In his latest column, PopCon Director, Mark Littlewood, looks at Kemi Badenoch's speech on net zero last week. "The mainstream political consensus over carbon net zero is over."
The mainstream political consensus over carbon net zero is over.
Kemi Badenoch has said that getting to carbon neutrality by 2050 is simply impossible. She’s right. She is also right that the way the target was adopted and the legislation passed does not reflect well on the state of our democracy.
Even the most dyed-in-the wool green activist cannot believe that such a monumental commitment should have been adopted at the fag end of Therea May’s premiership with such cursory scrutiny.
No doubt many people, myself included, would have liked Kemi to have gone further and to have taken the prospect of trying to get to CNZ at a later date – say 2070 or 2080 – off the table entirely.
However, her remarks earlier this week are certainly not the final word. Instead, the Conservative Party is opening up a wide-ranging consultation across vast swathes of policy and are actively seeking the ideas and participation of the membership.
This does indeed present a chance to truly renew the party’s policy offering.
My hope is that it produces some bold results rather than a lowest common denominator consensus that is simply “tolerable” to all parts of the Parliamentary party.
Too often, when confronted with difficult but binary decisions, the Conservatives have tended to offer an answer of “0.5”. Attempting to be all things to all men is a guaranteed route to electoral impotence and, worse still, would mean winning an election would be a pyrrhic victory as it would not lead to the surgery the UK so desperately needs.
The remarkable rise of Reform UK is in large part due to a growing sense that nothing in Britain works and the country needs a complete system overhaul. Even if you are sceptical about whether Reform have the right remedies, they have a very compelling – and increasingly popular – diagnosis.
The Conservatives’ only route back to office is to share the same analysis but then to offer crystal clear and practical remedies.
I don’t feel entirely confident that we have yet got the diagnostics bang on right. The UK’s governmental structures need more than a rewiring, they need a complete reset. Our system of government has become a gigantic quangocracy mixed in with judicial activism. The central pillar of our democracy – Parliament – looks increasingly like an historical curiosity or an afterthought.
I would encourage all members to actively engage in the policy consultation process and to seek to persuade the leadership that a common thread needs to run through the entire policy platform – one of ending the extraordinary influence of the Blob and returning power to the politicians we elect.
Such a platform would not only resonate with a disillusioned, but determined, electorate, it is also the only way to arrest our national decline.
Keep the flag of freedom flying.
Watch Mark explain the folly of net zero in this short video