KEMI Badenoch has removed the Net Zero deadline from Conservative Party policy on the grounds of unaffordability. She was one of just two MPs to ask about costs in the 90-minute debate in 2019. Why has it taken so long for her to do anything about it? Why hasn’t she gone further?
The technical means of delivering global Net Zero do not currently exist. Nuclear fusion might get close in the next decade, although I’ve been hearing that about nuclear fusion for the past half century. Direct air capture (DAC) might also do so, but it requires vast amounts of energy that fusion might not deliver.
The fact that a party which labels itself ‘conservative’ could commit to a policy that was, at the time, technically impossible, unaffordable and probably unnecessary speaks volumes about the appallingly low calibre of the legacy political parties. It’s not just the Tories, as Labour is demonstrating at the moment and the Lib Dems would if they could develop a policy beyond Sir Ed Davey falling off water-skis.
Readers may recall that Net Zero was dreamed up by the man who struggles to eat a bacon sandwich, failed Labour leader Ed Miliband. For reasons only she can answer, in her parting act of spite Theresa May introduced it as an extension of the Climate Change Act by statutory order. The well-known scientist Boris Johnson extended it by including international travel, Truss failed to cancel it, and Sunak stuck with it. All were guided by the Climate Change Committee, the quango created by the Climate Change Act and, like all quangos, now a monotheistic collection of power-crazed apparatchiks. None questions ‘the science’ (mostly non-scientists, they don’t understand that science advances through people asking questions). All are on nice little earners, and all are a part of the Westminster village game of ascending the quangocracy to the House of Lords. Such is the pitiful state of government in the United Kingdom.
As it happens, I was closely involved in the development of Reform’s policy on Net Zero. Following a quick chat in the summer of 2021, I sent Richard Tice a paper on why it was a rotten idea that could not work (brazen plug: I had just published my short book on Net Zero). I got a phone call from Richard the next day inviting me to meet him the day after. I arrived to find my paper printed off and on the table. It was full of tags and questions. As we went through it line by line, it was immediately clear that Richard had read, researched, verified and cross-checked. Unlike most of the politicians I have met, he had mastered the brief. The essence of our conversation became Reform policy. At our inaugural conference in Manchester, at the same time as Bozo was addressing the Tories, we had a bus with ‘Net Zero Freezes Your Gran’ parked outside their conference entrance. They were furious; we were right, as subsequent events have shown.
The difference in process is instructive. When confronted with a problem, conventional politicians and political parties form a committee and seek a popular answer. Reform leadership looks at the facts, does some checking, and implements a policy that will deliver the best outcome for the UK. The same was true of every topic in Reform’s General Election Contract.
This is the point about Reform that the political analysts don’t understand. We’re not left wing or right wing, which is a stupid measurement scale in any case. We’re not about destroying the Tories, or any other party for that matter. We’re about changing the whole State machine, which has become rotten to the core and is more focused on looking after itself than the people who pay for it – you and me.
With a national debt of £3trillion, an annual deficit of £130billion, the abject failure of all public services, spiralling energy costs, high (and soon to be increased) taxation and a looming recession, the UK is in a complete mess. The occupants of Westminster and Whitehall have got us here, and any solution requires fundamental change. Professional politicians can’t deliver that; Reform can and must. Badenoch’s six-year-delayed Damascene conversion to technical and financial realism simply proves the point. Net Zero was drivel in 2008, in 2019 and remains so in 2025. She could and should have renounced it (and much else) on her election to the leadership. She didn’t, because she has been captured by the political machine.
In this context of national salvation, the current spats are damaging and missing the point. The government machine is the enemy of the people. This is the target that Reform, a proudly populist party, must attack remorselessly, day in, day out. Everything else is a distraction.
