Net Zero tolerance
Decarbonisation must be affordable and have popular consent
Towering columns
For ConservativeHome, Paul Goodman reflects on the Prime Minister’s decision to weaken Net Zero commitments and how the Conservative coalition might respond:
Where bigger business goes, supply chains follow. Capitalism is going green (hence America and Europe’s drop in emissions during recent years) and firms like certainty, at least in terms of government policy. So expect protests from car manufacturers, some of whom are complaining, not without reason, of governnment confusion, drift and irrresolution. Where they lead, others will follow.
Some on the right will dismiss these firms as part of a blob, “Treasury orthodoxy” and globalism, in the same way that they are now turning on the Office for Budget Responsibility and the International Monetary Fund. You might expect them to give this policy shift and Sunak himself an ovation. Not so: he isn’t their man and they want him out, even if that means Sir Keir Starmer coming in.
So they will swallow the red meat flung to them – as the Prime Minister’s critics will try to frame his move – and clamour for more, claiming that man-made climate change doesn’t happen, and that the illusion of it is variously conjured up by Bill Gates, George Soros, the Rothschilds, the Da Vinci Code and shape-shifting lizards. But Sunak can afford to fail with all three of these constituencies – especially the last – if he can square the fourth: voters. As James Frayne has written on this site, they support Net Zero – yes, working class ones in the Red Wall too. Not to mention younger people, especially. But to what degree is unknown. My rule is: the nearer the target (or measure), the bigger the opposition, as the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election proved. The struggle between the Dutch farmers and their government may be the wave of Europe’s future.
In The Times, Juliet Samuel examines the gradual shift in government towards industrial strategy despite the lingering power of Thatcherite dogma:
There are unanswered, unpalatable questions: what to do about the shiploads of electric cars being dumped on the market by China, for instance, and how to withstand the onslaught of American giga-cheques flooding green industries. Everyone agrees we cannot possibly match either country in scale; both appear able to waste billions and sustain the resulting debt (although for how long, few can say). We must make do with less, and therefore must do it better.
And, no doubt, there is still a deep aversion in No 10 to the phrase “industrial strategy”. But faced with the facts on the ground, others like Jeremy Hunt and Kemi Badenoch have shifted tack. Hunt, influenced by his adviser Kristen McLeod, who developed a life sciences industrial strategy before and during Covid, has even started using the phrase. It may make Sunak uncomfortable but the dogma of non-intervention, of “global markets always know best”, is in retreat.
All of this renders Truss’s interventions almost quaint. To be generous to the ex-prime minister, she did start putting a few building blocks in place, such as an energy supply taskforce, foolishly ditched by Sunak. But fundamentally, faced with the question of how Britain can survive in a completely new economic environment, her response is: “We need to spell out our philosophy [because] Conservatives can’t just assume people have read Milton Friedman.” She always turns backwards, to the lodestar of Thatcherism, to avoid coming awkwardly face to face with the present.
In the Financial Times, Robert Shrimsley looks at how the Conservative party is allowing voters aged under 45 to drift away:
In 2017, the age at which people were more likely to vote Conservative than Labour rose to 47. By 2019, the crossover age had been clawed back to 39. But today the over-65s are the only age group with whom Tories enjoy a polling lead. Millennials, the oldest of whom have turned 40, are now the largest group in the population. Research for the think-tank Onward found only 21 per cent of them would vote Tory.
The party’s political values are alienating for many under-45s. Aside from Brexit and net zero targets there is also the hostile tone towards universities and graduates, even though a third of adults now boast a degree or equivalent. Age and education are today the best predictors of voting intention.
In the past, identifying as the party of aspiration helped the Tories surmount such differences. As people progressed financially, got a decent job, bought a home and started a family they found themselves on the blue brick road. This path has been broken by salary stagnation and high house prices. In 1997, two-thirds of 35- to 44-year-olds had a mortgage. By 2017 that figure was down to half. In England, the percentage of private renters in that age group rose from 8.2 to 27.6 per cent over the same period. Small wonder the crossover age is rising.
For The Critic, Sebastian Millbank says Russell Brand’s celebrity persona was always based on progressive acclaim for his outrageous behaviour:
Regardless of whether the specific accusations (which Brand denies) stand up, he has spent decades openly and gleefully behaving badly. There will be a lot of moralising and false soul-searching in the next few weeks. It’s vitally important not to be taken in by it. Russell Brand is wealthy, famous and powerful not despite but because he was subversive, transgressive and outrageous. Progressive opinion will try to make him an object lesson in the dangers of powerful men. It will ignore the fact that Brand’s power is entirely the product of progressive opinion delighting in precisely the behaviour they now profess to be horrified by.
