This is an audio transcript of the Political Fix podcast episode: Have the UK’s green plans hit a red light?’

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George Parker
Some inside the government called it Green Day. But according to Labour’s Ed Miliband, the government’s big package of energy announcements this week amounted to a boulevard of broken dreams.

Ed Miliband
There are some weasel words. They don’t say they’re going to meet the target they set out with great fanfare at COP26. All the document can say is they’ll make some progress towards it.

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George Parker
Welcome to the FT’s Political Fix, your essential insider guide to Westminster from the Financial Times, with me, George Parker. Coming up, Rishi Sunak’s government has a new net zero plan drawn up after the High Court ruled that existing plans weren’t enough for the UK to reach net zero targets. So is the new plan up to scratch? The FT’s Jim Pickard and our climate reporter Camilla Hodgson will be combing through the details. Plus, campaigning has kicked off for the May local elections. Labour and the Liberal Democrats have been out on the road. But where, oh, where are the Conservatives? The FT’s deputy opinion editor Miranda Green and columnist Stephen Bush will look ahead to a vital test of public opinion.

So the government has a new net zero strategy, but Downing Street has been very keen to tell everyone that the big launch wasn’t actually Green Day, but Energy Security Day. The energy minister, Grant Shapps, made the announcement in a video shot from inside what looked like a bunker and he used the language of battle.

Grant Shapps
Since 2010 we’ve invested £200bn in renewable energy. Today’s plan invests billions more. Together we will power up Britain from Britain, to force down your energy bills and ensure we can never be held to energy ransom again.

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George Parker
Blimey. Jim Pickard and Camilla Hodgson, thanks for joining us. Jim, what exactly is in the package?

Jim Pickard
Oh, my goodness. Where do I even start? So (laughs) Camilla and I, along with colleagues, were up very early in the morning when this all came out on Thursday, because they dumped a whole series of announcements that started at 7am and carried on for quite a long time. And I think at the end of the day, there was something like over 40 different documents covering over 3,000 pages, and it was a bit like panning for flakes of gold and an awful lot of estuarine rubble. But in no short order, there were a load of announcements about almost every sort of facet of energy and climate that you can think of. But the important thing is an awful lot of it was consultation. There wasn’t really any new money as far as I can think of. And therefore, it always felt a little bit like they were just trying to kind of drench people in verbiage and consultation and bits of paper to make you think that something was happening. And also, I should point out that this doesn’t just feel like the new plan, it feels like the new new new plan, because there’s been so many white papers and announcements on this stuff over the last couple of years.

George Parker
Is it a net zero plan or an energy security plan or a bit of both?

Jim Pickard
So they call it an energy security plan. But within these multiple documents, there are all sorts of things, including an update of the net zero plan. But we should remind the listeners that there was a court case last summer taken by a couple of NGOs and by the Good Law Project, which basically accused the government of having inadequate plans to reach net zero. The government was compelled to come back with a fresh net zero plan by the end of March because the judge agreed with campaigners. So if you’re wondering about the timing, it’s basically because a court ordered them to do this.

George Parker
Right. So Camilla, big question, does this go any way towards rectifying the problems identified with the original plan?

Camilla Hodgson
Well, I think the government would say yes. What they’ve done is they’ve laid out how they think their policies get to net zero. They had to basically quantify how you get to that magic number. The side problem for them is that they say actually the policies that we have already, they only get us to 92 per cent of what we need by 2030. That increases to 97 per cent by 2037. But crucially, that’s not 100 per cent. And so I think what happens from this point is a bit of a question mark. The government also hasn’t yet released the sort of underlying spreadsheet that goes blow by blow, policy by policy, quantifying exactly what kind of emissions cuts we should expect from things like getting rid of gas boilers. So I think the NGOs that brought the case are gonna be scrutinising the documents, waiting for that spreadsheet, and then there’ll be a decision taken about whether or not to go back to court or whether this is good enough.

George Parker
Really, another court case possibly looming, incredible! So part of the plan was carbon capture and storage. Can you explain exactly what that is and what role it will play?

