So Kemi Badenoch, whose party has spent weeks attacking Keir Starmer for registering use of a flat from a party donor, has been secretly using the flat of another millionaire donor, currency trader and Tufton Street think-tanker to run her own campaign https://t.co/iXlS9msCIB
Badenoch being holed up in the flat of a millionaire donor, currency trader and Tufton Street think-tanker is actually depressingly predictable.
Tory leadership hopeful Kemi Badenoch has been running her leadership campaign from the home of a wealthy donor, according to Bloomberg reports.
Despite the Conservatives going on the attack over Sir Keir Starmer’s use of a London flat in the run-up to the general election, which he declared, Rishi Sunak’s potential successor has been doing precisely the same thing – and has yet to make that fact public.
Bloomberg notes that Badenoch has been running her leadership campaign from the home of Neil Record, who is the chair of the climate science denial group Net Zero Watch.
Neil is also the former chair of the Institute of Economic Affairs, a think-tank closely linked to Liz Truss that was originally based on the infamous Tufton Street.
Hintze, who has donated more than £4 million to the Conservatives since 2002, also donated £10,000 in August to leadership hopeful Priti Patel, who was voted out of the contest by Tory MPs this week. Tugendhat also received £3,000 from Hintze in December.
The GWPF actively campaigns against the government’s climate policies and rejects established science on rising temperatures, calling carbon dioxide a “benefit to the planet”.
Lord Hintze has said he believes “there is climate change” caused “in part due to human activity over the past century”, but “all sides must be heard” on climate change “to reach the right conclusion for society as a whole”.
Authors working for the world’s foremost climate science body, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have said that “it is a statement of fact, we cannot be any more certain; it is unequivocal and indisputable that humans are warming the planet”.
The IPCC has stated that we are in the midst of “widespread and rapid [changes] … unprecedented over many centuries, to many thousands of years”.
Between the 2019 general election and the start of the 2024 campaign, the Conservatives received £8.4 million from fossil fuel interests, highly polluting industries, and climate science deniers.
Cleverly, Tugendhat, Patel are not the only Tory leadership hopefuls to have received donations from figures associated with the GWPF. DeSmog revealed in August that Kemi Badenoch had received £10,000 towards her campaign from Neil Record, a millionaire Tory donor and chair of Net Zero Watch (NZW), the GWPF’s campaign arm.
Record is also a “life vice president” of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) think tank, which he chaired until July 2023. The IEA, which supports new fossil fuel production, has received funding from the oil giant BP every year from 1967 to at least 2018.
Record has given money to both the IEA and the GWPF, which are part of the Tufton Street network of think tanks and lobbying groups based in Westminster campaigning for less government regulation, including on climate change.
The latest register of interests also shows that Record donated £2,000 to Tory MP Jesse Norman, who is publicly supporting Badenoch’s campaign.
As DeSmog has reported, Tugendhat also received donations and gifts worth £7,000 during the general election campaign from Tory donor and former party treasurer Lord Michael Spencer, who is a fossil fuel investor.
Spencer is the largest shareholder in Deltic Energy, which this year received licences to explore the North Sea for oil and gas. He also holds shares in Pantheon Resources, a UK company exploring for oil in Alaska.
Spencer, who has donated £6 million to the Conservatives since 2005, previously told DeSmog that oil and gas investments are less than two percent of his portfolio.
Views on Net Zero
Tugendhat, Badenoch, and Patel have vocally criticised the UK’s climate policies.
In a July interview on GB News, Tugendhat said the UK’s target of achieving net zero emissions by 2050 was “not realistic”. Badenoch said in 2022 that it was “arbitrary” and last year suggested she would back delaying it, which would contravene the UK’s legally-binding climate commitments. Patel shares this position, and told GB News last year that net zero targets should be “paused” because the “public are not ready”.
Polling by More in Common and E3G during the general election period found that a majority of people in every UK constituency are worried about climate change. Some 61 percent of 2024 Conservative voters said they are worried about climate change, matched by 76 percent of Labour voters, and 65 percent of the country overall.
In his GB News interview, Tugendhat also defended the previous government’s support for new oil and gas extraction, saying: “Drilling our own oil in the North Sea is more carbon efficient than bringing it in from anywhere else.”