Popular culture and fashionable opinion alike have long worshipped at the altar of the professional bad boy. Brand’s celebrity career is a perfect circle. It was launched on Channel 4, via its flagship reality TV show Big Brother, and it has been ended by Channel 4, with a sensational Dispatches documentary (with ad breaks, of course) drawing a massive audience.
The whole point of Brand was to trample on bourgeois convention, Brand’s brand was “cutely verbose druggy sex addict”; he was rock star meets court jester meets Don Juan. He’s always a victim — he’s addicted to sex, poor thing, can’t help himself! — even as power and money fall into his lap. He’s a fitting representative of Channel 4 itself, a powerful mainstream media outfit that likes to pretend it represents the counterculture, rather than the ruling elite. Just like Brand, it knows how to turn confession and apparent self-flagellation into just another performance, a lucrative spectacle that allows it to escape real consequences.
On UnHerd, Kathleen Stock warns against following the political musings of the so-called grown ups like Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell:
The obvious dangers of technocracy include corruption and voter disenfranchisement. Stewart seems to think the antidote is a more participatory politics, involving things such as citizens’ assemblies to “build consensus”. If there had been a citizens’ assembly on Brexit, he thinks, “you would have ended up with a customs union”. This is a common enough technocratic fantasy, floated many times before by those such as Obama and Clinton: that if people with adequate intelligence are given access to the right sort of detailed information and time to think about it, their conclusions about practical decision-making will converge.
But to me, this just further betrays the extent to which, for all his talk of avoiding polarisation, Stewart is still mired in the classic patrician attitude of the educated liberal who equates “clever” with “good” with “what me and my friends think”. His fantasy just isn’t true. Even when people agree about all the relevant facts in some domain, their radically different values will affect how they each respectively order and prioritise those facts, and what outcomes they then favour. And this does not necessarily make one side or other stupid.
Arguably, to genuinely lessen political polarisation, what the public needs is to witness robust, reasoned disagreement between people who differ radically on both facts and values, and yet who don’t resort to lazily dismissing each other’s characters or intellects in the process. But this is not what they get from “The Rest Is Politics”, and I suspect it won’t be what we get from “Political Currency” either. In the latter case, I predict many casual references to really really interesting guys, quite a lot of unconvincing football banter, and a bit of ribbing about Keble versus Magdalen. It seems we have no shortage of former politicians who think they are clever and interesting. We may even have some actually clever ones, like Stewart. But what we really could do with is a few wiser ones.
In The Telegraph, Miriam Cates calls on the government to be bold in its changes to gender guidance for schools, even if it means a fight in the courts:
The number of girls referred to the Tavistock clinic rose by 5,000 per cent between 2010 and 2022, and 80 per cent of schools now have “trans identifying” children. Almost half of secondary schools allow pupils to self-declare their gender without parental consent. Unsurprisingly, this has presented schools with challenges well outside their educational remit. When can a girl become a boy? Should boys use girls’ toilets or take part in girls’ sports? What are the legal, social and indeed grammatical consequences if teachers refuse to use the pronouns “they and them” to refer to a girl who says she is neither male nor female?
No doubt the majority of head teachers want to navigate a sensible course, but sadly there are also teachers – and third-party campaign groups – actively promoting gender ideology to children. There’s no shortage of schools teaching that gender is a spectrum or proudly displaying the trans flag, as if it were in no way contentious to claim that you can change your gender as easily as you can change your clothes.
This ideology seems to have gripped every level of our education system. Just yesterday I had to complete a form to consent to my daughter’s school flu vaccination. The drop-down box wanted to know if my child was “male, female or non-binary”. Failing to recognise a child’s biological sex in schools is a safeguarding risk. No girl should have to undress in front of a boy or vice versa and certainly no child should be lied to – or forced to lie – about another child’s sex. No child should be set on a pathway towards permanent sexual dysfunction and infertility by a school.
Wonky thinking
Onward published a new report, Troubled Waters: Tackling the Crisis on England’s Coast, by Jenevieve Treadwell. It examines how we can heal the economic and social divide between inland and coastal England. Coastal communities have fewer opportunities, poorer health outcomes, less housing, and more crime. They are also critical bellwether seats in British politics.