Camilla Hodgson
Yes. So carbon capture and storage is very expensive, nascent technology. Essentially what it involves is pulling carbon dioxide out of the air using kind of tech systems and then storing it underground or under the sea. In theory, the UK is quite well-placed for this technology because there’s a lot of storage space in the North Sea, but it’s been quite slow to get off the ground. The good news for the industry this week was the government announced eight projects that are in the North East and the North West of England that it says it will proceed with. The bad news is that’s not all the projects that wanted support. So it’s another one of a little bit of a wait-and-see for the industry. But I think in general it was good news.

George Parker
And carbon capture and storage basically allows you to carry on pumping out carbon but then capturing it afterwards, right?

Camilla Hodgson
Yes. This is one of the big gripes of climate campaigners. They say it’s a false solution. It’s very expensive. It’s basically just a distraction. And the oil and gas companies love it because they can say we’ll pair it out with our existing operations. We don’t need to switch to wind and solar. We’ll just carry on pumping oil.

George Parker
I was wondering, Jim, how big a part did oil and gas play in this big wodge of announcements?

Jim Pickard
Not a lot, really. I mean, there was a lot of speculation that they could deliberately choose to give tax breaks for oil and gas companies by basically taking the windfall tax that was announced last year and saying that as you were gonna introduce a threshold. So if the price falls below a certain level, we’re gonna stop hitting you with the windfall tax and therefore various projects wouldn’t become unviable. That hasn’t happened yet, but we think it could happen in a few weeks time. There was speculation they could approve an oilfield called Rosebank in the North Sea, just off the west of the Shetlands. That is something that’s currently going through the regulatory process and we’ll see quite soon. And it is massive. It’s twice the size of Cambo, which was another really controversial oilfield that was approved a couple of years ago.

George Parker
This is using oil and gas as a transition fuel. Is that the way it’s been described?

Jim Pickard
Sure. So the really important thing about oil and gas and the fact that the government has approved new licences in the North Sea. They’ve done it basically because the whole Russia invasion of Ukraine has reminded them that energy security is important and if we’re gonna burn a load of oil and gas, we might as well take it from our own local sources rather than shipping it in from outside around the world. At which point various people say, well, hang on, surely we’re moving to net zero. Why on earth are we finding new sources of oil and gas, surely we’re shifting immediately to renewables and all the rest of it? The thing to bear in mind is that if you imagine a diagonal line going across a chart as renewables increase and nuclear in theory increases and battery storage and all the rest of it, in theory, our use of oil and gas will go down, but it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes place over the next nearly 30 years. That is the kind of pragmatic case for drilling more oil and gas. What campaigners would say and what Ed Miliband from the Labour party would say is that if we’re lecturing people around the world about cutting oil and gas, it sets a terrible example if we do this.

George Parker
So, Jim, this week we saw Germany delaying its plans to switch to electric vehicles. The government seems to have watered down its own plans to switch the country to electric vehicles, doesn’t it?

Jim Pickard
So what’s happened in Europe is that the Germans have pushed the EU into a partial compromise over their 2035 target for phasing out petrol and diesel cars by allowing something called e-fuels, which is basically the kind of biofuel that you would use in cars. And when Grant Shapps held that conference on Wednesday afternoon ahead of Big Energy Day, he insisted that Britain would stick to its target of phasing out the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2030.

But what was very interesting in the Thursday announcement is that there’s something called an EV mandate, which is the proportion of cars produced by all car companies. Starting next year, you have to meet a certain level. So 22 per cent for cars in 2024 and then rising very, very rapidly. And it’s not a lot higher than the industries already out there, already selling 15 per cent of their cars are electric. The problem is some manufacturers make loads, like Tesla, and some manufacturers don’t make any.

And what they did in terms of the watering down of this on Thursday is that they said not only will you be able to sell your certificates with other manufacturers allowing you to make a certain proportion of petrol and diesel cars, but you can also take what you’ve been allocated and you can say, well, we aren’t gonna hit the target for next couple of years, but we’re gonna take some of our future allocations . . . 

George Parker
Right.

