PMQs is starting soon. Here is the list of MPs down to ask a question. The Green party co-leader Carla Denyer described Tony Blair as a “dinosaur” in a video on social media for his views on climate change. “What a surprise. A political dinosaur is a big fan of fossile fuels,” she says. Denyer says today’s Climate Change Committee report shows why action to tackle the climate crisis is needed. Fiona Harvey has written it up here. Denyer says this shows why doing nothing about climate is unrealistic. Julia King, a scientist, crossbench peer (she is Lady Brown of Cambridge) and chair of the Climate Change Committee’s adaptation sub-committee has accused Tony Blair of sending out the wrong message on the climate crisis. Speaking on the Today programme this morning, she said: My concern is that people might take away a message from that report that we should do adaptation instead of mitigation, and that is absolutely the wrong message. We need to do adaptation, because even if we get to net zero by mid-century, there’s still a huge amount of climate change to come, and we need to be ready for that. But we can’t adapt to everything. As people know who live on the coast and suffer coastal erosion and flooding. No, we can’t adapt to everything. It’s absolutely critical that alongside adaptation, we are reducing emissions as well. Aletha Adu has more on the backlash that Blair is facing in a story here. Aletha also quotes an unnamed senior Labour MP saying this about the former PM. It’s maddening. Blair parachutes in, and is handing talking points to the Tories and Reform on a silver platter. TBI [the Tony Blair Institute – Blair’s thinktank] might want to remember it’s not running the country. “All politics is local,” as the saying (normally attributed to the former US speaker of the House of Representatives Tip O’Neill) goes, and that explains what is happening in the campaign for the English local elections. There is one day left until polling day and the main political parties, quite literally, talking rubbish. Labour has announced a crackdown on fly-tipping. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs issued a press release about this last night, but the new element is a bit vague, and partly it is just promoting things that already happen. It says: Councils will work with the police to identify, seize and crush vehicles of waste criminals. Drones and mobile CCTV cameras will be deployed to identify cars and vans belonging to fly-tippers so they can be destroyed. Ministers have launched a rapid review to slash red tape blocking councils from seizing and crushing vehicles. Councils currently have to bear the significant cost of seizing and storing vehicles but under new plans, being consider by ministers, fly-tippers will cover this cost, saving councils and taxpayers money. In addition, waste cowboys will now face up to five years in prison for operating illegally. Any criminals caught transporting and dealing with waste illegally will now face up to five years in prison under new legislation. Alongside the government press release, the Labour party has released figures showing that “under the last Conservative government rates of fly-tipping in England increased by more than a third to over 3,000 incidents per day”. Here is their table. A Labour spokesperson said: On the Tories’ watch, fly-tipping skyrocketed and enforcement against criminal rubbish dumpers went down. They badly let communities down and had no plan to turn things around. The Conservative party put out its own press release last night, and it was about the bin strike in Labour-controlled Birmingham. Birmingham is not one of the areas where local elections are taking place. But the Tories are arguing that, in effect, Birmingham is on the ballot everywhere, because it is a template for Labour. Kevin Hollinrake, the shadow local government said: Labour-run Birmingham is a warning to every community in the country going to the polls on Thursday. Under Labour, council tax soars, services collapse — and you’re left with rats in the streets and rubbish piling up. The party also put out a response to Labour’s fly-tipping news. Victoria Atkins, the shadow environment secretary, said: Wherever Labour is in charge, waste is piling high - like in Birmingham, where Labour’s inability to stand up to their union paymasters has left rat infested rubbish littered across the streets. And here is some more comment on Tony Blair’s net zero comments from environmentalists and commentators From Damian Carrington, the Guardian’s environment editor, on Bluesky “We need to depoliticise the climate debate” says that Tony Blair report ... .... the main impact of which has been to deepen the right wing culture war against net zero by describing the climate debate as “hysteria” From Carole Cadwalladr, the former Observer journalist, on Bluesky Tony Blair is literally being paid by a man with one of the highest carbon footprints on the planet - Larry Ellison. The founder