The claim that UK oil and gas has a lower carbon footprint than imports is “misleading” and can only be achieved “by comparing UK gas production to the very dirtiest gas imports”, according to the research and campaign group Uplift.
Cleverly has supported the 2050 target but has said he would favour a “competition-based approach” rather than using the power and funding of the state. However, the private sector has often acted to delay climate action. According to the non-profits groups NewClimate Institute and Carbon Market Watch, which surveyed 51 major companies, their median goal is to cut emissions by 30 percent by 2030 – well below the 43 percent reduction identified by the IPCC.
Cleverly’s leadership campaign told DeSmog that “We thank all of our donors for their support for James Cleverly as the best candidate to unite the Conservative Party and win the next general election.”
Tugendhat, Patel, and Hintze have been approached for comment.
The Institute of Economic Affairs has its headquarters on Lord North Street, Westminster. Credit: Des Blenkinsopp (CC BY-SA 2.0)
A senior figure at the influential Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) think tank contributed to a new documentary that spread numerous myths about climate change.
Stephen Davies, an academic who has worked in educational outreach roles at the IEA since 2010, appeared several times in Climate The Movie: The Cold Truth – a new film directed by climate science denier Martin Durkin.
In the documentary, Davies claims that climate activists want to impose an “austere” life on ordinary people. “Behind all the talk about a climate emergency, climate crisis” is “an animus and hostility towards” working-class people, “their lifestyle, their beliefs and a desire to change it by force if necessary,” he says.
According to the website Skeptical Science, which debunks climate misinformation, Climate The Movie contains more than two dozen myths about climate change. The film suggests that we shouldn’t be worried about greenhouse gas emissions, because plants need carbon dioxide. “We’re in a CO2 famine,” one interviewee claims.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s foremost climate science body, has stated that carbon dioxide “is responsible for most of global warming” since the late 19th century, which has increased the “severity and frequency of weather and climate extremes, like heat waves, heavy rains, and drought”.
Climate The Movie producer Thomas Nelson told DeSmog that “I see the misguided fight against carbon dioxide as being as crazy as fighting against oxygen or water vapour, and I think scaring innocent children about this is deeply evil”.
The IEA said that “Steve firmly believes that climate change is happening and carbon emissions are having an impact. His view that climate policy imposes costs, particularly on working-class communities, is entirely mainstream. IEA publications and spokespeople have supported action on climate change, including carbon pricing.”
A screenshot of Stephen Davies of the Institute of Economic Affairs in Climate The Movie: The Cold Truth. Credit: Climate The Movie / YouTube
In 2018, Greenpeace’s investigative journalism unit Unearthed revealed that the IEA had received funding from oil major BP every year since 1967. In response to the story, an IEA spokeswoman said: “It is surely uncontroversial that the IEA’s principles coincide with the interests of our donors.”
The IEA also received a £21,000 grant from U.S. oil major ExxonMobil in 2005.
The IEA has extensive influence in politics and the media. It was pivotal to Liz Truss’s short-lived premiership as prime minister, and has boasted of its access to Conservative ministers and MPs. During the year ending March 2023, the IEA appeared in the media on 5,265 occasions, a figure 43 percent higher than its previous peak in 2019.
The group has also received donations from a number of philanthropic trusts accused of channelling funds from the fossil fuel industry and helping to support climate science denial groups. The IEA is a member of the Atlas Network – an international collaboration of “extreme” free market groups that have been accused of promoting the interests of fossil fuel companies and other large corporations.
It’s not known if the IEA has received funding from BP since 2018.
The IEA is a prominent supporter of the continued and extended use of fossil fuels. The group has advocated for the ban to be lifted on fracking for shale gas, calling it the “moral and economic choice”. The IEA has also said that a ban on new North Sea oil and gas would be “madness”, has criticised the windfall tax imposed on North Sea oil and gas firms, and said that the government’s commitment to “max out” the UK’s fossil fuel reserves is a “welcome step”.
The IEA is part of the Tufton Street network – a cluster of libertarian think tanks and pressure groups that are in favour of more fossil fuel extraction and are opposed to state-led climate action. These groups are characterised by a lack of transparency over their sources of funding. The IEA does not publicly declare the names of its donors.