Jim Pickard
. . . in order to do it now. So it’s a little bit of fiddling to help the car companies.

George Parker
Yeah. So Camilla, what are the bits of the plan stood out to you as you pored through those documents at 7:00 in the morning?

Camilla Hodgson
Yeah, there was a lot to go through. There are some more niche, interesting things, like on carbon markets the government said it wants to crack down basically on greenwashing. And really what they’re talking about there is when companies buy carbon offsets, often there are questions about the integrity of those credits, about whether they’re just doing it and carrying on polluting on the side. So the government said it wants to come up with some new rules about that. There was also some more support to help households decarbonise and replace gas boilers with a heat pump, which is good news, I think campaigners would say. I think the bad thing about that is the government has some fairly ambitious targets for rolling out heat pumps, but the pace of delivery is extremely slow and there isn’t really a domestic industry capable even of delivering what they would like at the moment.

George Parker
So, Jim, from a sort of layperson’s point of view, watching the evolution of this through from when David Cameron started talking about cutting the green crap through to Boris Johnson, it seems to me that the government’s had a reasonably good record on net zero issues. But what does Ed Miliband, the shadow energy secretary, say about it?

Jim Pickard
OK, so you’ve had over the last 13 years, critics would say that there’s been a lot of stop-starts. So you take something like onshore wind one year, they’re welcoming it, another year they’re trying to stop it completely. But yes, on the global front, Britain has been ahead on quite a lot of renewable energy stuff. We’ve got three or four of the biggest offshore wind farms in the world. The big debate we’re getting into and this has been turbocharged by Joe Biden’s inflation reduction act, which is providing something close to £400bn of subsidies for green industries. That has put the cat among the pigeons across Europe and various policymakers thinking, do we replicate this? The EU is trying to come up with an equivalent kind of policy. You have to bear in mind that China dominates global markets for production of photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, batteries for electric cars. They’re miles ahead because the state has encouraged this and funded this for a very long time. So there’s a sense in Britain that Grant Shapps a couple of months ago was saying, oh, we’re 10 years ahead of the US and sounding a little bit complacent. Jeremy Hunt this week quite importantly said that we wouldn’t be going to subsidy-race with the US. He said there might be more on the fiscal front of the Autumn Statement at the end of the year. The difference with the Labour party is that they would borrow a huge amount of money, £28bn a year, and they would throw the book at it. A bit like America, and actually co-invest as a government alongside private companies to do all the renewable stuff, insulation and everything else.

George Parker
And, Camilla, what do the environmental groups say about them?

Camilla Hodgson
Well, they’re actually pretty aligned on that front with the Labour party in many ways. I think there is quite broad agreement really that if you want to really turbocharge investment in the green economy, there does need to be some more support. There are a lot of both campaigners and industries saying we need more financial support, but it’s also about policy and regulation. And so for example, the time that it takes to get a new wind farm or a new solar farm approved here in the UK and also in the EU can be years. And so that really is a drag on investment, it makes people nervous. And again, going back to this government’s sort of stop-start policymaking on green issues, I think that is just another drag on investment.

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George Parker
Camilla and Jim, thanks for joining us. Speaking of energy and transport, how do you launch a local election campaign? Well, on a yellow tractor, of course, if you’re Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey.

Ed Davey
And I brought my tractor along. (People cheering) You know, we’re gonna need some heavy machinery to clear up the mess of the Conservatives. (People agreeing)

George Parker
Yes, Mr Davey there, speaking shortly after using a tractor to demolish a wall of blue-painted hay bales to illustrate his plans to take down the Tory vote on May the fourth. Labour’s Keir Starmer was on the road, too, with a pledge to freeze council taxes.

Keir Starmer
Labour would freeze council tax next year. Using (people agreeing) that windfall tax that hasn’t been collected. Yes, you heard it right. Not a penny more on your council tax, not a penny more than the bill you paid last year. And that is a tax cut for the 99 per cent of working people.

