Sir Keir Starmer and shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves are under attack from within Labour circles as they turn increasingly chilly towards the party’s flagship environmental policy in an election year.
The opposition leadership has gone from a firm promise in 2021 to invest £28 billion a year on a “Green Prosperity Plan”, via increased borrowing, to merely an “ambition” to come up with the money in the second half of the next Parliament, subject to fiscal rules.
But given the scale of the climate crisis, and the need to retool the UK economy with low-carbon energy, transport and industry, some critics say Sir Keir is failing a test of leadership and playing into Conservative attacks on his alleged lack of principle.
Labour MP Barry Gardiner, a former energy and climate change secretary, said the party’s leadership was being short-sighted. “The green investment plan is going to happen. It has to happen,” he told the Standard.
“All I know is that if you want to sustainably grow the economy, you have to have a Green Prosperity Plan. So there’s no point in saying we’re not going to do the Green Prosperity Plan until we’ve sustainably grown the economy.”
After the economy was blown up by Liz Truss’s unfunded borrowing plans, the Conservatives have thrown Labour on the defensive by claiming the green project amounts to a tax grab on ordinary families.
At a high-powered business conference in London on Thursday, Sir Keir framed the green transition as “probably the single biggest opportunity that we've been presented with for decades, in relation to the next generation of jobs, the technology of the future”.
But how to pay for it? Ms Reeves reacted frostily earlier at the conference when she was asked about criticism from party adviser Jürgen Maier, the former UK head of Siemens, who insists that the £28bn plan is vital to future growth.
“He is advising us on transport” rather than the environment, she said, before declining 10 times in a Sky News interview to re-commit to the plan.
When she announced the plan three years ago, Ms Reeves vowed to be “the first green chancellor” and said the costs of climate change would be greater if the government did not invest now. But since then, she said, the costs of government debt have soared and Labour will “never play fast and loose with the public finances”.
Baroness Young of Old Scone, who is a trustee for the Labour Climate and Environment Forum, said Ms Reeves was right to stress fiscal probity but that the Conservatives were ripe for attack on the environment, after Rishi Sunak diluted net zero policies.
“Tory flip-flopping about climate change and the environment creates uncertainty and damages public commitment and business investment, all for the sake of attempting to appeal to fringe voters. It isn’t working as a campaign tactic,” she said.
“The Tories can try to present Labour’s green commitment as old-style spend. In reality, a green economy is the way of the future.”
Rebecca Newsom, head of politics at Greenpeace UK, said Labour was right in 2021 and wrong to backtrack now.
“Starmer has rightly spoken about the need to invest in the country’s renewal, and there are huge growth and job opportunities for all regions of the UK if green investment is truly prioritised,” she said, arguing that the United States and European Union were “already racing ahead of us”.
“Voters want their bills to go down, and prioritising renewables and home insulation would do just that. These kinds of policies are really popular with voters, we just need politicians to act.”
