Now is the Right Time for Conservatives to Eject Their Green Wing

More power to Kemi’s broom

Following Tim Stanley’s emotional and unscientific appeal for green conservatism in the Telegraph, a number of other commentators in the paper itself and elsewhere have added their thoughts. In the same paper, but in the opposite camp, Stanley’s claims were dissected by Lord David Frost and Dr John Constable of the Renewable Energy Foundation. Subsequently, the paper’s resident solar power and greenomics evangelist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard joined the Stanley camp. Whatever else is argued between these four – and beyond – it establishes that if there is a Left-Right axis in British politics, there is at right angles to it another axis, such that both a ‘green Left’ and a ‘green Right’ can be seen. Now those of a green bent are furious that anyone should occupy any opposite space. But none can make a good argument for their own position, much less a good-faith response to their counterparts taking theirs.

The Left, claims Stanley, turned a “tangible ecological crisis into a culture war abstraction”. But the Right – which Stanley sometimes limits to the “online Right”, seemingly to distinguish it from more respectable quarters – responded to green-Left misanthropy with a “misplaced sympathy for the devil”, siding with “fossil-fuel giants” and against renewables. Evans-Pritchard, picking up on Stanley’s lessons for a form of green Conservatism “limited by voluntarism and property rights” from Aristotle and Disraeli, argues that “The political Right needs to rediscover its philosophical compass.” Accordingly, he channels “Edmund Burke’s contract of eternal society” and Margaret Thatcher before laying into Kemi Badenoch’s “purge of Tory candidates who dissent” – though evidence of this is limited – “at an abominable political moment”. The arguments are, to be kind, confused, misty-eyed and more ambitious than their authors’ talents are equal to.

I am no fan of political geometry, because objects that we can grasp through shorthand or metaphor in that way lack sufficient dimensionality to be useful. (Before we know it, the simple axis we summon up to aid discussion requires us to consider a tesseract.) But let’s stick with it for the moment. If there is a ‘green Left’ and a ‘green Right’, there are by necessity four quadrants to the conceptual space of British politics. Yet for the duration of this century, half of that conceptual space has been silent, empty and verboten. It has been so silent and empty that it has not even been officially designated a colour to oppose green in the way that red sits opposite blue. It has no grantors, no institutions, no patrons and no teenage Swedish truant living saints. Indeed, the area – or is it volume? – that is opposite green: let’s call it brown – is functionally equivalent to exile, worse even than being sent to the real Coventry, which is bad enough. To position oneself in the brown camp was to commit career suicide and eject oneself from polite society. No public sector job, no media job, no job in the increasingly green-woke City was available to you. And so on. Cancellation was invented for climate change ‘deniers’, years before it came for the transphobes and accidental racists.

Observing from afar, it was no less a nasty green energy tycoon than Dale Vince whose comments serve my point. “Tim Stanley has this right”, he states: “climate denial should be a crime” – a view that the multimillion-pound donor to the Labour Party, along with Chris Packham, has proposed before, and which, like Stanley’s and Evans-Pritchard’s prose, is illuminated by the light from continental wildfires. “100,000 expected deaths across Europe this summer”, claims Vince, as if reading out the charges, concluding that “Climate change kills, climate denial is its accomplice.” Stanley, of course, who is far too polite to call Dale Vince what he is, made no such comment that would lend itself to an argument that climate ‘denial’ should be criminalised – much less a precrime. Nonetheless, Stanley’s politeness may have caused him to not interrogate the ground on which he stands, at the same end of the green-brown axis as the likes of Vince.