Peter Franklin: The benefits of real free trade in carbon

This is an extract from the forthcoming collection of essays 'Green conservatism: protecting the environment through open markets'. Similar collections will be published under the Green Alliance's ‘Green social democracy’ and ‘Green liberalism’ projects as part of the Green Roots programme, which aims to stimulate green thinking within the three dominant political traditions in the UK. 

There’s no use denying it, the environment is a difficult area for the Conservative Party. And the biggest environmental issue, climate change, presents the greatest difficulties.

Although Margaret Thatcher was the first world leader to warn about the threat of global warming, and although David Cameron famously highlighted the issue too, other prominent Conservatives including Nigel Lawson and Peter Lilley have been outspoken in their opposition to the mainstream agenda on climate change.

Other Conservative or right-leaning voices, both in politics and the media, have gone even further, denying the reality of climate change altogether.

Peter Franklin: Ten unwasted years

Peter Franklin is a Conservative policy advisor and speechwriter specialising in environmental and social issues.

Ten years ago the Conservative Party suffered its worst ever defeat under universal suffrage. It wasn’t just the seats lost or the abysmal vote share, but also the national sense of joy at our humiliation. Were you up for Portillo? That was the question on smiling lips up on happy faces across the land.

Well, I wasn’t up for Portillo. I’d already crawled to my bed in a state of shock – not at the results, but at my reaction. You see, I’d long drifted away from the party – out of disgust at the Poll Tax, the defenestration of Margaret Thatcher, the ERM debacle and back to basics. But oddly it was that election night in 1997 that convinced me that, in the timeless words of Iggy Pop, “I am a Conservative.”

The party of local government

The next morning I was off work, feeling sick as the Blairs marched into Downing Street. But amid the triumphal entry some late election results filtered through – not for the general election but for the local elections, also held the previous day. And guess what? We made gains!

Modest gains to be sure, and from a pathetically low base, but gains nonetheless. It was a tiny consolation prize, barely noticed at the time and long since forgotten, but the start of something much bigger. In subsequent years we would overtake the Lib Dems and then Labour to become the first party of local government. While MPs squabbled in Westminster, the quiet competence of our councillors - notably my own county's Sandy Bruce-Lockhart - rebuilt our base in the country.

That’s why I’m putting them first in my list of why the last ten years have not been wasted. I’ll leave it to others to pick over the wrong turns and dead ends of our time in the wilderness – this is a personal account of the upside: not only the strange survival of the Conservative Party, but also the way it continued to influence the destiny of our nation despite being out of power.

Hague saves the party

These days William Hague is one of our most popular politicians. It was not always thus. As leader he faced a storm of abuse that would have withered a lesser man. However, the appearance of calm was deceptive; beneath the waterline he was paddling furiously to rescue the party from the consequences of a ruinously expensive election campaign. When people ask why he didn’t do this, that or the other as leader, it’s because he was too busy saving us from bankruptcy!

Better outside the tent…

The threat of bankruptcy wasn’t just financial. In the early years of his premiership, Tony Blair held the nation in thrall. His big tent politics threatened to swallow up all opposition – it certainly swallowed Ken Clarke, Michael Heseltine and Paddy Ashdown. But William Hague was not to be taken in. His finest hours came with his awe-inspiring demolition job of the Government’s fatuous annual report, one the finest Parliamentary performances of recent times – and just maybe the moment when the nation began to see the truth about New Labour.

Peter Franklin: In defence of Danny Kruger

On Monday, Guido Fawkes picked up on Sean Gabb’s fisk of Danny Kruger’s book ‘On Fraternity’ published by Civitas.  In this Platform, Peter Franklin comes to Danny's defence.  Peter Franklin is a Conservative policy advisor and speechwriter specialising in environmental and social issues.

Danny Kruger is a friend of mine and a former colleague. He was kind enough to mention me in the author’s acknowledgements, even though I disagreed with some of his arguments. For these reasons you may wish to dismiss the following attempt to fisk the fisk as a back scratching exercise, but here goes anyway:

Gabb’s onslaught consists of four main attacks: on the “fraudulent nature of [Kruger’s] analysis”; on the Conservative leadership who apparently “put Dr Kruger up to write [the book]”; on the book’s “pretentious and obscure” language; and on the author for “executing his commission so incompetently”.

INTELLECTUAL FRAUD?

