Thought for the Day this week. The idea of holidays as an expression of excessive consumption again misses their original purpose – to be a reminder of our ultimate dependency upon something that is properly beyond the laws of human ownership.

There are those who would castigate the young protester Greta Thunberg as she makes her way to a climate conference on an expensive zero-emissions yacht as offering a moral example that only the fabulously rich can follow. It’s a fair point. But I imagine that bobbing about mid-ocean, and as a Tropic storm is developing in her path, there is no better way of recognising the fragility of human life and its vulnerability to forces beyond our control.

As the Amazon burns on the altar of continual economic growth, there is an ancient wisdom to the idea that we need to respect the limit of human expansion. In the end, the question at the heart of the environmental crisis is whether we can be content to live within certain limits. Can we ignore those forces in our society that prompt us always to want more and more? Can we learn to live with manna? Can we develop a positive appreciation of having enough? Here is the recipe for a proper holiday.

Nature is dying. Human existence is under threat like never before. Our air is polluted. Our rivers run dry. Our oceans have become dustbins of disposable plastic. From coral reefs to the earth’s forests, from bees to elephants, the planet faces existential threat. A million species are now threatened with extinction.

In ages past, natural catastrophes were designated acts of God – in other words, not a human responsibility. In the Anthropocene era, however, we humans are in the dock and our economic activity is being judged.

Our obsession with growth, with GDP as the measure of human success, has given more of us more wealth along with extraordinary technological toys. It is, apparently, one of the great success stories of the modern era. But it has come at too high a cost. Public intellectuals such as Steven Pinker may flatter the present generation with talk of our enormous progress – but the latest UN Report on the state of the planet shows that progress is being purchased at the price of our future existence.

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Why do the Greens make so many see red?

By Tom Chivers

Anyone who believes in infinite growth on a finite planet, according to David Attenborough, “is either a madman or an economist”. Or a philosopher. Pinker is simply a thinking man’s Bernie Madoff, selling us a flashy Ponzi scheme that points the way to disaster.

“Things can only get better” sang Labour activists in 1997, on the way to Tony Blair’s first election victory, as even the Left parroted the virtues of economic growth. These days it is almost impossible to find a mainstream politician who doesn’t believe in the virtues of having more, the very engine of our coming environmental catastrophe.

There was a time when we thought a few lifestyle tweaks were the answer – a bit of re-cycling here, cutting down on meat and long-haul flights there. But we’re well beyond that now, far past what George Monbiot calls “micro-consumerist bollocks”. He goes on: “Instead of pissing around on the margins of the problem … We have to go straight to the heart of capitalism and overthrow it.”

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Who will ride the Green wave?

By Peter Franklin

For Monbiot, the destruction of capitalism is not some Left-wing fantasy of universal equality, it is not about class warfare or Marxist politics, it is about survival plain and simple. Either we kill it or it kills us.

In this new world, two things will be necessary: we will have to learn to have less, learn to be poorer. And we will have to learn to be smaller. Scale down, don’t scale up. “Small is beautiful” as the people-centred economist E F Schumacher put it back in the 70’s.

The trouble is, not even the Green Party seems to believe in small any more. With Brexit, it too has caught the bigger is better bug. One honourable exception, though, would be Green Party member of the House of Lords, Jenny Jones. Writing in the Guardian in 2016, she observed:

“The most profound weakness of the EU, from the Green point of view, is that it is a super-sized, top-down dogmatic project of endless industrial development and growth. It fosters the pointless carting of goods enormous distances, and it smashes local resilience and self-reliance.”

Yes, yes, and yes again. And there is a small but worthy Green Leaves movement (great name, btw) that agrees with her.

But, unfortunately, the wider Green movement has come to be hijacked by this whole corporatist top-down approach, prioritising free movement – including the free movement of film stars to take international flights to protest climate change – and free markets, insisting that the only way to tackle the big issue of climate change is through the very globalised structures that create it.

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Just how mad is the Green New Deal?

By Peter Franklin

The Greens, too, been suckered by the idea that being progressive is the path to climate restoration. Yet, in truth, those who believe in progress have little to offer the environment. Because it was under the gas-guzzling banner of progress that the current scourge on our planet was justified.

Indeed, it is probably conservatives who now offer the greatest hope for the future. By definition, they seek to conserve the best of what is threatened. You get a strong sense of this connection between conservatism and conservation in the writings of the novelist, poet and farmer, Wendell Berry, a man so anti-progressive he won’t even use a tractor:

“We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us”

Most conservatives have yet to recognise is that capitalism is not their friend. I noted in my Confessions interview with Roger Scruton that Capitalism is the greatest change agent the world has ever seen. And he acknowledged that this has become the great question for natural conservatives to wrestle with.

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The problem, in the USA especially, is that conservatism has come to mean conserving free-market capitalism. But increasingly, this view is being challenged. In Peter Kolozi’s 2017 book, for example, Conservatives against Capitalism: From the Industrial Revolution to Globalization, an older tradition of conservatism is appealed to. One that pre-dated the neo-liberal revolution. And, earlier this year, the deeply conservative Fox anchor and Trump supporter Tucker Carlson opened up the subject by providing a compelling critique of the cult of the free market, in a way that no ‘progressive’ Democrat would ever dare.