“From Brexit to Trussonomics, the IEA has consistently peddled and promoted destructive and damaging policies,” Green Party MP Caroline Lucas told DeSmog. “Yet perhaps nothing will prove more dangerous long term than the stream of climate denialism and calls to delay action that have been pouring out of Tufton Street for many years.
“Clearly the IEA is now ramping up its climate culture war and the Conservative Party has been following suit. The cross-party consensus on climate action we used to have in Parliament is under strain like never before.”
The IEA and Stephen Davies were approached for comment.
Climate The Movie
During the documentary, Davies suggests that action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is being used to limit the freedom of individuals. He claims that climate activists want to impose “a much more austere simple kind of lifestyle” on people “in which the consumption choices of the great bulk of the population are controlled or even prohibited.”
Davies adds that: “What you have here is a classic example of class hypocrisy and self-interest masquerading as public spirited concern. You could take these kinds of green socialist more seriously if they lived off grid, they cut their own consumption down to the minimum, they never flew. Instead you get constant talk about how human consumption is destroying the planet but the people making all this talk show absolutely no signs of reducing their own.”
The documentary also features an interview with Benny Peiser, the director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) – the UK’s leading climate science denial group. Peiser has previously claimed that it would be “extraordinary anyone should think there is a climate crisis”, while the GWPF has expressed the view that carbon dioxide has been mischaracterised as pollution, when in fact it is a “benefit to the planet”.
The film was favourably reviewed by commentator Toby Young in The Spectator magazine, who described it as “a phenomenon”. Young has previously said that he’s sceptical about the idea of human-caused climate change.
The IPCC has stated it is “unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land”, while scientists at NASA have found that the last 10 years were the hottest on record. Earth’s average surface temperature in 2023 was the warmest since records began in 1880.
The IPCC has also warned that false and misleading information “undermines climate science and disregards risk and urgency” of climate action.
The documentary also features Claire Fox, a member of the House of Lords who was nominated for a peerage by former prime minister Boris Johnson in 2020.
Fox used the documentary to claim that, by tackling climate change, people will be forced to pay more “to simply live the lives that they were leading”.
She suggests that supporters of climate action are trying to “take away what we consider to be not luxuries but necessities.”
The UK’s Climate Change Committee, which advises the government on measures to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, estimates that the combined policies will cost less than one percent of the country’s national output.
The Office for Budget Responsibility, the UK’s independent economic forecaster, has also said that “the costs of failing to get climate change under control would be much larger than those of bringing emissions down to net zero”.
Claire Fox and the GWPF were approached for comment.
A Charitable Cause?
The IEA is a registered charity, meaning that it receives generous tax breaks.
The group justifies this charitable status partly on the basis of its educational outreach programme, which aims to “equip tomorrow’s leaders with a deep understanding of free market economics”.
The IEA claims that: “Our aim is to change the climate of opinion in the long term and our work with students is a key part of this.”
In the year ending March 2023, the group claimed to have engaged with 3,500 students and 1,200 teachers via its seminars, internships and summer schools.
Formerly the IEA’s head of education and now a senior education fellow, Davies is a senior member of the group’s outreach programme. He is the first person listed in the IEA’s student speakers brochure, which advertises the IEA staff members who are available to speak at schools or universities.
The brochure also lists the IEA’s chief operating officer Andy Mayer, who has said that the government should “get rid of” its target of achieving net zero emissions by 2050, which he called a “very hard left, socialist, central-planning model”.
The non-profit Good Law Project recently made a complaint to the Charity Commission about the IEA, claiming that the libertarian group had breached charity rules. Namely, the Good Law Project claims that the IEA is in breach of rules stating that charities must avoid presenting “biased and selective information in support of a preconceived point of view”.
The Charity Commission rejected this complaint, stating that: “We have assessed the concerns raised and have not identified concerns that the charity is acting outside of its objects or the Commission’s published guidance.”
Good Law Project campaigns manager Hannah Greer told DeSmog: “It won’t be a surprise to anyone that the IEA is cementing its role as a major mouthpiece for climate change scepticism. It’s a huge scandal that the IEA is still allowed to peddle fringe views under the guise of being an ‘educational charity’ while benefiting from taxpayer subsidies.
