Rishi Sunak’s Friday morning was probably ruined by the furious resignation letter he received from Zac Goldsmith, in which the Tory peer accused the prime minister of being apathetic about the environment and a failure on climate policy. But was Goldsmith right?
It appears so. While it would be difficult to accuse Sunak of being a climate denier, the evidence suggests he does not care about the subject, which has resulted in a lack of climate action and risks the UK helping push the planet towards an uninhabitable condition.
Though the prime minister is always keen to regale audiences with how his young daughters are champions for the environment, he is certainly not one. When he was chancellor, ministers in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the Foreign Office frequently described him as a “block” on funding for climate and nature, and said that at the cabinet table he argued for trade deals with countries that had lower environmental standards, rather than using Britain’s power on the world stage to push for change.
Critics are keen to point out Sunak refused to sign a foreword to the Dasgupta report, a review of the value of biodiversity. This review, by the respected professor Sir Partha Dasgupta, was welcomed across the board, even by the former chancellor Sajid Javid, despite Sunak appearing unimpressed by its findings.
Still, people can learn, and in his role as prime minister Sunak has had access to all the best experts and evidence available on climate. He was given a major opportunity to stand on the world stage as the UK’s new prime minister at the UN’s Cop27 climate summit last year, but he flip-flopped on attending, and only flew out to Egypt at the last minute, giving the audience a policy-free speech about how his children care about the environment.
Since then, things have gone downhill. His government failed to include environmental protections in the retained EU law bill, which will scrap many EU regulations that protect the environment in the UK. Sunak’s government has also committed to extracting more polluting fossil fuels, from the Cumbria coalmine to the Rosebank oilfield.
And under his leadership, the energy department has spent far more time attacking the Labour party for taking donations from a funder of the protest group Just Stop Oil than it has championing the net zero by 2050 target enshrined in law by Sunak’s predecessors.
Just look at this week’s Climate change committee report. The UK was not perfect on climate policy under Boris Johnson, but the committee, chaired by a Conservative MP, found the country had regressed further over the past year.
It said the country had failed on insulation, with fewer homes protected under government-backed schemes than last year; that there had been little progress on transport emissions; there was no programme for behaviour change; and wind and solar farms were being installed at a snail’s pace. The committee specifically blamed a failure of political leadership for the stalled progress.
Lord Deben, the outgoing chair of the committee, said its confidence that the government would meet its shorter-term carbon-cutting goals by 2030 was even lower than last year, despite the publication of a new green strategy by ministers. “We’ve slipped behind, and other people have moved ahead,” he said. “This is not a report that suggests satisfactory progress.”
Sunak has also been outflanked on the normally politically straightforward subject of puppies. Although he got a dog for his daughters and takes it on the occasional photo opportunity, he allowed the Defra minister Mark Spencer, who is cosy with the farming and hunting lobbies, to scrap the kept animals bill, a decision that Labour and the Lib Dems are looking to exploit and which is likely to allow animal cruelty to continue for years to come.
In his resignation letter, Goldsmith wrote: “The problem is not that the government is hostile to the environment, it is that you, our prime minister, are simply uninterested.” It is hard to disagree. Unless Sunak has a swift and significant change of heart, he is likely to be remembered for allowing the UK to lose its role at the forefront of the climate fight.