George Parker
It later turned out that this generous Labour policy only applies to before a general election next year and is not a commitment by Starmer to deliver the policy if he’s actually in power. Always worth reading the small print. Oh well, welcome to the local elections. Stephen Bush and Miranda Green, thanks for joining me. So, Stephen, first of all, what happened to the Tory election launch?

Stephen Bush
Well, it kind of caught everyone by surprise. And then I think it was only this week when lots of us went, wait a second, so the Lib Dems are launching with a fun stunt with something painted blue being destroyed by Ed Davey. The Labour party are doing their bells and smells launch and then we’re like, wait, when is the Conservative one? And it turned out it was actually a week ago in Birmingham, which raises an interesting philosophical question about what it means to launch a campaign, right? When you have a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound?

George Parker
Was this the Lewes Conservatives Spring Forum that we all used to go to every year? Was it launched there?

Stephen Bush
Despite the fact that Rishi Sunak’s had a great month in which he has taken, I think, now unchallenged control of his party, for some reason, some bright spark in CCHQ decided that what would be good would be for journalists not to come to spring conference to see him being cheered to the rafters, but instead for them to have the world’s sort of softest launch of their election campaign. I mean, I don’t really get it.

George Parker
And why are they doing this? Are they fearing the worst on May the fourth, in spite of the fact they’re fighting on a pretty low base, given the fact these elections were last held in the dying days of Theresa May’s premiership in the middle of the Brexit crisis?

Stephen Bush
Yeah. Although the 2019 local elections were disastrous for the Conservative party, they were also disastrous for the Labour party.

George Parker
Under Jeremy Corbyn. Yeah, yeah. and both parties essentially got hammered, of course.

Stephen Bush
Labour got hammered by Remainers for their unclear position on Brexit and the Conservatives got hammered by Leavers. And the huge winner of those elections was Vince Cable, then the leader of the Liberal Democrats. So it could still be quite bad for them, even though they will poll better just because the Labour vote will go up quite a bit. But it’s still a bit of a surprise, because usually what a political party does with its local election campaign is they use it effectively to mark their own homework.

Why did Keir Starmer launch in Swindon? Because to be honest, things could go catastrophically wrong and they will make gains in Swindon regardless of circumstances. And what he’s creating is the opportunity to go, I came here and we won. So you’d think that they would go somewhere like maybe Leicester, where the Labour party’s all sorts of local difficulties and purely anecdotally, my own friendship group, lots of people from the Indian subcontinent in particular are very excited by the fact Rishi Sunak is prime minister. Given the problems Labour are having in Leicester, you can see how they might pick up some gains there. So I think it’s surprising that they’ve decided to go for this, but it is one option for a party, when they expect they’ll get a hammering, is not to talk about the election.

George Parker
Yeah. So Miranda, how big a test is this for Keir Starmer, would you say?

Miranda Green
I think it is because the feeling is abroad that the general election is ’round the corner. You know, you alluded to the confusion over their will-freeze-council-tax pledge. There was also a slight inconvenience where Angela Rayner, the deputy leader, and Rachel Reeves, the very high-profile shadow chancellor, seem to have a different interpretation of what their intentions are on capital gains tax, which is quite important if you’ve chosen your attack line on Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, is that he’s Mr 1 Per Cent and so you would go for people like him. They seem to disagree on that.

I think it’s very, very high stakes for Keir Starmer because how the Labour front bench perform under the pressure of a local election campaign over the next few weeks could expose some problems in how they might operate in a general election. And also because, you know, talking to the parties over the last couple of days, they say that actually the public are gearing up for a general election as well. So their expectations of Keir Starmer are gonna be pretty high in terms of, you know, potential incoming prime minister. He really has to show that he cannot just win some seats, but also that he, under pressure and with all the extra media exposure of a campaign, is the right sort of leader and that he’s got control on his front bench, which I have to say sometimes you do wonder about.

George Parker
Well, this is fascinating, wasn’t it — this desire to be absolutely rock-solid on fiscal discipline and economic credibility trumping almost anything else, including making stuff look absolutely ridiculous at a campaign launch?

