The Tories Need to Renounce Their Climate Authoritarian Past

It's the high-handed squashing of dissent that got us into this mess

Ahead of Shadow Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero Claire Coutinho’s talk at the Conservative Party Conference on Monday, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson was quoted in the Telegraph. “I went too far, too fast on net zero,” proclaimed the headline, the one-time flagship Tory policy now decapitalised. Johnson got “carried away”, he now admits. Later in the morning, Coutinho took the Manchester stage with the title of her talk given as ‘Energy is prosperity’. “In the last few decades, we lost sight of a simple truth,” she explains. “Energy is a Good Thing.”

There is much to celebrate in all this. Coutinho’s speech announced the party’s plans to axe the Carbon Tax, immediately taking £8 billion off the country’s bills. Subsidies for renewable energy plants that were completed before the 2014 switch form the Renewables Obligation to the Contracts for Difference will also be scrapped. According to the Office for National Statistics audit of Energy Taxes, ROCs cost the country £7.7 billion in 2024. She did not explain, however, how these contractual obligations will be exited gracefully, without legal wrangling and taxpayer costs. “Our energy system is not here to prop up the profits of multi-million pound wind developers at bill payers’ expense.”