“This has been allowed to happen because we have seen alarming and unambiguous regulatory failure from the Charity Commission – who have been presented with evidence of how the IEA is flouting charity law, but have chosen to look the other way.”
Jacob Rees-Mogg, Lee Anderson and Liz Truss at the launch of ‘Popular Conservatism’. Credit: PA Images / Alamy
The launch of Popular Conservatism saw attacks on “net zero zealots” and the Climate Change Committee.
Liz Truss’s new ‘Popular Conservatism’ faction of the Conservative Party launched today with attacks on net zero targets and environmental bodies, using the playbook established by libertarian lobby groups.
The self-styled PopCons included politicians critical of climate policies and science, including Lord Frost, who is a director of the climate science denial Global Warming Policy Foundation, as well as Conservative MP Lee Anderson and Reform party president Nigel Farage.
PopCon director Mark Littlewood is the outgoing managing director of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), an influential free market think tank that has talked up its access to government.
The IEA received funding from oil company BP every year from 1967 to 2018, according to an Unearthed investigation confirmed by the IEA. Both IEA and BP have declined to say if this funding continues, when asked by DeSmog.
A branded leaflet handed out at the event, under the heading “what we stand for”, stated: “End net zero zealotry and promote energy pragmatism to provide both security of supply and low prices”.
The leaflet also named the Climate Change Committee (CCC), the government’s independent advisory body on hitting its climate targets, as one of the institutions which “stand in the way of meaningful reform”.
Littlewood’s speech criticised the UK’s net zero target, complaining about “the Climate Change Committee, pronouncing on our progress to the eye-wateringly [sic] expensive and almost certainly unachievable aim of being carbon net zero”.
Lee Anderson, former deputy chair of the Conservative Party, repeatedly attacked net zero in his speech, which he claimed “never comes up on the doorstep” aside from when it is brought up by “the odd weirdo”.
Anderson said: “if we became net zero tomorrow, this country… it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference to the earth’s atmosphere”, pointing to the higher emissions produced by other countries.
Anderson argued that net zero would cost voters money, calling for an “opt-in, opt-out” approach to what he called “green levies” on energy bills, adding: “Not one politician can put their hand on their hearts and tell you how much it’s [net zero] going to cost.”
The CCC has estimated the cost of net zero at less than one percent of GDP, while the Office for Budget Responsibility has said that “the costs of failing to get climate change under control would be much larger than those of bringing emissions down to net zero”.
Liz Truss used her speech to say: “If we look at the net zero zealots that Lee has just been talking about, the need for cheaper energy is being drowned out by some very active campaigners.” She claimed voters “don’t like the net zero policies which are making energy more expensive”.
The International Monetary Fund found in September 2022 that the energy crisis was hitting UK households harder than any country in western Europe, due to the UK’s reliance on gas for heating homes.
Tufton Street Links
Politicians fronting the PopCon group have a history of working with anti-green think tanks and supporting more fossil fuel extraction.
Truss (who went to the University of Oxford with Littlewood) has extensive ties to the IEA, which is part of the Tufton Street network – a cluster of libertarian pressure groups and think tanks that oppose state-led climate action.
In 2022, Truss’s campaign for Tory leader was run by Ruth Porter, a former communications director at the IEA. Once in 10 Downing Street, Truss hired Porter as her senior special advisor, and has since appointed her to the House of Lords. A number of former Tufton Street figures were appointed to government advisory roles during Truss’s short-lived tenure in Downing Street.
The IEA publicly supported Truss’s ‘mini-budget’, which caused economic chaos by promising large tax cuts without explaining how they would be funded. While in office, Truss lifted the UK’s ban on fracking for shale gas, a policy advocated by the IEA. (The policy was ditched by her successor Rishi Sunak.)
The IEA has consistently opposed UK government climate policies, preferring “market solutions”. In October 2022, IEA executive Andy Mayer said the government should “get rid of” its net zero target, which he called a “very hard left, socialist, central-planning model”.
During her 2022 leadership campaign, Truss received £5,000 from Lord Vinson, one of the few known funders of the Tufton Street-based Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s main climate science denial group.
Rees-Mogg also has a long record of opposing climate policies. Earlier this month he said: “the current headlong rush to net zero risks impoverishing the nation to no global benefit on emissions”.
