The rash of Carney

The Labour Party have brought former governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney into their climate policymaking. Could there be a worse appointment?

According to The Telegraph,

Labour has hired the former Bank of England governor Mark Carney and the boss of Barclays to help unlock billions of pounds in private investment after it was forced to abandon its £28bn green spending pledge.

Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, has appointed some of Britain’s most senior business leaders for advice on raising private investment through its proposed National Wealth Fund. 

For those who don’t know, Carney has been governor of both the Bank of Canada (2008-2013) and the Bank of England (2013-2020). As I have pointed out at length elsewhere, Carney turned the UK’s central bank into a green NGO.

Rather than dealing with the stagnation and austerity following the 2008 financial crash, Carney elevated the concept of climate risk, and used the Bank’s international position to leverage ESG and other preoccupations of Michael Bloomberg into central bank policymaking, including appointing the eco-billionaire to chair the G20 Financial Stability Board’s now disbanded Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosure. When energy prices spiked in the post lockdown period, the Bank of England, now with is green pants around its ankles, was taken by surprise that climate risks were in fact complete fiction. Carney’s successor, Andrew Bailey spoke of his shock that starving the energy sector of capital would produce higher prices and drive inflation. Luckily for him, he had Russia to blame. If he had not, the myth at the heart of Britain’s policymaking — including monetary policy — that our security and prosperity depends on Gaia’s providence and our obedience to her, would have exploded.

I have made two films that feature Carney. The first, as outlined above is here. I do not believe that Carney, or his successor and the staff at the organisations they oversaw did not know that what they were doing was causing prices to go up.

The second video is about green ideology and its myth of ‘climate crisis’. Mark Carney makes plain the fact that ‘the money is here’, in COP26, and that the climate agenda is all about ‘rewiring' the global economy’ in the interests of green billionaires. Useful idiots such as George Monbiot intervene to make the climate agenda look like a street-level popular movement, and fake academics give the ideology superficial credibility, if not plausibility.

But it is the bottom line that counts. Since I made that first video, Bloomberg’s estimated personal wealth increased by $22 billion. The billionaire had a lot to thank the former chief financial regulator for, and so in summer 2023, appointed him to chair his business empire.

In normal times, the humble Labour Party activist would not take at face value a sit-down between any senior politician and the representatives of banking corporations and billionaires to discuss the unlocking of ‘billions of pounds in private investment’. But these are not normal times, and the membership appear to have little to say about these negotiations, about which the Telegraph reports that Labour ‘has promised that each £1 of public money will be backed up by £3 of private sector investment’. So are these normal investments?

There are investments and there are ‘investments’. A mantra echoes through Hansard’s record of debates about UK (and EU and global) climate and energy policy for the last quarter century, during which time all three large legacy Westminster parties have been in government: “investor confidence”.

As recent posts here have shown, governments including and since Tony Blair’s have been determined to ensure that ‘investors’ in green tech get their profit. Through schemes such as the Renewables Obligation and its successor subsidy regime, Contracts for Difference, developers that promise to support the policy agenda are guaranteed a return, often substantially above what normal investors can expect — especially during times of ‘austerity’ that marked the end of the last Labour administration, and into the coalition ‘greenest government ever’. What governments offered big capital funds is ‘investment’ without risk.

That hypothetical Labour Party activist — who is nowhere to be seen — would rightly ask what the consumer got out of these ‘deals’ between government and Big Capital. But as David Turver points out today, energy prices are still sky-high in historical terms. It only takes a peek at the governments own figures to show that the era of green energy policy is the era of rising energy prices.

Now, the shadow and likely future Chancellor Exchequer is doing deals with one of the architects of green energy and green financial policy — the representative of a billionaire who is so fantastically wealthy that his estimated personal fortune would be sufficient to fund more than three years of the policy agenda that the Labour Party has had to abandon because it is too expensive. Rachel Reeves has seemingly put the kibosh on the £28 billion a year green spending programme, but what is she promising to Carney and his cronies as part of the £1-to-£3 public-private ‘investment’ ratio? What is the 3x pro-quo for our quid?

Of course it is guaranteed profits. And if the deal that Labour does with corporations and billionaires ‘on our behalf’ is anything like the agreements that have preceded it, then it will guarantee inflation-linked profits for fifteen years.

The green agenda means, therefore, nothing more than guaranteed profits, at the consumer’s expense.

There is apparently something of delusion in Westminster, which confuses politicians into believing that anything which is called an ‘investment’ is functionally distinct from the worst of the era of central-planning. It uses superficial market mechanisms as a fig leaf to hide the shameful fact that this is the same as state control. But from the consumer’s perspective, there is no difference between taking money from the public to fund grands projets through more circuitous routes — and letting green billionaires take the cream — than direct taxation. The green policy wonk believes that he can just explain away the rising prices — rather than rising taxes — as ‘just the market’, nothing to do with policy.

There is of course a debate about how we fund such things as utilities. Many are of a view that energy production should not be in the hands of private interests at all. But climate change seems to wash away from the political sphere any criticism from such quarters, no matter that Lawson-era policy delivered the best deals for the low-waged and poor of this country.

Gone with the labour-left’s critique of capitalism is the conservative-right’s critique of central planning. The Saudi Arabia of Wind is a place in which Tories with straight faces claim that the state’s underwriting of profits is a free-market solution to the problem of climate change.

