Senior Labour officials spent the early months of this year pretending to quibble over pumping £28 billion (€32.8 billion) into ‘green’ projects. Now, a leaked recording has revealed that they believe this sum to be “tiny”—that “hundreds of billions of pounds” must be thrown at net zero proposals instead.
At UnHerd’s “alternative election hustings” debate on June 26th, Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens described the Labour Party manifesto—which contains only a few vague slogans on net zero—as a “bikini,” because “what it conceals is more important than what it it reveals.” In much the same way, Labour’s environmental spending commitments were earlier this year omitted from a ‘campaigning bible’ designed to help current and prospective Labour MPs win votes.
Thankfully, leaked audio recording of Darren Jones, Labour’s shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, has made it quite clear that—in Jones’ own words—while “conflict [over the annual £28bn pledge] made it sound as if we had basically junked the whole thing … we definitely haven’t.”
In the recording from March, obtained by The Daily Telegraph, Jones confirmed that “we’re still absolutely committed to it [mass spending on the green agenda]. It’s still one of the top five priorities, and it’s going to be a huge amount of effort to get there because we’ll have to move quite quickly.”
When another figure in the recording points out that “some people would say that 28 billion isn’t enough,” Jones agrees:
No, it’s tiny. Hundreds of billions of pounds we need.
Labour officials are clearly uncomfortable with saying this in public ahead of the July 4th election, given how unpopular the drive to net zero has become. Indeed, when asked this morning, on June 27th, how many billions Labour will spend in this area, the party’s shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson refused to answer the question, instead trying to push the conversation in another direction.
But voters need not only rely on leaked footage to work out what path Labour will take if, as all the polls suggest, it gains a major parliamentary majority at the election. After all, its leader, Sir Keir Starmer, is an open (and avid) “red-green” eco zealot. Why else is his party working overtime to out-green the Greens?
Responding to reports yesterday, Jones insisted that Labour has no “secret plan,” adding that “I was setting out what the private sector is going to invest in their own businesses [sic] in order to get to net zero by 2050 in, for example, the energy sector.” Conned Britons might not have to wait long to find out which version of events is true.
