The green blob is creating its own fake opposition
Parliamentary opposition to Net Zero is being staged by its authors
The term that has become increasingly used is “kayfabe” — a term borrowed from the stage-managed sport of wrestling, in which rivalries between wrestlers, and even the fights themselves are simply scripted to maximise audience engagement.
The problem is one I have been attempting to explain in these articles as the failure to distinguish between policy and politics. The Tories are putting on a good show of a policy U-turn, but as I explain below, they are drawing on green blob-funded organisations to make their criticisms of Ed Milband. In this most recent case, they are using the work of former Number 10 insiders from the Boris Johnson administration, whose agenda was indistinct from Ed Miliband’s. Indeed, they hosted Ed Miliband as a keynote speaker at an event at the end of 2024. It’s a shame that not even the Telegraph noticed it.
Policy is everything, but it is also superficial. In an ideal circumstance, a party’s offering to the public is a coherent and confident expression of its ideological outlook. And the public, having heard the arguments, draw their Xs, sending MPs to Westminster, and choosing a government. A government attempts to offer policy, which with the cooperation of Parliament, turns into law.
But we do not live in ideal circumstances.
First, there is — or was — the cross-party Westminster consensus. As I have argued, the agreement not to debate climate policy denied democracy absolutely. The traditional parties, by failing to offer any meaningful decision put politics — and policymaking — beyond the reach of the public. If you cannot vote against a thing, then you cannot meaningfully vote for a thing. It was only when that democratic deficit created the opportunity for an outsider party that the Tories put on a show of breaking from the consensus.
But then there is the wider Westminster ecosystem — the so-called “civil society” organisations, which feed into the policymaking process, having displaced the public from politics. Practically all of these organisations, which include think tanks, professional organisations, NGOs, and so on, seem to have funding relationships with the green blob.
This is what I mean by politics — the process by which policies are formulated. If we’re not allowed in, and our interests are not represented, then policy is all but irrelevant. The bobs that fund “civil society” using countless and uncounted £billions overwhelm independent perspectives, strategic coordination being a condition of grant funding.
A show is being staged, in which green blob outfits seemingly call out the policies lobbied for by green blob outfits.
So, while we may cheer that Miliband got a bloody nose from it, we’re not empowered by the spectacle. The spectacle itself is just different limbs of the same blob, seeking the optimal solution for itself. Here is a recent Daily Sceptic piece about this plastic politics.
Another Phony Battle in the Climate War
According to the Telegraph, Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero Ed Miliband has “been accused of ‘covering up’ evidence that Labour’s Net Zero plans will increase household electricity bills”. A “full cost-benefit analysis” of “regional energy pricing” had been promised, according to the newspaper, but so far Miliband’s department has yet to produce the goods, with complainants claiming that the results would undermine his Clean Power 2030 agenda, and this explains its absence, they claim. No doubt, both Net Zero and Miliband’s 2030 agenda are falling apart. But this spat between a Minister and his shadow is not a war that we should take sides in, as neither represent our interests and the criticism of Miliband fails to address the real problems with any part of Net Zero.
The accusations emerge from the Conservative Party and an organisation called Britain Remade, which the Telegraph describe as “a Right-leaning think tank”. But that is misleading. A naïve reading of the piece would leave the impression that both Britain Remade and the Conservatives are Net Zero sceptics. But Britain Remade is a Green Blob-funded organisation, founded by (among other former green-Tory wonks) Sam Richards, a former advisor to Boris Johnson’s government – which sought to remake Britain as “the Saudi Arabia of wind” Presumably, Richards told Johnson it was a good idea.
There is an apparent split in the Green Blob over the question of how to manage and charge for use of the grid. There is a surfeit of energy available in remote locations near wind farms and rural solar farms, whereas more densely populated areas, particularly in the southeast, now face insufficient capacity to carry the power. The problem is amplified by electrification of heating and transport (EVs), growth in which is going to be stalled until new capacity can be built. How to pay for it, without incurring the problem of pushing prices up even further?
