Starmer's Green Wins Undermined By Adviser Retreat
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- Kemi Badenoch has made dismantling the climate agenda one of her top two opposition priorities, vowing to abandon net zero, boost North Sea drilling, scrap the windfall tax on oil and gas profits, and repeal the 2008 Climate Change Act — breaking a cross-party consensus dating to Margaret Thatcher's 1988 UN climate warning.
- Nigel Farage's Reform party has gone further still, openly denying climate science and threatening to withdraw the UK from the 2015 Paris agreement.
- Morgan McSweeney, Starmer's former adviser, pushed Labour to halve its pledged £28bn green investment, fearing defections to Reform — a misread, since More in Common/ECIU polling found two-thirds of voters still want the UK to meet net zero.
- Renewable energy investments cut wholesale electricity prices by about a third last year according to the ECIU, though households haven't felt the savings because bills were re-inflated by fossil fuel crises tied to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the Iran war.
- Electric car sales leapt 60% in April, aided by Labour's charging infrastructure investments and more generous grants for solar panels and heat pumps.
- IEA chief Fatih Birol endorsed the UK's North Sea licensing moratorium in April, saying new drilling won't ease prices or energy security — contradicting Badenoch and Farage's drilling-first pitch.
- Rachel Reeves attacked nature protections against "bats and newts," prompting The Wildlife Trusts' Craig Bennett to call the rhetoric "performative" and note that roughly 80% of Britons want stronger, not weaker, nature protection.
Why it matters: The actual voter defections hit Labour on its left flank — to the Greens and Lib Dems in recent local elections — not on the right, directly contradicting the McSweeney calculus that drove Labour's climate retreat. With likely successor Andy Burnham already equivocating on North Sea drilling to placate unions, Labour risks repeating the strategic error that cost it seats.
