My weekly column in the daily newspaper, the Plymouth Herald (published 26.9.23), strangely omitted my very mild criticism of Starmer’s Labour Party stance on the Climate Emergency – policies that will ensure chaos just as much as the Tories. Ho hum, so much for parliamentary democracy.

The cuts to climate action announced by PM Sunak last week are catastrophic. Doing even less to reduce global warming emissions locks-down the UK, hiding indoors from a global epidemic of new green industries and the fresh-air of climate jobs.

Sunak is not responding to science or fact. He is simply attempting to prop-up the core vote of his climate-denying and self-delusional Tory base-support, and echoing the ideological bigotry of his far-Right backbenchers – those political immigrants who entered the Conservative Party from ultra-nationalist organisations such as UKIP and even fascist sects just a few years ago.

He openly states that politicians may take into account scientific reports from their own consultants, including the Climate Change Committee, but politicians don’t have to follow the research. Tories know best. After all, look how well they’re doing on NHS waiting lists, the housing crisis, child poverty and mental ill-health.

Such political manoeuvring away from emissions-reductions will do nothing to protect us from the immediate threats:  extreme weather events that are flooding our homes, polluting our rivers and seas. The unprecedented sudden extreme heatwaves, droughts, hurricane force winds, harvest failures and food shortages, and the transport disruptions that create job lay-offs.

The climate movements’ drive towards zero-emissions is a drive for a marvellous level of new investment in millions of climate jobs and new social infrastructure to meet the new conditions of disruptive, inclement weather conditions. The government opposes all this. But to cut that essential ambition is to damn those less able to afford costly adaptations, to hell.

The working class is being left to fester as extremes of weather accelerate. The commitment to fossil fuels only benefits the big shareholders in the industries with the highest short-term profits at the expense of any long-term stability.

The faster we move the less damage will be done. For renewable electricity alone, there are 95 new bids for green energy generation to produce 3.7GW of power, at a cost almost half that of fossil-fuelled electricity generation. Thousands of decent new jobs. Now all that is in question, withdrawn or stalled due to new financial uncertainty caused by policy change. It is as if the Government wants to see climate catastrophe and economic collapse.

Britain should be investing in new factories to produce the transmission cables needed for the green energy grid in a world crying-out for cables! New factories to mass produce the heat-pumps needed to replace gas boilers would bolster the economy. A renaissance of industrial production of wind generators, an industry moved overseas by this governments policies, would employ thousands and could resurrect steel-making with fresh investment in green-steel production. 

The social investment government should make in insulating our fourteen million homes, currently lousy with damp, toxic mould and chilling draughts, the priority. That would create more than 2 million jobs, the transition of workers currently in low-paid casualised and precarious service jobs to decent and secure employment rebuilding our social infrastructure and security.

But no. Instead our government, unlike most in the world, wants to invest in new oil and gas fields in the North Sea, offering billions in tax-subsidies to private overseas corporations, and mechanised coal fields employing tiny numbers, the produce of which is for exports by owners from overseas, with no benefit to our economy. 

Only the super-rich will benefit financially, but even they won’t be able to stop the impact of ever-increasing climate chaos. Those who point to China and India as worse cases are blind to the fact these are the nations developing renewable energy the fastest, out-competing our paltry industries and soon to cross the tipping point towards cleaner and cheaper energy production than ours. 

The question is begged: “how is it that Sunak is getting away with this?” On the one hand, the leader of the Conservative Party is simply speaking to those loyal to the Party, either because they don’t believe climate change is a threat, or they don’t want to pay anything towards the costs (let the working class pay). On the other, his official opposition, the Labour Party, is not even prepared to champion the weak climate actions contained in Corbyn’s manifesto. There is no authority ready to legislate to force fossil-corporations pay for the damage they’ve caused and continue to cause.

Britain is heading in entirely the wrong direction. Some misguided and frankly laughable (if it wasn’t so desperately tragic) notion of going our own way, being our own people, returning to the glory days of past empire leading the world by example (all a mix of myth and colonial barbarity) has fed a total denial of reality.

We are at great risk. Either we get in front of the changes or we will be drowned in the torrents already coursing through our streets. If governments refuse to listen to science or even look out of their windows, then the people have to rise-up to force the changes needed. The only power available to challenge and stop oil is the mass of the working class, stopping production. If that means breaking inhuman economic policies and environmentally destructive laws, so be it. System Change not Climate Change!