The fortunes of coastal communities cannot be turned around overnight. But by focussing on these three underlying challenges the government can set these areas on stronger foundations. A series of interventions to unlock investment and build the capacity of local leaders could be the beginning of a coastal recovery.
First, the Government must take steps to shift coastal economies away from unproductive sectors and low-level occupations. Ministers should pilot a Coastal Economy Transformation Programme in three to five coastal towns and cities, giving local leaders powers and resources to grow the private sector, boost connectivity and increase investment - learning from the Recompete Pilot in the United States. A new set of pathfinder partnerships between colleges and local employers focussed on higher-level apprenticeships would address the low skills equilibrium and prevent the brain drain of talented young people to inland areas. The Government should also leverage the attractiveness of seaside living and the rise of hybrid working to create a new wave of “coastal neighbourhoods” for young workers and families.
Second, address the challenges of seasonality. A new Coastal Surge Fund for Police and Crime Commissioners would build seasonal resilience, reducing crime and antisocial behaviour in the summer months. The hidden costs of holiday homes could be met by allowing councils to raise property taxes on empty homes and invest the proceeds in the community.
Third, tackle the downsides of demography. Councils on the coast should be given greater freedom to use the planning system to improve public health, and reducing obesity and smoking. A loan forgiveness scheme should be introduced for medical students who continue their studies at coastal trusts to relieve acute staffing pressures in the NHS and social care. New “mobile health units,” pioneered in rural parts of Canada could bring multi-agency diagnosis and treatment services to underserved communities with high levels of need. And Ministers should take a bold step to crack down on HMOs - reforming Local Housing Allowances, cracking down on rogue landlords, supporting regeneration through Compulsory Purchase Orders, and providing finance for repairs.
Coastal communities once had pride and purpose. They can again. The Government needs to act swiftly to place these areas on a more sustainable path. If they do not, the political penalty will be drastic.
The Resolution Foundation has proposed a new system of unemployment insurance in From safety net to springboard by Mike Brewer and Louise Murphy. They propose that unemployment insurance should be paid at 65 per cent of previous wages, up to a cap set at the median earnings of £2,260 per month for three months at most.
Creating better unemployment insurance would both boost job market dynamism and productivity growth in the UK, while also protecting workers’ living standards if they are hit by unemployment. Evidence shows that more-generous unemployment benefits support workers to find better-paid and longer-lasting jobs. By reducing the fear of not being able to meet financial obligations in the event of unemployment, it seems workers feel more confident in taking risky job moves.
We therefore propose a new and modernised system of unemployment insurance for the UK. Contributory Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) – a vestigial part of a once much larger contributory social security system, with fewer than 25,000 claimants – should be scrapped and replaced with a system that provides real wage insurance and enables proper job search, but without putting excessive demands on the Exchequer. To deal with very low replacement rates, we propose that unemployment insurance should be paid at 65 per cent of previous wages, up to a cap set at the median earnings of £2,260 per month (a companion report has already recommended that Statutory Sick Pay also be paid at 65 per cent of previous wages). This echoes aspects of the furlough scheme, and, if it were in place now, would mean entitlements rose from £84.80 per week at present up to a maximum of £339. To ensure that unemployment insurance protects those in low-income households, unemployment insurance should be treated like earnings within Universal Credit, meaning that it reduces Universal Credit awards at the rate of 55p in the pound, in line with other payments designed to replace earnings, like Statutory Maternity Pay. (Contributory JSA is currently deducted pound per pound from Universal Credit, meaning there is no incentive for workers from low-income households to claim it.)
We propose a cautious approach of initially paying unemployment insurance for at most three months, after which eligible lower-income workers could continue to receive support through Universal Credit. This relatively short duration gives workers the time to look for a good job, but minimises the chance that workers’ work-search activity turns into long-term unemployment (this ‘moral hazard’ issue is a common critique of unemployment insurance schemes). Crucially, this duration should flex with the economic cycle, with governments able to increase the length of coverage in downturns to protect workers while they spend longer looking for work. This would also allow the unemployment insurance scheme to contribute to our macroeconomic stabilisation toolkit, helping support both GDP and workers’ welfare in times of need, without future governments needing to invent new social security payment systems overnight.
Book of the week
We recommend The Decadent Society by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. He sets out to identify the causes and consequences of the economic, social, cultural, and political malaise that blights western societies in the twenty-first century.
