Beware as hard Brexiteers turn their attention to climate change

Farage, Johnson and now the man who brought us Brexit “uncut”, Steve Baker (below), have all issued less than Shakespearean monologues on their chosen pet projects. The Faragification of British politics into lowest common denominator, dog-whistle, tabloid soundbites has been unedifying to watch, backed up by the Prime Minister’s deliberate obfuscation and double-speak on important issues such as systemic and institutional racism and the so-called benefits of Brexit – all the while supported backstage by think tanks and research “charities” populated with climate interventionists and Old Blighty isolationists such as Baker, a former chairman and deputy chairman of the ERG, the pro-Brexit group of Conservative MPs which Jacob Rees-Mogg also chaired for a spell.

​READ MORE: Scotland sees largest rise in renewables capacity across UK as wind leads way

What a motley crew. Surely the British public, once bitten, will be twice shy when it comes to these chancers? Surely watching the slow-motion car crash that is Brexit and the UK’s descent from global authority and international respect have made the electorate wise up to their twisted logic, their two-faced men-of-the-people play act?

That remains to be seen. As usual, the tabloids continue to indulge these people’s self-interest, with Baker writing in The Sun just this week about the cost of net zero to ordinary working people, in particular, the cost of heat pumps as replacements for carbon-emitting gas boilers.

As soon as you see a Tory talk about ordinary people, red flags should go up. Because the current incarnation in Number 10 and their enablers care not a jot for ordinary people, working or otherwise, even if they have managed to persuade huge swaths of the former red wall turned blue electorate that they do. Their stonking great majority at Westminster is testament to this subterfuge.

Baker claims it will be the poorest who have to pay the most to achieve net zero. He describes current climate policy to reach net zero by 2050 “a ruinous economic experiment when we can least afford it” on the back of a global pandemic. He talks about this target as translating into the end of our comfortable lifestyles, our travel abroad, nice cars and even the ability to heat our homes.

Baker has obviously not heard of the scourge of fuel poverty that affects so many elderly and vulnerable groups in the UK already, due partly to high energy prices and poorly insulated homes.

As for comfortable lifestyles, has he not heard of austerity? Try talking about comfortable lifestyles to the working families of the four million children living in poverty in this country due to austerity, something the UN described as “the systematic immiseration” of sections of the population by Tory policy.

Baker fails to mention that divesting from fossil fuels into renewables such as wind and solar will actually be far cheaper and better value for the consumer as well as helping to save the planet. He is convinced that “to recover from the Covid-shock, we need hard-nosed conservatism and economic realism of the kind that brought the country back from the brink in the 1970s and transformed the UK into a vibrant economy in the decades that followed”.

Herein lies the rub, the absolute heart of his concerns – in the face of the annihilation of Earth, Baker is arguing for the same old, same old. In the eye of the climate storm, a crisis needing far-reaching radical and innovative solutions, this is all he has to offer.

However, Baker can say what he likes about the exorbitant cost of vital climate action as no-one with influence in government will challenge him and before you know it, this scepticism may well creep into policy just like the notion of a hard Brexit pushed by him and his associates slipped insidiously into voters’ political subconscious despite the obvious drawbacks and catastrophic implications.

READ MORE: British regulators jeopardise Scottish green energy with huge charges

Now, we are all living Farage, Johnson and Baker’s Brexit dream/nightmare. Although Johnson seems enthused with the green revolution, we have yet to see enough hard, concrete evidence and action beyond his blustery rhetoric. Without incentives to decarbonise and decent public awareness campaigns on the importance of net zero for our actual continuing existence on this planet and the benefits to our lives and bank balances, certain ordinary working people may end up agreeing with Baker.

Without the much-promised green revolution and new, well-paid jobs in clean industries and a just transition appearing on the horizon, ordinary working people might choose to feel they’ve been sold another pig in a poke. Better the devil you know.

Steve Baker is now trustee of Lord Lawson’s (another Brexiteer) Global Warming Policy Foundation set up to challenge “current orthodoxies” on climate mitigation and rescue “prosperity”. For “orthodoxy” please substitute “scientific fact”. For “prosperity” please substitute more “austerity”.

If the British electorate continue to believe these ideological mythologists, then more fool them.