of Oracle is his biggest funder & these techsolutionist remarks have to be seen for what they are: tech lobbying From Doug Parr, chief scientist and policy officer at Greenpeace UK Tony Blair Institute have released a report which is getting a lot of coverage in UK today It says the drive for net zero emissions is flawed and some media outlets have gone to town However it’s a bit odd By odd, I mean there’s a lot of bollocks in it and shouldn’t be taken seriously Parr has posted a long thread explaining why he is saying this on Bluesky. Here are some of his posts. On technology, it says current technologies have failed Right So solar, wind, batteries etc have all ‘failed’? Has Blair been paying attention? Instead, it says, we should use lots of *carbon capture* & *nuclear power*. which haven’t failed repeatedly, cost a fortune, or struggled at al For reference Tony, here’s a chart of how solar, wind et al are doing. I bet loads of companies and stockmarkets would like to fail this badly And wind and solar will continue to expand rapidly By contrast IEA etc are constantly having to revise down how much CCS will be deployed From Richard Black, director of policy and strategy at Ember, an energy thinktank, in a post on LinkedIn Where to start with the ‘new’ paper from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, approved by the great man himself and given fanfare treatment in the UK’s top tier media, calling for a ‘reset’ on action to tackle climate change? Nothing new about it: just a recycling effort. And not in a good way. Bearing in mind the word limit on LinkedIn posts, I’ll just deconstruct from the top down and see how far I get. “Voters feel they’re being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle” - when advances in many countries on renewables, EVs and heat pumps will reduce energy bills in perpetuity. “Fossil fuel consumption is set to rise up to 2030” - I suggest that TBI puts some of its money into coal stocks, then I’ll believe that they believe it. “China initiated construction of 95GW of new coal-fired capacity” - and simultaneously made market reforms showing that coal will be running less and less of the time, as renewable generation rises. Oh, they forgot that bit … The thing is: the paper isn’t entirely bad. Its diagnosis is partially correct. But its prescription is all stuff that we’ve heard a hundred times before, that takes grand but ultimately vapid statements like “The current climate debate is broken” and treats them as tablets of stone. What’s missing is a call for political leaders to lead with confidence and clarity on solutions that are cost-effective, popular, gaining market share and command the favour of private investors. An odd omission, you might think, for a politician once bold enough to reform his party en route to winning three terms in office. British fighter jets joined their US counterparts in airstrikes against Yemen’s Houthi rebels overnight, the first military action authorised by the Labour government and the first UK participation in an aggressive American bombing campaign against the group, Dan Sabbagh reports. Dale Vince, the founder of the renewable energy company Ecotricity and Labour party donor, has accused Tony Blair of talking “nonsense” on net zero policy. In a statement he said: This from Tony Blair is net zero nonsense. He talks of growing fossil demand from China, when in fact it has peaked. He says we need less focus on renewable energy and more on carbon capture - one is cheap and abundant and prevents carbon emissions, the other is an incredibly expensive way of trying to deal with emissions. Prevention (green energy) is always better and cheaper than the cure. Net zero is in fact the economic opportunity of the century. Jobs and GDP growth is what’s at stake, green energy can bring both of those, fossil fuels will keep us on the global energy bill rollercoaster and carbon capture is a fools errand. Expected better than this from the TBI. The Green party peer Jenny Jones has described Tony Blair as “completely out of touch” on climate policy. She posted this on social media. Tony Blair is completely out of touch. @UKLabour should ignore him as a past relic. Net Zero is popular with people. Who can argue with warmer homes, better public transport and (potentially) much cheaper energy, when we unlink from gas. In his interview with Times Radio, Steve Reed, the environment secretary, was specifically asked about the claim from an unnamed Labour source who said that Tony Blair’s net zero comments amounted to a tantrum. (See 9.46am.) Asked if he agreed, Reed replied: “No, I don’t.” Reed also played down the extent to which the Blair article amounted to criticism of government policy. He said: One of the other points that Tony is making in his piece is that there needs to be more focus on carbon capture and storage technology. Well, we agree with that. The government is investing £22bn in that technology. That’s the highest amount any government