London's Climate Action Week: A Festival of Intransigence on an Island of Hypocrisy in a Sea of Political Chaos

Green billionaires are flexing their muscles

London Climate Action Week (LCAW) is an annual event, the eighth of which kicked off on Sunday. With the intention of “harnessing the power of London for global and local climate action” the week is to climate Blobbers as Easter is to Christians. It’s a festival packed full of events, from litter picking through wine-tasting networking to boring lectures about the global economy, all in the service of the green agenda. But LCAW had barely opened when news arrived that Britain was to get its seventh Prime Minister in a decade.

The link between Keir Starmer’s exit and a Green Blob Fest may not be immediately obvious. But to those of us who believe that climate policy is a lens through which today’s politics can be understood it is straightforward. The Green Blob will admit that climate change requires dramatic changes to society. But debate about those deep changes has been absent from British politics this century, and the terms of the transformation have never been put to the voter in a meaningful contest of ideas. Since the consequences of such policies have been increasingly felt as deindustrialisation and economic stagnation, so a democratic deficit has broadened and deepened, and is now a schism running through global, European and British politics. It doesn’t matter what promises are made about the benefits of green policy, they cannot be delivered. And so the inadequacy of any Prime Minister who stands on such promises is going to be revealed in short order.

LCAW, then, might be seen as a festival of fiddling in Rome on fire, with Nero giving its keynote address. The great and good will swan about stages and dinners, patting each other on the back about how they are saving the planet. But the stark facts evident in just that city is that its population, and the wider public of the country, are sick to the back teeth of such self-serving hypocrisy and intransigence.

The convenor of the festival is the strange little outfit known as ‘E3G’ (Third Generation Environmentalism Limited), which purports to be “a climate change think tank with a global outlook”. Don’t they all? Either way, they certainly all have the same funders, which as I’ve argued here often, makes a mockery of the entire concept of ‘civil society’: if there are just a handful of billionaire philanthropists funding all of green ‘civil society’, to what extent does ‘civil society’ even exist? It doesn’t exist. It’s just a lobbying front, taking the styles of charities, think tanks and even academic research, but all of which are strategically coordinated as a condition of their funding by about four philanthropic grant-making bodies. There might just as well be one green ‘NGO’, but financing a constellation of them gives the appearance of a social movement, supported by a public. This, sadly, is a fact of contemporary politics that even its major victim, and latterly Net Zero policy-sceptic, the Conservative Party, has yet to understand. Or, rather, admit to. For it too was led up the garden path by the lure of Green Blob billions, only to be cut loose.