The Green Party, though, has been mugged by progressivism, which has left its environmental credentials surprisingly poor. When I was younger, the Green Party’s European position was all about contesting the terrible Common Agricultural Policy. Now that the butter mountains have gone, too many Greens assume that the issue has been resolved. But it hasn’t. Monbiot calls the CAP “among the most powerful drivers of environmental destruction in the northern hemisphere.”

And here he makes common cause with the unlikely figure of Michael Gove:

“Each year, around £3.2 billion comes to U.K. farmers under the CAP. Of this, a full £2.6 billion is not paid according to how farmers manage their land but according to the size of their holdings. This perverse arrangement means public money flows to those who are already wealthy.”

All of which is just a little more evidence that our political goalposts are rapidly shifting. Left and Right are changing their meaning. My own diagnosis of this change follows the brilliant analysis of this by Nancy Fraser, that Bill Clinton and then Tony Blair made their peace with free-market capitalism at just about the same time as some on the Right were beginning to wonder whether capitalism was really their ally.

The shock of this re-alignment has yet to fully work itself out. But for those of us who have long been suspicious of unrestrained free markets and their effect on human flourishing, the thought has started to dawn that the old-fashioned Right – with its emphasis on family, religious belief and small-scale wellbeing – might be a better place from which to challenge the evils of capitalism, than from within the assumptions of the progressive Left. And nowhere is this more evident than when it comes to the environment.

PEI’s 150,000 people don’t usually attract much attention. But today they go to the polls and might just become the first Province to elect a Green government.

It’s been a meteoric rise for the PEI Green Party, because just two years ago the pollsters had them on less than 10% of the vote.

But this is more than a Canadian curiosity. Though not quite as widespread as the populist surge, a Green wave is disrupting politics in countries across the West – and, as with the populists, it is the established parties of the centre-Left who are paying the price.

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The fall of social democracy

By Peter Franklin

In the Netherlands, the main green party, GroenLinks, has replaced the once dominant Dutch Labour Party as the leading party of the Left. The German Greens may well follow suit – they are now regularly outpolling the SPD. In the Finnish general election last week, the Green League gained ground. In France, Les Verts are set to do better than the Socialists in the forthcoming Euro elections (though that’s not the highest of bars these days). The Australian Greens are now established as the third force in politics – though still some distance behind the big two. There’s no breaking the America duopoly, but radical green policies such as the Green New Deal are a big influence on the Democrats.

So why do we see Green support at rising and record levels in so many countries?

In an interview with the International Politics and Society journal, Zack Grant of Oxford University provides some of the answers. As part of a team that analysed “340 general election results in 32 countries… over the course of 45 years”, he found that green parties do best in countries with devolved political systems:

“Non-proportional electoral systems are often blamed for the woes of minor parties in countries. Overall, however, our study found decentralisation… to be a better predictor of Green party strength than the electoral system. Minor parties find it easier to win seats at the subnational level… these are typically second-order elections which are perceived as less important by voters, and therefore allow for greater chances of minor party success. Consequently, parties like the Greens can build reputations as credible legislators which aids future national election campaigns.”

Green electoral success is also associated with “high levels of GDP per capita and lower rates of unemployment”, “countries [that are] highly dependent on nuclear power” and “countries which lack substantial support for ‘radical Left’ parties such as Syriza and Podemos”.

Then there’s profound change in the demographic make-up of the Left-leaning electorate:

“…survey data analysis in many different countries consistently paints a similar picture with regard to who are the “core” Green voters: young, university-educated people working in ‘sociocultural’ areas (healthcare, social services, the arts etc.) that hold liberal social values.”

It’s not surprising that a completely different set of people has chosen a different set of parties to put their support behind.

Further reading

Just how mad is the Green New Deal?

By Peter Franklin

Of course, Green parties haven’t prospered in every country. In the UK, the Greens have been overshadowed by Jeremy Corbyn and Momentum. As Zack Grant puts it, there’s “a degree of functional equivalency between certain Green parties and the radical left”.

It’s not just the radical Left, though. Other movements, most notably Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche, have been able to claim the young, urban, professional vote – and to do so from the centre or centre-Left (which, indeed, is where some Green parties position themselves).

In this age of insurgent Rightwing populism, it’s becoming clear that parties can prosper by presenting themselves as a counter-insurgency: seeking to provide an alternative to the political establishment, but diametrically opposing themselves to the national populists. Whereas the conventional parties of Left and Right seek to straddle the ‘Open-versus-Closed‘ divide (for instance on issues like immigration and EU integration), the populist and counter-populist parties are taking up positions at either end of the new spectrum.

I don’t expect the Open-versus-Closed agenda to entirely supplant Left-versus-Right, rather what we’re seeing is the rise of a messy and unstable four-cornered politics.

It’ll be made all the messier by the as yet unresolved contest between Greens, other parts of the anti-establishment Left, and liberal movements such as En Marche and Change UK to define the ‘Open’ politics of the next generation.

My money is on the Greens because, unlike the liberals, they’re not associated with establishment politics; and unlike the rest of the Left, they have don’t have to pay lip service to a working-class socialist tradition – and thus can focus their appeal to the college-educated, metropolitan voters most receptive to an ‘Open’ agenda.

Most importantly, Green parties can offer more than mere politics. As part of the wider environmental movement, they hold out the promise of purpose and belonging through a shared and value-laden lifestyle. For people with no other strong sense of identity that is a powerful offer – and, ironically, the one thing the Greens share with their populist opponents.

Further reading

Crony capitalism is empowering the Left

By Peter Franklin