Let’s look at each of these charges – firstly, that of intellectual fraud: It seems that Kruger’s crime was to make “a return to market liberty under Margaret Thatcher” a premise of his argument. This might seem a fairly uncontroversial assumption. But apparently not. It seems that far from being a free marketeer, Margaret Thatcher was in reality a ruthless corporatist. “I was one of the earliest conservatives to understand the real nature of the Thatcher project,” says Mr Gabb modestly, “it was to reconcile the fact of an extended and meddling state apparatus, plus big business privilege, with the need to generate enough wealth to pay for it all.”

Golly. In contrast to Gabb, I must be one of the last conservatives to understand the real nature of the Thatcher project. Fortunately, our hero is on hand to reveal all:

“There was no reduction in tax for the middle classes. There was no overall cutting of regulations. Instead, the taxes and regulations were revised so that we could, by immense hard work, reverse the long term relative decline of the British economy.”

So, Thatcher managed to maintain the burden of statism, but disguised it in such a way that the country somehow forgot it was there and transformed Britain into Europe’s most dynamic economy in a fit of absence of mind. Cunning, eh?

Then there’s some stuff about “creating a general environment within which disobedience to the expressed will of the authorities became unwise.” Yes, I recall the Great Terror of the Thatcher years. The way her critics were silenced and not in any way paid a lot of money by the BBC to slag her off at every opportunity. That Ben Elton, still rotting in Strangeways, I’m told. And what about that terrible day when the Army machine-gunned the Poll Tax protesters? Oh hang on, that was Tiananmen Square – my mistake.

To be fair, Thatcher didn’t achieve the libertarian utopia Sean Gabb would wish for – who could? But surely we can agree that the Lady moved things some distance in that general direction? The rest of the world (of which Danny Kruger is a member) certainly would, and so it seems a trifle unfair to single him out for failing to expose the statist conspiracy that is Thatcherism.

In any case, Kruger’s argument isn’t centrally concerned with the record of any particular Government. His main contentions are that the principles of liberty and equality are in tension; and that fraternity is the way forward. Does Gabb show that these ideas are fraudulent? No, he merely disposes of the idea that liberty and equality are in tension by maintaining that both have been diminished by successive Labour and Conservative Governments. As for fraternity, he has nothing to say. Given that the book is called ‘On Fraternity’ and is on the subject of fraternity, one would have thought that any attempt to demonstrate its “intellectual bankruptcy” would have more to say on, er, fraternity. 

Peter Franklin: What colour does blue and yellow make?

Peter Franklin is a Conservative policy advisor and speechwriter specialising in environmental and social issues.

When it comes to Lib-Con co-operation, the environment ought to provide fertile ground. Indeed, in last year’s Charity Champions awards, Friends of the Earth jointly nominated Oliver Letwin and Norman Baker – who were, at the time, their parties’ respective environment spokesmen. However, when Chris Huhne took over from Norman Baker, the Lib Dems made a point of breaking up a hitherto blossoming relationship. Whereas the idealistic Baker perceived that the future well-being planet might be more important than mere party politics, Huhne wasn’t going to have the Tories muscling in on traditional Lib Dem territory.

Of course, there are many Conservatives who are more than happy to leave the tree hugging to the original beard-and-sandals brigade. In part, their hostility stems from an antipathy to any sort of Lib-Con co-operation. To that, all I can say is grow up – we’re talking about the Lib Dems here, not the Socialist Workers Party. If the voters kick Labour out, but decline to give us a working majority what are we going to do? Sit in glorious isolation, while Gordon Brown cancels the removal van?

For other rejectionists the problem is not so much the Lib Dems, but environmentalism itself. I’m not sure what can be done to win such people over, I guess they’ve already been cut off by the tide of history – and will cling to their isolated position until it disappears beneath the waves.

Peter Franklin: Why Nigel Lawson is wrong on climate change

Last week ConservativeHome welcomed the anti-Stern analysis of Lord Lawson and Bjorn Lomborg.  Peter Franklin responds to Lord Lawson's critique below.

Given Nigel Lawson’s record on economic stability, I’m pretty disinclined to accept his judgement on climate stability. Nevertheless, the former Chancellor has emerged as Britain’s leading climate change sceptic, so it’s worth tackling his case head on. Essentially, it’s an argument of two parts, as set out by the man himself:

“...there is no escaping the two key truths. First, there is no way the growth in atmospheric carbon dioxide can be arrested without a very substantial rise in the cost of carbon, presumably via the imposition of a swingeing carbon tax, which would require, at least in the short to medium term, a radical change of lifestyle in the developed world.”