In our culture, the word decadence is used promiscuously but rarely precisely—which, of course, is part of its cachet and charm. The dictionary associates it with “having low morals and a great love of pleasure, money, fame, etc.,” which seems far too nonspecific—Ebenezer Scrooge was immoral and money loving, but nobody would call him decadent—and with cultures “marked by decay or decline,” which gets us a little closer but also leaves a great deal undefined. In political debates, it’s often associated with a lack of resolution in the face of external threats—with Munich and Neville Chamberlain, with W. B. Yeats’s line about the best lacking all conviction. In the popular imagination, it’s often associated with sex and gluttony; if you shop for something decadent on Amazon, the search algorithm will mostly deliver pornographic romances and chocolate strawberries. It can be a term of approbation—“I love this cake, it’s so decadent”—as well as disparagement; it can refer descriptively to a particular nineteenth-century aesthetic and philosophy; it can refer judgmentally to any style that the critic deems to represent a falling-off from a previous aesthetic high. It hints at exhaustion, finality—“the feeling, at once oppressive and exalting, of being the last of a series,” in the words of the Russian poet Vyacheslav Ivanov—but a finality that hasn’t yet arrived, so why not eat, drink, and be merry in the meantime?
In trying to distil a useful definition from all these associations, there’s a tendency to end up with what might be called “higher” and “lower” understandings of decadence. The low definition, the one familiar from advertising and lazy cultural criticism, basically defines the term to mean “inordinately pleasurable experiences with food and sex and fashion”—from the extreme (orgies, bondage bars, opium dens) to the rather less adventurous (four-star meals, weekends in Vegas)—and empties out the moral and the political elements entirely.
The high definition, on the other hand, tries to make the aesthetic and moral and political all fit together in a comprehensive civilizational indictment—in which moral decay goes hand in hand with overripe aestheticism and rampant hedonism, which in turn connects to a cowardly failure to make the sacrifices required to protect civilization from its enemies. This sort of decadence is an overture to a catastrophe in which the barbarians sweep in, the orgies are cancelled, and the overdecorated palaces are all put to the torch…
…In each case, the goal is to define decadence as something more specific than just any social or moral trend that you dislike. A society that generates a lot of bad movies need not be decadent; a society that just makes the same movies over and over again might be. A society run by the cruel and arrogant might not be decadent; a society where even the wise and good can’t legislate might be. A poor or crime-ridden society isn’t necessarily decadent; a society that’s rich and peaceable but exhausted, depressed, and beset by flares of nihilistic violence looks closer to our definition.
Most important, the emphasis on stagnation means that we can talk about decadence without implying that some kind of collapse is necessarily looming on the horizon. It makes the word compatible with the reality of nondecadent civilizations falling in a historical heartbeat while decadent civilizations go on and on. It frees us from the assumption that there’s some iron logic that links orgies in the capital to barbarian invasions on the frontier, weak-kneed leaders to bombed-out cities, corruption in high places to wars that lay those high places low. It lets decadence be decadence without the implication that the “falling-off” leads inexorably to a truly catastrophic fall. And even if certain features of decadence do make a Götterdämmerung more likely, it leaves open the more optimistic possibility, with which this book concludes: that a decadent era could give way instead to a recovery of growth and creativity and purpose.
Quick links
Inflation dropped to 6.7% in August 2023 despite claims that it would rise back to 7%.
Core inflation in the UK ranks right in the middle against other EU countries.
The public backs the delay to the petrol and diesel car ban by 50% to 34%.
Voters supported a 2030 ban on new petrol and diesel cars when announced in 2020, but now a majority oppose it.
Polling also shows voters support delaying or dropping some Net Zero commitments by 44% to 38%, but only 17% want to abandon Net Zero entirely.
…but Labour has promised to bring back the 2030 deadline for a ban if elected.
The UK is a world leader in decarbonisation, reducing emissions to their lowest level since Victorian times.
Construction of the Sizewell C nuclear plant will be judicially reviewed for insufficient environmental considerations despite 44,260 page impact assessment.
Support for transgender people being able to change the sex on their birth certificate has fallen from 58% in 2016 to 30% in 2022.
Public borrowing in August 2023 was £11.4 billion lower than the Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecast of £81 billion.
Labour enjoys a 22 percent polling lead ahead of the Conservatives in Wales.
Police pullback following the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States could have resulted in failure to stop 3,000 homicides.
32% of Conservative voters say stopping the boats is the most important of the Prime Minister’s five priorities.
Liz Truss’s government considered introducing a flat rate of income tax in the mini-budget.