has ever invested. So I think we are doing what Tony Blair says he wants to see, but we’re also shifting away from dependence, over-dependence on fossil fuels because it’s better for the country to take control of our own energy. And, in an interview with LBC, asked if Blair was right to say “net zero is doomed”, Reed replied: I don’t think that’s quite what Tony Blair said, to be a fair. This government is transitioning the economy away from being dependent on fossil fuels. In the foreword he wrote to the report published by his thinktank yesterday, Blair did not explicitly talk about UK government policy (he was talking about climate policy in the developing world generally – although the points he made apply as much to the UK as to anywhere else) and he did not directly mention the 2050 net zero target. But he did say: Any strategy based on either “phasing out” fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail. Good morning. Keir Starmer faces PMQs a day after Tony Blair in effect fired a torpedo at his net zero strategy – an essential part of Labour’s Plan for Change. We covered the Blair comments on the blog yesterday and here is Jessica Elgot’s story. Blair has been out of office for 15 years, but he is still an influential and knowledgeable figure and there is no one alive in British politics who has a better record at winning general elections. Until relatively recently, climate policy was an area on which all the main parties were broadly agreed. After Kemi Badenoch recently gave a speech saying that the government’s legal target of getting carbon emissions down to net zero by 2050 was unachievable (despite the fact the Tory government legislated for this, and Badenoch herself was one of the MPs who approved the secondary legislation without voting against), and with Nigel Farage now saying the government does not need to do anything about climate change, the Blair intervention is final proof that that consensus is now in tatters. Badenoch is likely to raise this at PMQs today, not least because much of what Blair said sounded as if it could have come from one of her speeches. According to Politico, Farage is also due to get a question today too. Steve Reed, the environment secretary, was doing a morning interview round, and he played down the significance of Blair’s intervention. He told Times Radio: [Blair is] making a valid and important contribution to a very significant debate that we’re having. I agree with much of what he said, but not absolutely every word and dot and comma of it. But this government is moving to clean energy because it’s best for Britain. It’s more energy security for Britain. It’s jobs and investment right across the United Kingdom. And those are all things we all want to see. Reed was following Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, who said this when asked about the Blair comments in the Commons yesterday. I agree with a lot of what [the report from Blair’s thinktank] says. It says that we should move ahead on carbon capture and storage, which the government are doing. It says that we should move ahead on the role of artificial intelligence, which the government are doing. It says that we should move ahead on nuclear, which the government are doing. But, privately, Labour figures are not as relaxed about Blair’s intervention as these comments imply. This is what Sam Blewett and Noah Keate are reporting in their London Playbook briefing. Anger in the Labour ranks was palpable last night, with one campaigner telling Playbook the foot soldiers “working their socks off” ahead of the locals are “incredibly pissed off.” The well-connected campaigner suggested it was the tantrum of “someone struggling for influence” … and even went on to point out the TBI has received funds from Saudi Arabia. (Blair’s think tank insisted it was “editorially independent.”) Here is the agenda for the day. 10am: John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister, speaks to the Scottish TUC conference in Dundee. Morning: Adrian Ramsay, the Green party’s co-leader, is campaigning in Doncaster. Noon: Keir Starmer faces Kemi Badenoch at PMQs. 2pm: Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, gives evidence to the joint committee on human rights. 2pm: David Lammy, the foreign secretary, gives evidence to the Lords international relations and defence committee. Afternoon: Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, is campaigning in Tunbridge Wells in Kent. Afternoon: Kemi Badenoch is campaigning in Hertfordshire. She is also due to do an interview with GB News. Afternoon: Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, is campaigning in south Yorkshire. If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (normally between 10am and 3pm at the moment), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word. If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary. I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
Author: Andrew Sparrow