This is just wrong. The bulk of the carbon savings that we need to make will come from greater energy efficiency, not from changes in the way we generate energy. By saving energy we will also save money. And with energy prices on the rise there is more money to be saved than ever.

Energy efficiency and economic progress go hand in hand. The more primitive a society the more energy inefficient it is. Just think about the sheer wastefulness of an open fire, where most of the heat escapes uselessly into the atmosphere. To take a more contemporary example, Chinese homes and factories waste a lot more energy than their western counterparts.

And yet even in the most advanced economies opportunities to save energy go unclaimed. For instance, Britain has millions of homes where proper loft insulation would pay for itself in a couple of years and go on saving substantial amounts of energy, money and carbon year after year. So why do so many people fail to insulate their homes properly? It’s because, contrary to simplistic economic theories, people don’t always act in an economically rational way. Sometimes they need a prod in the right direction.

That’s why I’m opposed to most forms of environmental taxation, which tends to be a blunt instrument that rarely achieves its ostensibly environmental purpose. What we need are sophisticated policy tools designed for a particular purpose and used for no other (such as the raising of tax revenues). For instance we could have a system of energy efficiency credits, which enterprises could earn by implementing various energy efficiency solutions such as insulating a given number of homes or selling a given number of energy efficiency light bulbs. Polluters such as power stations would have to buy a given number of certificates. A market would then operate, generating profits for those supplying the most attractive energy efficiency solutions at the lowest cost. The polluters would have to pay the cost of kick starting the market, but, in aggregate, money would be saved and put to a better use than wasting energy.

Peter Franklin: Rebutting climate change scepticism

Peter Franklin is a Conservative policy advisor, speechwriter and contributor to The Guardian's Comment Is Free.

I’m a great admirer of Ruth Lea. A brave and early critic of Gordon Brown, she stood up to New Labour while the big boys of the business world were still sucking up. And despite her background in the pointy-headed world of Britain’s think-tanks, she communicates her ideas with a clarity that puts most of our elected politicians to shame.

Thus her letter in Wednesday’s Telegraph, in which she advances a highly sceptical line on climate change, is all the more disappointing. But it does, at least, gather up the key themes of the sceptical case in a few short paragraphs. So here they are, with a brief critique of each:

Climate change is always happening

Climate change sceptics are quick to point out that the Earth’s climate is changing all the time. And so it is. But the examples they give invariably fall into one of two categories: ‘major but prehistoric’ and ‘recent but minor’. An example of the latter is the so-called ‘little ice age’ – an era of frost fairs held on the River Thames. But the thing about the little ice age is that it was, well, little. For significant climate change on a global scale you have to go back to the end of the last proper ice age. However, you have to remember that this took place over thousands of years and that the human population of the time was sparse and nomadic. If anything like the same degree of climate change took place now, squeezed into a shorter time frame, then the consequences for civilisation and billions of people would be catastrophic. There is nothing in our history that compares with the scale, spread and speed of what might happen within our lifetimes and those of our children and grandchildren.

There is no scientific consensus on climate change

The validity of this argument would depend on how you define consensus. If you’re using the word as a synonym for unanimity, then there is indeed no consensus on climate change. If on the other hand you’re  using it in the sense of ‘mainstream view’, then there most certainly is a consensus – and an overwhelming one at that.

Peter Franklin: I love the "and theory", but...

Peter Franklin is a Conservative policy advisor, speechwriter and contributor to The Guardian's Comment Is Free.

Regular visitors to this site will be familiar with its house philosophy, which goes by the unlovely, but oddly memorable, name of ‘and theory’ (which I think is more easily read in hyphenated form i.e. and-theory. Iain Duncan Smith defines and-theory thus:

“I have never believed that modernisation requires the jettisoning of Conservative euroscepticism, or of our belief in low taxation, or of our tough approach to crime. These principles remain enduringly popular with the public. My proposal for the modernisation of the Party is not to subtract from these core principles – but to add to them.”

In his ten point briefing on the issue, Tim Montgomerie provides a number of examples of policy positions based on and-theory:

(a) A commitment to actively support healthy, traditional marriages and fair pension and inheritance arrangements for gay adults…

(b) A bigger budget for the armed forces and an end to the sale of arms to despotic regimes…

(c) Faster, longer imprisonment of repeat offenders and more care for the vulnerable children of prisoners...