The UK government’s legally-binding target to cut carbon dioxide emissions to net zero by 2050 is part of international efforts to keep global warming below 1.5C.
As Business and Energy Secretary in 2022, Rees-Mogg supported overturning the UK’s ban on fracking, and said “we have to stop demonising oil and gas” in a meeting with the UAE’s state investment company.
He also receives around £29,000 per month to host a show on right-wing broadcaster GB News. A DeSmog investigation last year found one in three GB News hosts spread climate science denial on air in 2022, while more than half attacked net zero policies. The channel‘s co-owner, Paul Marshall, has £1.8 billion invested in fossil fuels via his investment fund Marshall Wace.
Science Denial
Several figures with ties to climate science denial turned out for the PopCon launch. They included Lord Frost, a trustee of the GWPF who last year said global warming could be “beneficial”, along with Dame Andrea Jenkyns, who sits on the board of the GWPF’s campaign arm, Net Zero Watch.
The IEA and GWPF have both received funding from Neil Record, a Conservative donor who was IEA chairman until July 2023 and remains chair of Net Zero Watch. Record has donated thousands to Tory MP Steve Baker, an IEA ally and former GWPF trustee who has claimed much climate science is “contestable” and “propagandised”.
The PopCon launch was also attended by GB News host Nigel Farage, honorary president of right-wing party Reform UK, which campaigns to “scrap net zero”. Last year the party received £135,000 from donors who spread climate denial or had fossil fuel interests. Reform leader Richard Tice has claimed that “CO2 isn’t poison; it’s plant food”.
Farage posed for a photo at the PopCon event with Lois Perry, director of climate denial group CAR26, who is running for leader of UKIP and last month said she does not believe in human-caused climate change.
Addressing the audience Truss made a series of bizarre attacks on the Left, taking aim at “wokeism” and said the Tories had failed to “take on the left-wing extremists”.
“Wokeism seems to be on the curriculum,” said Truss. “There is confusion about basic biological facts, like what is a woman.
“Look at the net zero zealots, if you listen to the Today programme, I don’t recommend it, you’ll hear demands for more public spending.”
Truss went on to warn that the left were “on the march and actively organising”.
“These people have repurposed themselves, they don’t believe they are socialist or communists anymore. They say they’re environmentalists, they say they’re in favour of helping people across all communities, they are in favour of supporting LGBT people or groups of ethnic minorities.
“So they no longer admit that they are collectivists but that is what their ideology is about.”
She went on to claim that anti-capitalists were being “pandered to” by the Government and that Conservative values were being eroded and said it was “only through Conservative values that we can give the British people what they want”, however fell short on saying what this was exactly.
Former prime minister Liz Truss during the launch of the Popular Conservatism movement at the Emmanuel Centre in central London, in a bid to rally right-wing Tory MPs ahead of a general election this year, February 6, 2024
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Running through a list of enemies almost longer than her catastrophic time in Downing Street, Ms Truss nevertheless claimed that Britain was “full of secret Conservatives — people who agree with us but don’t want to admit it,” while the Tory party had been appeasing “left-wing extremists.”
Painting a picture of a world on the edge of socialism, the former prime minister, best known for crashing the economy in a matter of days, asserted that “the left have been on the march.”
“They have been on the march in our institutions, they have been on the march in our corporate world, they are on the march globally,” she claimed.
Taking on this menace and “changing the system itself” will require “resilience and bravery,” Ms Truss added.
Unfortunately, rather than resilience and bravery, she had to hand only Lee Anderson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, former frontbenchers taking a break from their present gigs on GB News.
I’m trying to get a handle on the Heritage Foundation and whether it has influence over UK Tory politicians e.g. through the Institute of Economic Affairs. Liz Truss and Krazy Kwarteng were strongly influenced by the IEA.
It’s clear that the Heritage Foundation has had huge influence in US politics since the Regan administration, with huge influence during Trump’s presidency. It’s part of the mechanism of plutocracy whereby the rich and powerful dominate politics instead of representative democracy. I’m chasing this mostly because of Heritage Foundation’s climate-destroying policies and whether this is what Rishi Sunak is following.
16/8 This is taking some time, plenty of info available, on the case. X
