Kemi's Pledge to Repeal the Climate Change Act Must Be Just the Start

The Westminster Uniparty consensus on climate catastrophism needs to be completely dismantled

Kemi Badenoch has pledged that the Conservatives will repeal the Climate Change Act. Ahead of the Party’s conference, which opens this weekend, Badenoch is attempting to boost her ailing leadership and reverse her tanking polling figures by drawing from the broader Tory fold’s commentary on deindustrialisation, economic growth, Blair’s toxic legacy, immigration and so on, to establish a new policy platform. If she follows through on this, it will represent not just a break from the very longstanding cross-party Westminster consensus on climate change, but also a divorce from the blobs that have for just as long stood between the public and MPs of all parties. But will this almost revolutionary turn work, or is it too late?

I have been hard on the Tories, and I will continue to be so. But there is no understating either the significance of this development or the scale of the task Badenoch has taken on. And for that, the news must be welcomed. The most toxic item of the climate change agenda, in my view, was neither the scientific flaws of its premises, nor the technical shortcomings of its policy solutions. Such things can be revealed, if people are free to speak truth to power. No, the problem with the agenda was its requirement that normal democratic politics be suspended, the public’s interests be discounted in policy and critics of the entire enterprise be smeared and excluded from public life.