Miranda Green
Yes, absolutely. And also, slightly unfortunately. So he decided to say Rishi Sunak, we’re calling him Mr 1 Per Cent, and of course, immediately someone pointed out that Sir Keir Starmer is also a member of the 1 per cent in terms of his income. So they are gonna have to be quite a lot savvier, I think, about their presentation. And Rachel Reeves has been absolutely front and centre for really quite a few months in trying to be this reassuring presence on fiscal discipline, as you say. And so you really can’t have a situation where other frontbenchers are starting to play fast and loose with spending commitments of any sort.

George Parker
And would you expect, Miranda — Labour’s made big gains, Stephen was setting out the backdrop there to the last lost elections in 2019 — do we expect them to make gains and if so, where?

Miranda Green
Yeah, they should make gains. So 2019, when these seats were up, the Tories lost 1,300 seats and in fact, some of the most sort of respected election gurus are saying that they could lose upwards of another 1,000 seats. So that’s a lot of potential gains for Labour, but also very significant gains potentially for the Lib Dems who had that very good year last time these seats were up. And you know, there could be a lot of red faces in Tory central office, I think, after these elections.

George Parker
Steve, how seriously should we take these elections as an indicator of how Starmer’s likely to do next year? Speak to people in Downing Street who say they expect that the Tories will be hammered in these elections, that they’ll be trailing badly in the polls for most of 2023. Does it give us much of a steer as to what might happen next year?

Stephen Bush
Not really. In some ways, the best way to see a local election is like a health check, right? If you go to the doctor and the doc goes, your cholesterol’s a bit high, exercise a bit more, it doesn’t mean you’re going to keel over from a heart attack because you might diet and exercise more, eat more fruit. But the thing which is useful about them is they are a health check both of the parties but also for the opinion polls. When Ed Miliband lost unexpectedly, according to the polls, one of the reasons why it didn’t seem that unexpected to a lot of people is that this Labour poll lead kept not turning up in the local elections. Now, of course, the last time that we had local elections, you know, was two Conservative prime ministers ago, very different political context. This will be the first time in this era of very big Labour leads. And there are arguments about methodology, arguments about whether or not this lead is real, is solid. But Conservatives are right to say if they do get hammered in these local elections, it doesn’t mean they are fated to lose next year.

Miranda Green
That’s absolutely true. But I think sad obsessives like us will be looking at particular areas, won’t we? And there’s those kind of traditional red versus blue battlegrounds where you probably will be able to take some lessons away about whether Labour can take back those seats it lost to the Tories in the 2019 general election, about whether those seats along the south coast, the South West, will become even more solid Labour territory.

George Parker
Yeah.

Miranda Green
I think there could be really interesting sort of local patterns which will read across to the general election, and particularly also if you look at that Lib Dem attack on the Tories, the expression of which was a tractor going through the blue bales of hay. That actually does have quite a lot of read across for Lib Dem target seats currently held by the Tories. If you think of Surrey for example, they think there are loads of seats that could fall to them as younger people leave London, enter this kind of affluent commuter belt and realise that in order to oust a Tory, you’re in a territory where you have to vote Lib Dem. So it’s kind of like an influx of new tactical voters. So I think there could be lots of lessons to read across to a general election, even though, as you quite rightly say, (laughs) it’s not a replicant.

Stephen Bush
Yeah. Although Rishi Sunak was addressing the 1922 committee this week and he joked when he last spoke to them and he said, you need to unite or die. And he said, well, I’m glad we’ve chosen unity (Miranda laughs). But one of the reasons why they’ve chosen unity is because they think he can win. I think a real risk to Rishi Sunak in these elections is that Conservative MPs have started to spend the fact they’re gonna be only 10 points behind by the party conferences. You can see how — if things go badly at this set of elections — it becomes self-fulfilling because Conservative MPs start doing unhelpful things that damage their major asset, the prime minister, etc, etc.

