LONDON — Kemi Badenoch’s new-look Conservative opposition is still working out the policies it wants to put before voters. But the U.K.’s net zero target is already firmly in the party’s firing line.
The Tories, while in government, passed legislation to reduce net carbon emissions to zero by 2050. Now Badenoch and her shadow team say the target damages the country — and they want to ditch it.
Setting that aim in 2019 was a “mistake,” argued interim Shadow Energy Secretary Andrew Bowie.
“What’s quite clear is that the setting of arbitrary targets with no clear plan on how to deliver them does not work for the country,” he told POLITICO in an interview, his first since stepping into the role while his colleague Claire Coutinho takes maternity leave.
Bowie added: “It leaves us economically worse off, and at a competitive disadvantage to other nations as well. So yeah — Kemi’s absolutely right when she says that it was a mistake.”
Former Prime Minister Theresa May signed the target into law weeks before leaving Downing Street in June 2019. But since her election as Conservative leader in November, Badenoch has distanced herself from one of her party’s largest legacies.
“We made it the law that we would deliver net zero by 2050, and only then did we start thinking about how we would do that,” she said in January. Badenoch insists she wants to tackle climate change but won the leadership contest after branding herself a “net-zero sceptic.”
And she does not consider the target a vote winner. “What we have now is this zealotry where it sounds like it is absolute zero and people want to take us back to the stone age,” Badenoch told a podcast this week to mark her first 100 days in the job. “That is just terrible.”
Bowie was May’s parliamentary private secretary when she signed the goal into law and he is now trying to align the two positions.
“I don’t regret [the target],” he said. “I just — I regret, maybe, the way that we went about it.” His old boss May would “recognize the Conservative Party is under new management,” he added.
The party’s shift to disavow its old keynote green policy comes as it seeks to hammer Labour ministers over the government’s clean energy policy stall.
Labour is sprinting to decarbonize the power system so that it runs on 95 percent clean power by 2030, with the promise this will cut energy bills. The Conservatives say it will force up costs in pursuit of a “misguided ideology.”
Bowie — who was an energy minister until last summer’s general election — has distanced himself from other policies pursued by his former department, including dishing out billions of pounds in government subsidies to the Drax biomass plant.
“I don’t think anybody can defend the eye-watering amounts of money that were funneled to Drax over the period that we were in government, and that’s why we’re taking the position that it needs to end,” he said.
His party will face up to some “hard truths” under Badenoch’s leadership, he said. Bowie previously admitted he and other former Conservative ministers should have moved quicker to roll out mini-nuclear power projects and gone “further and faster” on home insulation.
The Tories face an uphill battle to win over the public — the party collapsed to its worst result in terms of seats at last year’s election, and is now behind the right-wing challenger outfit Reform UK, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls.
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