In their places is a chimera, epitomised by the creature that is Carney, of the worst of both state socialists and crony capitalists. The appointee of the Austerity Chancellor, George Osborne. The representative of the billionaire environmentalist. The former central banker. Now he is to serve as Labour’s public-private-partnership planet-saver. The £28 billion a year that was to come from the public to fund the green agenda has been reduced to £7 billion. The one-to-three public-private funding ratio for the green agenda will take the remaining £21 billion from domestic and commercial energy consumers via the ‘market’. And the rest, of course, because you will still be required to meet the costs of making your home and lifestyle Net Zero-compliant, as well as fund those — through your bills, via the ‘market’ — who cannot afford to.

It will fail, of course. And it will fail in just the same way that Mark Carney’s biggest project, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) has failed. The attempt to forge an alliance between the world largest financial institutions of all kinds, led by Carney and Bloomberg, is shrinking as firms quit the organisations under the GFANZ umbrella. ESG, the fabric of the GFANZ, though still arguably ascendant in Europe and the UK, is elsewhere seen as a busted flush — especially in the USA. Bloomberg’s green dream is beginning to fracture into shards…

But Britain, with the help of Rachel Reeves and the Labour Party may yet sustain his place in Forbes lists of the world’s wealthiest billionaires. They truly are the party of the eco billionaires. As has been pointed out here, the fake ‘civil society’ organisations that lobby Labour’s politicians, in lieu of a connection to either its historical constituency — the working classes — or the broader public, are wholly funded by such figures as Bloomberg. The following is taken from my Climate Debate UK/Together Association report on air pollution politics…

In his three terms as New York Mayor, Michael Bloomberg revealed that local politics is an open door to the wealthy and that opposition is easily overwhelmed. Having altered the City’s constitution to allow him to run for a third term, Bloomberg used his own money to fund his campaign, outspending election rivals by multiples – 1,100 per cent in his 2009 campaign. Winning with just 585,466 votes (in a city with a population of nearly 8 million), but with a campaign spend of $109.2 million, each vote cost the billionaire $186.50. His 2002-2013 tenure was characteristically authoritarian, seeking bans on smoking, trans-fats, and large sizes of sugary drinks, and favouring aggressive policing strategies such as stop-and-frisk. 

Bloomberg’s interest in climate developed in his final term. The first significant grants by Bloomberg Philanthropies, also known as The Bloomberg Family Foundation Inc. (BFF) to environmental causes were made in 2011 – $6.5 million to the World Resources Institute and $15 million to the Sierra Club, launching his personal crusade against coal. According to the BFF’s 990 form filings, grants worth nearly $42 million were made in 2008, but grew in line with Bloomberg’s fortune, rising to an extraordinary $1.6 billion in 2019, though total grants in the following year were more modest: $497 million in 2020 and just over $1 billion in 2021, which included $202 million of climate-related grants. Bloomberg has recently committed $500 million to campaign to have all American coal plants closed, largely through litigation and supporting CSOs  

[…]

Though Michael Bloomberg has given away in philanthropic grants an amount that to any ordinary person is an extraordinary sum, it just a small fraction of his vast total net worth, estimated to be $95 billion in mid-2023 – a figure that has nearly doubled since 2018. He was easily able to buy his way into politics, by entering the mayoral race of a global city, in which a vast majority had disengaged from democratic politics. From there, Bloomberg used his money and his political position to align or control global and national CSOs and to obtain positions close the Secretary General of the United Nations and the Governor of the Bank of England, giving him proximity to and influence in policymaking in national governments and intergovernmental agencies.

Labour’s appointment of Mark Carney is a very clear signal that Labour is committed to servicing the needs, not of the country, not of the working class, not of the public, but green billionaires. Their cronies and fully-funded organisations are the only thing that qualifies as a political constituency. The current government has finally shown signs of having discovered that the green policy agenda is a liability. But they are so overwhelmed by multiple crisis of their own making, that there is little they can do to persuade the public to see past their terminal incompetence and corruption, to give them a seventh chance. Even if they were to announce the repeal of the Climate Change Act tomorrow, it would be to little effect at the next General Election.

The next government, which is of course likely to be Labour, shares the same fate, but has yet to realise it. Perhaps they have convinced themselves that the public will be pleased to see the appointment of Carney to their policymaking teams. Perhaps they believe that the public will be grateful as their life savings and pensions — actual investments, actually subject to risk — are drained into Bloomberg’s vast stash. Perhaps they still believe that green billionaires’ cronies can help them rehabilitate their political reputations. If only they had asked, they might have a clue, and the tragic unravelling of their misapprehensions over the next five years could be avoided.

But with politicians, such as Rachel Reeves, being so utterly incapable of seeing even the recent past — and her appointee’s role in creating it — it is no surprise that they lack any foresight. We will get poorer, Michael Bloomberg will get richer. And the only good that can come of it is that the Labour Party will go the way of the Conservatives. It is up to us to build the alternative that follows it. And we must start now.

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Apologies again for the relatively low volume of posts recently. I have been focussed on trying to shore up this and other projects — so much so that I have been less able to actually do them. However this is starting to work out, and now we have a surer footing for the near future. Your continued support and patience is most gratefully received.