A welcome sign that the Conservative Party is greener than ever

A group of Tory MPs has called for the internal combustion engine to be abolished by 2030 and for a carbon tax to be imposed on polluting products, writes John Rentoul

The most eye-catching policy in the pamphlet is the suggestion that petrol and diesel vehicles should be phased out five years earlier than planned (Getty)

The highest compliment that any party can pay to its opponents is to copy them. Thus Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens should be flattered by the latest pamphlet from the One Nation group of Conservative MPs.

It was the Labour government that started to set targets in law for reducing climate change, and it was Lib Dem ministers in the coalition government who drove through the remarkable shift towards wind power in electricity generation.

The Conservative Party, on the other hand, has often seemed to face both ways. Margaret Thatcher was the first prime minister to take the science of climate change seriously, and destroyed a lot of heavy industry, but otherwise was a champion of consumption-led growth. David Cameron posed with huskies but complained about “green crap” on electricity bills. Theresa May gave the 14th go-ahead for a third runway at Heathrow, but just before she stepped down from office, set a target date for Britain to be net zero in 2050.

Similarly, Boris Johnson was keen on cycling when he was mayor of London and says many of the right things, although they tend to be slogans (“build back greener”) rather than policies. But the call from a group of Conservative MPs to abolish the internal combustion engine by 2030 and to bring in a carbon tax suggests that the party as a whole is changing.

The One Nation group of MPs was formed last year to organise against a no-deal Brexit, and many of its leading lights (Amber Rudd, Nicky Morgan and Nicholas Soames) left the House of Commons at the election. However, under its new chair, Damian Green, who was Theresa May’s deputy, it now claims one third of Tory MPs as members, and today’s pamphlet is a significant marker of the greening of the party.

The most eye-catching policy in the pamphlet is the suggestion that petrol and diesel vehicles should be phased out five years earlier than the 2035 date currently pencilled in by the government. This is target-setting with a bite: a mere 10 years to switch from one dominant source of energy – fossil fuels – to another. It is so fast that some of the electricity used to power vehicles will continue to be generated by fossil fuels, but the decarbonisation of all electricity generation is likely to follow soon after.

It seems only yesterday that the Tory party had a visceral opposition to targets. When the Labour government set them, they “distorted priorities” or encouraged people to “game the system”. And it is true that putting targets in legislation is a bit silly, because laws can always be repealed. But it seems the Tories now accept that the right targets, especially if written into law, can act as a powerful spur to change behaviour. The whole point is to “distort” activity so that people do more of the things that society wants, and less of the things it doesn’t.

That is the thinking behind a carbon tax, and it is a more comfortable ideological fit for the Tories than for the other parties. As Jerome Mayhew, the new Conservative MP for Broadland in Norfolk, argues, the failure of the market to take into account the environmental cost of emitting carbon dioxide is an “inefficiency” that “defenders of free markets … need to address”. He even combines a free-market message with a fiscally responsible one, saying that the “economic crisis inflicted by our necessary response to Covid-19” means that “we will need to raise additional taxation”. A carbon tax, discouraging pollution, would be better than a tax on jobs or spending.

Environmentalists shouldn’t look a green horse in the mouth. The next election is a long way off, and in any case, converting all the main parties is the best guarantee of sustainable progress. The more pressure that can be put on Boris Johnson to make “build back greener” more than a slogan, the better; and it is more likely to be effective in the short term if it comes from inside his own party.