George Monbiot exposes Starmer’s hollow victory
Two Thirds of Anti-Net Zero Tories Wiped Out in UK Election
Original article by Adam Barnett and Joey Grostern republished from DeSmog.
The result has “buried Sunak’s anti-green agenda once and for all”, said Will McCallum of Greenpeace UK.
Labour’s landslide victory over the Conservatives has left the party’s anti-net zero wing in tatters.
DeSmog’s analysis of Westminster’s influential Net Zero Scrutiny Group (NZSG) found that two thirds of its supporters are no longer represented in parliament following the July 4 general election.
Twenty-four of the 37 MPs supportive of the backbench grouping were voted out – a loss of 65 percent of its backers. Outgoing supporters include former energy secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg, former NZSG co-chair Steve Baker, and Net Zero Watch board member Andrea Jenkyns.
A further five stood down or resigned before the election, among them veteran climate crisis John Redwood.
The group’s former chair Craig Mackinlay, who contracted sepsis in September, has been appointed to the House of Lords by outgoing prime minister Rishi Sunak. Mackinlay has said he would use this platform to campaign for “sensible net zero”.
The NZSG has actively campaigned against climate action since it was formed in 2021. The group’s joint letters to the Telegraph made front page news, as supporters urged the government to scrap “environmental levies on domestic energy”, “expand North Sea exploration” for oil and gas, and support “shale gas extraction” by lifting the ban on fracking.
In addition to the NZSG grouping, former Prime Minister Liz Truss, who has become an outspoken critic of net zero since leaving Downing Street in 2022, was voted out on Thursday.
Campaigners have welcomed the departure of MPs opposed to climate action. “This landslide election victory has buried Sunak’s anti-green agenda once and for all along with many of its principle architects”, Will McCallum, co-executive director at Greenpeace UK, told DeSmog.
“Most of the former MPs who sought to sow division and disinformation about net zero have lost at the ballot box.”
Meanwhile, 14 anti-net zero MPs were re-elected, including Labour MP Graham Stringer, who is on the board of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s main climate denial group, and Lee Anderson, who defected from the Tories to Reform UK earlier this year.
Four new Reform MPs were also elected, including party leader Nigel Farage and chairman Richard Tice, both of whom have a record of climate science denial.
Despite this, campaigners are still positive. McCallum added that “the biggest winners [in the election] – Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party – contested this election on strong green policies that will slash emissions, lower bills and deliver hundreds of thousands of new jobs”.
“There is and has long been a public consensus on climate action in this country”, he said, and “the new government should feel empowered to be bold”.
Here are some of the most prominent critics of net zero who have lost their seats:
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Jacob Rees-Mogg, who lost his North East Somerset seat by more than 6,000 votes to Labour’s Dan Norris, was secretary of state for business, energy and industrial strategy under Liz Truss between September and October 2022.
While in office he reportedly argued for lifting the ban on fracking for shale gas, and told the head of the UAE’s state investment company, in a private meeting revealed by DeSmog, that people need to “stop demonising oil and gas”.
Since January 2023, Rees-Mogg has presented his own show on GB News, which regularly broadcasts climate science denial. Rees-Mogg has been a harsh critic of the government’s net zero policies, stating that “the current headlong rush to net zero risks impoverishing the nation to no global benefit on emissions”.
Steve [“Number two”] Baker
Steve Baker has led the charge against climate policies in parliament. Baker was a trustee of the UK’s main climate denial group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), from May 2021 to September 2022, when he stepped down to serve as Northern Ireland minister. He was co-chair of the NZSG, which operated as the GWPF’s caucus in parliament.
At a 2021 Conservative Party conference event, Baker said that much climate science is “contestable” and “sometimes propagandised”, while claiming that some UN climate scenarios were “implausible”.
In February 2022, Baker received £5,000, and a further £10,000 in February 2023, from Neil Record, chair of Net Zero Watch, the campaign arm of the GWPF.
On Thursday Baker lost his Wycombe seat to Labour’s Emma Reynolds by more than 4,000 votes.
Dame Andrea Jenkyns
Andrea Jenkyns, who lost her seat of Leeds and South West Morley by more than 7,000 votes to Labour’s Mark Sewards, sits on the board of Net Zero Watch, the campaign arm of the GWPF, the UK’s main climate science denial group.
In March 2023 Jenkyns told parliament: “Personally, net zero, I think we need to ditch these targets, especially at the moment, and use whatever resources we’ve got under our feet.” She has described herself on Twitter as holding “no-to-net-zero views”.
Miriam Cates
Miriam Cates lost her Penistone and Stocksbridge seat by more than 9,000 votes to Labour’s Marie Tidball in Thursday’s general election.
Cates was tipped as a rising star of the Conservative party, a “darling” of the Tory right. She is the co-chair of the New Conservatives, a socially conservative faction of the Tory party which received £50,000 in January from GB News investors the Legatum Group.
Cates also sits on the advisory board of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a right-wing group fronted by prominent climate denier Jordan Peterson.
Speaking at the National Conservatism Conference in London last year, Cates suggested that “epidemic levels of anxiety and confusion” are being caused by teaching children that “humanity is killing the Earth”.
Philip Davies
Philip Davies, who lost his Shipley seat by more than 8,000 votes to Labour’s Anna Dixon, has a long record of opposing climate policies. Davies was one of only five MPs to vote against the UK’s Climate Change Act in 2008.
He currently works as a presenter for GB News, as does his wife and fellow Conservative politician Esther McVey, who was re-elected on Thursday.
