Arthur Reynolds is a journalist, a former civil servant and government speechwriter.
Andy Burnham has shipped Ed Miliband off to the Foreign Office, but the team he’s installed at the Energy Department is just as frightening.
Miatta Fahnbulleh is a fan of Extinction Rebellion and has called for carbon taxes. Her number two, Katie White, chaired an organisation that claimed lower growth would be ‘good news’.
Another of the department’s new ministers, Polly Billington, served as media director and special adviser to, you guessed it, Ed Miliband.
Before entering Parliament, Billington founded and chaired UK100. Her LinkedIn page describes the group as “a network of highly ambitious local government leaders” that “supports decision-makers in UK towns and cities in their transition to 100 per cent clean energy by 2050.”
Although that sounds innocuous enough, UK100 proposed getting to net zero by adopting a series of radical, growth-sapping policies.
They are enthusiasts for “workplace parking levies” – taxes on businesses who have the gumption to provide their staff with parking spaces – and wax lyrical about a Nottingham City Council scheme that charges employers almost £600 per space.
In 2022, UK100 convened a “confidential roundtable”with two authorities who were looking to implement a parking levy. Their write up of this meeting borders on the comic.
It recommends that councils which plan to introduce levies should “build a rapid rebuttal unit” to “control the narrative” and “ensure their citizens can access trusted and accurate information” rather than the viewpoints of “those who are most wedded to frustrating change.”
Council-endorsed attacks on businesses that oppose tax rises; that would be a terrific use of public money, I’m sure we can all agree.
More than two-thirds of Brits travel to work by car. London is the only region where a majority of people use public transport. Yet, to Labour’s climate class, a car park is an indulgence which is ripe for taxation.
Parents who drove their children to school were also in Billington’s sights. In a press release that lamented the fact only 40 schools across the country had banned cars during drop-off and pick-up, she urged parents “not to drive during the school run.”
The release contended that “councils outside London are unable to enforce school streets without the ability to fine drivers” and suggested ANPR cameras could automatically issue Penalty Charge Notices.
Millions of parents drop their children off at school before driving to work. No matter how much they’d like to save the planet, most do not have time to park miles away and walk to school.
But if Billington gets her way, many Brits will be barred from owning a car to begin with. She has written glowingly about “car-free developments” such as those operating in Brighton.
UK100’s “Power Shift” report explains how these schemes operate: “when residents purchase a property in the development, they agree to a restrictive covenant which prohibits private car ownership.”
The same report calls the policy “feasible”, though I doubt developers and would-be homeowners would concur.
Not content with denying many the right to own a car, UK100 advocated hitting homeowners with a barrage of draconian green measures: Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards currently reserved for rental properties would be extended to every home sold, cost exemptions “on all but the hardest to treat properties” would be removed, and a new EPC would be required after renovations.
This kind of bureaucracy is the last thing Britain’s glacially slow housing market needs.
Rates of homebuilding, too, have been catastrophically low for decades. Billington’s answer was to hamstring developers with even higher costs.
UK100 wanted green demands to take priority even in cases where builders warned they could make schemes financially unviable. The results would be obvious: fewer homes and higher prices.
Surprise, surprise, Billington is also an EU-fanatic. During the referendum campaign, she ran Environmentalists for Europe, an organisation that claimed EU membership prevented Britain becoming the “dirty man of Europe.”
This premise was complete and utter fiction. Irrespective of their merits, our parliament put the Climate Change Act and the net zero by 2050 mandate into law.
Nor does EU membership confer environmental sainthood. Fossil fuels generate less than a third of British electricity. By contrast Malta, safely cocooned inside the EU, generated 85 per cent of its power using fossil fuels in 2024.
Net zero may sound benign when it’s talked about as a distant target. But Billington’s programme reveals the tremendous cost and inconvenience it would impose on our country.
Taxes on parking, cameras at the school gates, green conditions on every home and surrendering our right to own a car, would all intrude on the British way of life.
Kemi Badenoch is right to keep those who share this warped worldview well away from the Conservative Party. Should they wish to pursue the folly of net zero, Ed Davey’s circus is always looking for new performers.