And of course you’re exactly right that in many ways the most exciting thing about this election are the Liberal Democrats, because we’ve gone from having a Conservative prime minister who Liberal Democrat strategists loved. Boris Johnson was basically the dream opponent in those southern seats where the party’s directly has done well in the past and now seems to be doing very well and again, to a prime minister who unfortunately for Liberal Democrat strategists, Liberal Democrat voters quite like. And what we don’t know is have those voters who are flirting with the Liberal Democrats got to a point where they go, OK, I like that Rishi Sunak, but it’s time for a change, or can they be tempted to back the Conservatives?

George Parker
And Ed Davey who came up to the press gallery this week for the Dems. They had a drinks party for people like me, which is rather nice. And he sounded . . . 

Miranda Green
Treating in an election campaign.

George Parker
But he was extremely bullish. They’re very confident making further gains. One thing that keeps nagging me though, Miranda, is that it’s very hard to say what the Lib Dems actually stand for at the moment. I can understand why they might be a protest vote, which is obviously a very traditional point with the Lib Dems. But in the past, there was always one policy you could hang the Lib Dems on whether it was one pence on income tax for education or the Iraq war or whatever it was. But it’s hard to know what they’re about at the moment, isn’t it?

Miranda Green
I think that’s a really fair criticism because they don’t have a central issue around which to kind of coalesce. And in a sense, they’ve become a kind of complimentary electioneering campaign machine to ensure (laughter) Labour government at the next general election, which is actually only half of what you should be doing. If you are the third party in politics, you should have something more about you other than that you are the main other lever for voters to pull to eject a Conservative government. So they’ve got a lot of work to do.

I think they are, as you say, feeling incredibly bullish. They think that these quite affluent areas where they might do really well kind of ring around . . . 

George Parker
Mmm.

Miranda Green
. . . London, the kind of commuter belt places. They have picked up that the creaking of the public services is feeding through even to affluent voters.

George Parker
Mmm.

Miranda Green
And that is a reason to want to maybe dislodge a government that’s been in power for 13 years. So in a sense, they can do lots of freedom of information requests to campaign on things like health issues, like sewage in the rivers. People care about this stuff locally, but it adds to a kind of national picture of a government that’s not really taking care of the public realm. And even affluent groups of voters care about that. I think your overarching criticism of the Lib Dems is totally fair, however.

George Parker
So Stephen, we’ve got Easter holidays coming up and then we’ll be into the full campaign period. People will be voting on May the fourth and then conveniently, two days later, it’s the coronation of King Charles. So, you would imagine that Rishi Sunak will wanna pull the duvet over his head, move on as quickly as possible, wouldn’t you?

Stephen Bush
Yeah. The coronation is incredibly well-timed for Rishi Sunak. I’m not suggesting that’s why when it is (laughter), but it acts as a firebreak . . . (all talking at the same time)

Miranda Green
There’s people out there, Stephen, but who will take any conspiracy theory and run with it.

Stephen Bush
The other firebreak for him politically is that the Labour party will almost certainly do its reshuffle. So there’ll be two kind of, don’t focus on the fact that we’ve just got hammered in the locals; look at the bright, shiny things happening over there. But yes, if he does especially badly, there might be all sorts of tortured metaphors about the need for succession planning, etc, etc.

George Parker
A right royal mess.

Miranda Green
A right royal mess. Yes. But you see, there’s already this complete difference, isn’t there, in what people think of Rishi Sunak and what people think of the Conservative party. So if the Conservative party doesn’t do well in the local elections, but people are still giving Rishi Sunak personally the benefit of the doubt, it’ll in a sense, just be a continuation of the same peculiar problem the Tories have, which is that they’re lagging way behind their leader.

George Parker
I think the thing they agonise about in Tory circles is a relatively popular prime minister is weighed down by an unpopular (laughter) legacy party. But we’ll see. Miranda and Stephen, thanks very much.

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And that’s it for this episode of the FT’s Political Fix. If you like the podcast, we’d recommend subscribing. You can find it through all the usual channels to receive episodes as soon as they’re released. And we also appreciate positive reviews and ratings. The FT’s Political Fix was presented by me, George Parker, and produced by Anna Dedhar and Manuela Saragosa. The sound engineer is Breen Turner. Until next time. Thanks for listening.

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