Britain is entering the 2030s with expensive energy, weak industrial capacity and growing demands on the electricity system. We do so against a backdrop of renewed great power competition and the AI revolution. By the next election, voters will need more than another argument about who was to blame.
The UK has shown its independence of European political plans, and it’s future lies globally and with the Commonwealth. The EU’s future is easier to arrange without the UK as a dissenting member.
Net Zero was a mistake and Kemi Badenoch one of the only MPs to criticise its adoption. Now that the Conservative party has moved on from it, and are pursuing a policy of realistic carbon reduction, we can have a policy of electricity generation that is right for the economy and the environment.
Conservatives worry that somehow tackling climate change is socialism. It need not be. The problem starts with a classic proposition of market economics that the price of energy from fossil fuels does not properly reflect its costs in the long-term damage to the environment and the planet.
The fundamental problem with One Nation Toryism, then, is not that it is corrosive as an idea. It is that it provides cover for those without ideas.
80 per cent of Conservative members think it’s right to hold new candidates to supporting the party policy on net-zero and the ECHR, and 73.4 per cent backed the decision not field a candidate in the upcoming Clacton by-election.
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.
That is exactly what she is doing. Like any good engineer, she has identified the fault, diagnosed the cause and started fixing the problem. And that is not a purge. It is leadership.
It seems that Kemi and her energy team will be just as occupied holding the new Energy Secretary to account as the last. And we at Onward will continue to argue for a common sense energy policy.
What the country needs is a proper attempt to sit down and work out what the hierarchy of threats is, what the timescale is, and what we can do about them.
It can be argued that the Net Zero positioning is less against climate change action itself, but one rooted in economics. The prospective danger is that Badenoch and the Conservatives get bogged down constantly making complex arguments and outlining such connections while other parties jump straight to the central issues.
Conservatism has traditionally understood that facts cannot be negotiated with. Markets, public finances, demographics and geopolitics impose constraints that governments ignore at their peril. Climate change belongs to this same class of realities