There was a time when the TB-GBs consumed British politics. Tony Blair and his chancellor were known for spilling their private disagreements out into the national media. This impulse may have faded in (semi)-retirement, but old habits die hard. This week, Blair’s clunky comms on the political expediency of Britain’s climate ambitions masked a more sensible report from his eponymous Institute for Global Change (TBI, where I used to work), instead attempting to reignite a fight Blair had with one of Gordon Brown’s former emissaries, the climate and energy secretary Ed Miliband.
Following apparent ire from Number 10, Blair rowed back on implying that Keir Starmer should drop net zero. TBI released a statement saying the government’s approach is “the right one”. Many have focused on the potential conflicts of interest in who TBI does business with, including the fossil fuel-rich nations that the institute has advised. But setting aside these potential frictions, the arguments themselves have clearly failed to change the government’s approach.
Blair’s inability to alter Labour's current policy stems from his experience of trying to widen the party’s appeal, while ensuring it was trusted as a sound custodian of public finances. This may have worked in 1997 but his strategy hasn’t evolved since then, and it isn’t up to dealing with the challenges of 2025.
Many Labour thinkers that came of political age during that decade still see climate change as a fringe concern of middle-class leftists. They worry that net zero is a vehicle for a narrow socialist utopia, which the left has long aspired to. But this ignores what we know about who actually supports climate action in the UK, and why.
Support for this in Britain is, in fact, fundamentally conservative. Its driving force is the environmentalism of middle England, where voters want to preserve for future generations a British landscape that is under threat. There’s a reason that climate was for so long the preserve of the Tory party and that, in July last year, the Green Party won seats in Herefordshire and Suffolk, as well as Bristol and Brighton.
New research this week shows how support for net zero binds Labour’s 2024 coalition, including “Reform-curious” voters. Suggesting it row back on emissions reduction is bad advice to a Labour government. Not only would it accelerate the loss of votes to the Lib Dems and Greens, it would also do close to nothing to shore up support on the right.
If you think climate policy is the preserve of the political extremes, you likely also confuse the more extreme demands of environmental advocates with mainstream ones. Take TBI singling out reductions in air travel or meat consumption as unpopular. No one is suggesting these are policies for now. At best they might be looked at in the 2040s or 2050s. Even then, experts only expect UK meat consumption to need to fall by a fifth to meet net-zero goals. And with consumption naturally declining anyway, the government may not need to do anything about these issues at all. Radical positions on even more urgent issues like fossil fuel extraction and use are also a bogeyman. Labour’s ambitious plans—to “make Britain a clean energy superpower”—still involve gas playing a role in reserve capacity from 2030.
The positive story overlooked by Blair’s critique is that when we have encountered problems without solutions—such as the need for low-carbon flight—innovation has made options to solve them easier or cheaper. The falling price of offshore wind in the 2010s and the surging uptake of electric vehicles in the 2020s have confounded predictions. Electric aviation, once seen as impossible, is now almost viable for short-haul flights. Blair, of all people, should be championing this innovation, much of which is British, rather than making the future more uncertain for the investors backing innovators.
Instead, Blair cites technologies that are both expensive and uncertain. By focusing on those, rather than proven ones such as wind, solar and EVs, his institute’s proposals make net zero more expensive. These technologies might have been viable if we’d started investing in them 20 years ago, but they will struggle to be ready for 2050. We will want to capture carbon and we probably want nuclear to support growing demand from data centres, but we can’t pretend these are the cheapest ways to decarbonise power.
Getting such big, risky projects off the ground would mean a far greater role for the state. The government would need to select and ultimately financially back risky tech. But recently the government has taken a market-led approach. Doing this has seen private sector innovation drive the rapid rise of renewables and the collapse in battery costs. The whole point about the UK’s climate approach, however, where independent experts set an envelope or budget of emissions, is that the government has discretion on how to meet its targets. If people want an alternative approach, they are free to suggest it, as Blair has—but they must recognise the balance of costs and benefits.
The fallacy is that Blair’s “sensible” approach to climate is also the fiscally conservative one. Investing in innovation is great policy, as TBI suggests, but it isn’t cheap. Blair is right that adaptation is vital and that avoiding flooding is a key success metric for the British public. On the same day his institute released its report, the independent Climate Change Committee highlighted successive government failures on adaptation to climate change. Yet, for every percentage of a degree of warming, adaptation gets more expensive. Unmitigated climate change, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility, means public debt reaching 289 per cent of GDP by the end of the century—three times current levels. The TBI report’s claim that “No country can afford to pay the price of decarbonisation as well as the cost of climate disasters caused by others’ inaction” is a self-fulfilling prophecy that only pushes all countries to face far higher fiscal pressures. If the government followed Blair’s proposals, the cost to the taxpayer would be far higher than if the government stays true to its current plan.
What Blair’s intervention does make clear is that we are no longer in an era of cuddly consensus on climate—it is now a political contest. Though, as Rishi Sunak found out last year, or the right in Australia has learned, there is an ever-narrowing pool of voters on a certain side of that contest.
We are at a weird and wobbly moment for net zero. Progressives who know they should act are in danger of over-correcting for a threat they see on the right. Meanwhile, on the right, the green transition is nearly always at fault for society’s ills. The Telegraph and the Times are often full of stories blaming net zero or Ed Miliband for a variety of problems. A Spanish blackout, which even Spain doesn’t know the reason for yet, is only the latest example. Blair’s argument this week was gleefully endorsed by both Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage.
Following the former PM’s intervention, the government stated that it sees “net zero as a growth opportunity”. The reason for the robustness of the response is that Labour knows its attempted message of security, ambition and progress on net zero is one that meets the moment. It gives voters what they want to see. If there is a lesson to learn from Blair, it’s that one’s argument isn’t going to be right forever. When circumstances change, so should our thinking.