Liz Truss
A number of net zero sceptic MPs existed outside the NZSG grouping, among them former prime minister Liz Truss, who resigned in October 2022 after just 49 days in the job. As well as appointing Rees-Mogg energy secretary, Truss overturned the UK’s moratorium on fracking for shale gas – a key demand from the Net Zero Scrutiny Group.
Since leaving Downing Street – and in between giving paid speeches to U.S. anti-climate groups like CPAC and the Heritage Foundation – Truss has become an open opponent of net zero policies.
In her 2024 book “Ten Years to Save the West”, Truss called for the independent Climate Change Committee to be abolished, and attacked the UN COP process, which coordinates international action on climate change. Truss also claimed that while in cabinet she argued against the UK hosting the COP26 climate summit.
On Thursday, Truss lost her South West Norfolk seat by 630 votes to Labour’s Terry Jermy.
‘Watching Closely’
“It’s obviously fantastic news that 30 Tory MPs who’ve lobbied against climate policies are no longer in parliament”, said Jessica Townsend, founder of the MP Watch campaign group, which used DeSmog research in a recent event on “top ten climate denial MPs”.
Townsend noted that seven of the campaign’s list have won seats, including Reform’s Farage and GWPF director Graham Stringer.
“MP Watch will be watching these MPs closely in coming months as well as the influence fossil fuel companies and their think tanks may have on Labour in Westminster now that the power base has shifted,” she added.
Original article by Adam Barnett and Joey Grostern republished from DeSmog.
Sunak and Starmer unite for war
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/sunak-and-starmer-unite-war
Leaders join forces to condemn Farage for comments on Nato expansionism
RISHI SUNAK and Sir Keir Starmer united in support of their bipartisan war policy as the row spread over Nigel Farage’s remarks blaming Nato and European Union expansion for contributing to the Ukraine conflict.
The two leaders expressed outrage that anyone would make an election issue out of the apparent drive to a wider war in Europe and Britain’s complicity in it.
But anti-war campaigners warned that the conflict could not be swept under the carpet.
Reform Party owner Mr Farage had been the first to break through the wall of silence surrounding British policy towards Russia and Ukraine during the election.
Mr Farage said: “The West’s errors in Ukraine have been catastrophic. I won’t apologise for telling the truth.”
He had told the BBC that “the ever-eastward expansion of Nato and the European Union was giving this man a reason to say to his Russian people, ‘they’re coming for us again’ and to go to war,” referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Making it clear that he did not support Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, he added: “I am not, and never have been, an apologist or supporter of Putin.
“As a champion of national sovereignty, I believe that Putin was entirely wrong to invade the sovereign nation of Ukraine.
“What I have been saying for the past 10 years is that the West has played into Putin’s hands, giving him the excuse to do what he wanted to do anyway.”
The squabbling Tory Party briefly united to condemn Mr Farage.
Mr Sunak said he had played “into Putin’s hands” and former defence secretary Ben Wallace called him, somewhat irrelevantly, “a pub bore.”
Security minister Tom Tugendhat linked the Reform leader with the left, telling the press: “It doesn’t matter whether you’re Jeremy Corbyn or Nigel Farage — if you parrot the Kremlin’s lies, you cannot be trusted with our national security.”
Not to be outdone, Sir Keir huffed that Farage’s comments were “disgraceful,” adding that Ukraine was basically off-limits as a subject for political debate.
“Anyone who is standing for Parliament ought to be really clear that Russia is the aggressor, Putin bears responsibility, that we stand with Ukraine — as we have done from the beginning of this conflict — and Parliament has spoken with one voice on this since the beginning of the conflict,” the Labour leader said.
Indeed, he threatened a dozen Labour MPs with loss of the whip for expressing concern at Nato policy slightly before the 2022 invasion.
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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/sunak-and-starmer-unite-war
Farage said Andrew Tate was ‘important voice’ for men in podcast interview
Reform UK leader has also argued against diversity quotas and said people on benefits were ‘too stupid’ to work in appearances over past year
Nigel Farage has praised the misogynist influencer Andrew Tate for being an “important voice” for the “emasculated” and giving boys “perhaps a bit of confidence at school” in online interviews that appear to be aimed at young men over the past year.
The Reform UK leader spoke in favour of Tate for defending “male culture” in a Strike It Big podcast that aired in February, while acknowledging that the influencer had gone “over the top” and elsewhere that he had said some “pretty horrible” things.
Since December 2022, Tate has been facing charges in Romania of human trafficking, rape, and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women, which he denies.
Many politicians and teachers have spoken out against Tate’s influence on young boys in the UK, after the self-proclaimed misogynist said women belonged in the home and were a man’s property. “There’s no way you can be rooted in reality and not be sexist,” Tate said in one video.
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Farage’s interview comments
February 2023
“‘I’m too fat, I’m too stupid, I’m too lazy, I don’t get out of bed in the morning. I smoke drugs, give me money’ … That’s what we’re saying. ‘I don’t need to work, the state will provide for me’ … We cannot afford it.
“I welcomed much of [Liz Truss’s] budget. I think if there is a criticism, they tried to do too much, too quickly, without prior explanation … What happened here is the backbenches wobbled really quite quickly because a lot of Conservative backbenchers are basically globalists and listened to those big noises from the multinationals and the IMF. As soon as she sacked Kwarteng, it was all over … I would much have preferred her to hold her nerve, keep making those arguments and see if the party dared get rid of them.”
August 2023
“I think Andrew Tate is a fascinating figure. I think his speaking to men, who because of the woke agenda were told they couldn’t be male in any way at all, was an important thing. But I feel some of his comments were pretty horrible.”
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April 2024
Javier Milei is “Thatcherism on steroids – this is incredible, cutting and slashing public expenditure, doing all the things he’s done … That’s leadership … He is amazing.”
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