Boris Johnson has lost the support of all his key supporters in the final months before his resignation, with Brexiteers and right-wing culture warriors who hailed him for victory first to melt away, followed by once-loyal cabinet ministers. But one group will mourn the end of the Johnson era: the Green Tories see the prime minister as their best hope for years and are concerned that his successor will not deliver on his promises.
Johnson’s premiership delivered more important environmental legislation and perhaps more progress in addressing the climate and natural crises than any of his Conservative predecessors in the past decade.
Three landmark acts of Parliament – the Agriculture Bill, the Fisheries Bill and the Environment Bill – as well as a plan to reach net zero emissions, an energy security strategy and the UN climate summit Cop26 in Glasgow last November, contributed to a vigorous Two years and a half. Johnson also led plans to phase out petrol and diesel cars, a boom in offshore wind and a pledge to protect a third of the UK’s land and seas.
Sam Hall of the Conservative Environment Network said environmental policies had always been central to Johnson, not an add-on. “Despite the political turbulence caused by Brexit and the pressure to respond to the pandemic, the Prime Minister delivered an impressive amount of new green policy domestically and prioritized environmental issues at international forums such as Cop26 and the G7.
“In particular, net zero is seen as an integral part of the Government’s alignment strategy, with a huge amount of new investment flowing into the UK’s industrial hubs as a result of our net zero target. In response to the Ukraine crisis, the Prime Minister doubled down on renewables to boost the UK’s energy security and ease the cost of living, although she failed to unlock additional support for energy efficiency from the Treasury.
Ben Goldsmith, a prominent Green Tory supporter and brother of Zac, the Foreign Secretary elevated to the Lords by Johnson, said: “I have not seen a Prime Minister before who has placed such importance on climate and nature recovery. It was bigger than we’ve seen from any previous government.”
Goldsmith emphasized Johnson’s genuine interest in nature and animal welfare issues, shared by his wife Carrie Johnson. “He has a sense of the sacred,” Goldsmith said. “Nature really matters to him. I’m not sure many political leaders share that.
Even die-hard green activists are giving Johnson his credit. Dave Timms, head of policy at Friends of the Earth, said: “As Prime Minister, Johnson has increasingly made the climate crisis part of both his personal and the Conservative Party’s public narrative. His rhetoric at times like the UN climate talks, while idiosyncratic, has not shied away from acknowledging the scale of catastrophe facing the world, nor the need for urgent action.
But campaigners also said Johnson’s green record was fragile, insufficient and undermined by U-turns and omissions. Along the way, there were also victories for the Tory party’s right-wing Net Zero Scrutiny Group, set up to obstruct climate policies. And alongside announcements like a “10-point plan” to “recover better” from the pandemic, there have been policy failures and gaps, as well as many measures – road building, airport expansion, new North Sea oil and gas licensing and a mooted new coal mine – which contradict Johnson’s stated green ambitions.
“It’s a tragedy that he seemed unable to turn around.” [his rhetoric] in decisive and consistent domestic action across government to address this crisis,” Timms said. “Key departments have been allowed to act as if the climate crisis were an optional extra or, in the case of Rishi Sunak’s Treasury, to actively undermine efforts with tax breaks for short-haul flights, cuts to insulation and welfare programs to build roads.”
The windfall tax on oil and gas companies is another example: the way it is implemented means it can wrongly incentivize fossil fuel production, as companies can largely avoid the tax by investing in new oil developments and gas in the North Sea.
According to Richard Benwell, chief executive of the charity Wildlife and Countryside Link, the rhetoric has overtaken the reality on conservation too. “Johnson has made some excellent promises … But there remains a big gap between promise and practical action,” he said.
Urgent investment was needed to restore water and habitat quality and improve the UK’s farmland, but all were “incomplete, unimplemented and underfunded”, Benwell said, and some proposals would “undermine our most important nature conservation laws’.
Those failures will be what count, Timms added. “The cost, in economic and social terms, of inaction [on the environment] will completely eclipse the money spent now, moving us towards a zero-carbon future. Measures like whole home insulation programs will save money on fuel bills, investing in green energy will free us from the tyranny of volatile fossil fuel prices. Hundreds of thousands of new and long-term jobs could be created, but the longer we delay action, the more expensive and damaging the bottom line will be.”
Johnson’s inability to hold on to his party has created an even greater danger: the prospect that his successor will abandon his green leanings to appease the Tory right. His scandals have already given space to some who have always been unhappy with environmental policies to voice their grievances.
The Net Zero Scrutiny Group of around 20 Tory MPs has suggested that net zero should be scrapped because it is too expensive and that more investment in fossil fuels is needed to combat rising energy prices. Hall called the Net Zero Scrutiny Group “a noisy minority in the party”, while the Conservative Environment Network has more than 100 MPs. However, their impact means that the incoming Green Prime Minister leaves a messy legacy and the environmentally-minded Tories must scramble to salvage what they can from the remains of the policy.
There is little merit to their claims: the UK’s energy price crisis is down to over-reliance on gas, underpinned by a failure to invest in renewables and energy efficiency, and the demand for further reliance on gas is just piling up problems for the future. But anti-green rhetoric has gained traction in the right-wing press and appears to be influencing Johnson’s potential successors: Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss are remarkably cool on green issues.
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Joshua Marks of the BrightBlue think tank, which defends green policies from a conservative perspective, warned that Johnson’s failures would mark the UK for years to come. “Johnson envisioned himself as a green king whose lasting legacy was to decarbonise and level Britain through a transition to a low-carbon economy. With distractions like the coronavirus, I suspect he won’t be remembered as such,” he said.
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