And-theory recognises that there can be no choice between shoring up the core vote and chasing floating voters, we need both in order to gain a working majority. In recent years the Conservative Party has been badly served by the ‘Mods and Rockers’ who’ve championed different halves of the winning equation.

It is now assumed that the modernising, floating-vote strategists are in the ascendancy under David Cameron. In actual fact, these are much the same people responsible for the core-vote strategy under Michael Howard. And though there is some overlap with the Portillistas of old, this is far from complete.

David Cameron, unlike Michael Portillo, doesn’t want to dump core Conservative principles. Like any good and-theorist he believes that we need to complete our conservatism, and thus broaden its appeal, by embracing issues such as environmentalism, social justice and civil liberties. However, he has discomfited many in the party with what seems like an exclusive focus on these ‘breadth’ issues. In Cameron’s defence it must be said that the voters have had year-after-year of nothing but the ‘depth’ issues (e.g. tax cuts and immigration), thus a period of rebalancing is in order.

Peter Franklin: Why the growth in air travel has to be stopped

Peter Franklin is a Conservative policy advisor, speechwriter and contributor to The Guardian's Comment Is Free.

Warning: If you don’t care about greenhouse gas emission or don’t believe in global warming then this article is not for you. In fact, it will make no sense at all. If, however, you are of the opinion that it might not be the best idea to let carbon dioxide levels double and triple just to see what happens, then read on.

David Cameron is someone who believes that we need to take action to reduce our carbon emissions. However, according to his interview with GQ magazine he seems to be against a tax on aviation fuel: “I don’t want to make air travel the preserve of the rich.”

This is something that was welcomed by our esteemed Editor and other visitors to Conservative Home. We wouldn’t want to “price people out of the skies”, they say.
There would appear to be some misunderstanding here. The mainstream environmental movement doesn’t want people to fly less, rather it doesn’t want them to fly more. There is a very good reason for this.

Aircraft are championship carbon emitters – not just as a result of the huge quantities of fuel they burn, but because of the altitude at which they release their greenhouse gases. Each tonne of carbon dioxide released in the air has two to three times the global warming effect of a tonne released nearer to ground level.

Moreover, the rate of growth in air travel means that aircraft emissions are outstripping those of any other major sector. Climate change experts have done the sums, projecting forward the various growth rates to see where we’re likely to stand in 2050. At a time when Britain’s emissions will need to be 60% down on 1990 levels (a target adopted by all the main parties and endorsed by the weight of opinion amongst scientists), aircraft emissions look set to gobble up most or all of Britain’s carbon budget. In other words, emissions from every other sector would have to be zero or close to it.

Ah, but isn’t there a danger in extrapolating trends so far into the future? Can we really expect air travel to continue growing at the current rate for the next forty years? Well, yes, we can. Even in developed countries like Britain, the market for air travel is as far from being saturated today as the market for road travel was forty years ago. Moreover, air space is very much less constrained than road space. In the absence of government action, all that can stop the growth of the air travel market is economic stagnation, a catastrophic rise in the oil price or a halt to the development of new airports.

But won’t technology come to the rescue? Energy efficiency and low carbon energy sources are making a big impact everywhere else, so why not aviation? Unfortunately, aircraft are uniquely resistant to technological improvement. There is no viable alternative to currently used aviation fuels. Various operational, engine and fuel efficiencies are making some impact on emissions per passenger mile, but the rate of improvement is much slower than the rate of market growth – and has already been taken into account in the calculations I mentioned earlier. Even if there were to be some stunning technological breakthrough – say fuel cell powered jet engines – it will take many decades before current aircraft designs touchdown for the last time.

The hard truth is that the only way to stabilise aviation emissions is to stop the growth in demand. And that will require some form of market intervention to steady the cost of air travel relative to living standards. This implies some kind of tax or levy, (the proceeds of which could be used to help the developing world acquire alternative communication networks).

Yes, I realise that all of this will require international agreement, which won’t be easy to say the least. However, the same will be true of any meaningful action on climate change – without which we might as well all go home and prepare for the worst.

That in a nut shell is the substantive case, but what of the political case? Can we really afford to tell the voters that we want to price them out of the skies? As I’ve explained it’s not about reducing access to air travel, but restricting the level of growth to the rate of fuel efficiency improvement. That oughtn’t to be too hard a message to sell. But there’s a more serious point about the purpose of the Conservative Party.

Is our raison d’etre to facilitate the growth of material consumption regardless of the consequences?  As conservatives we should be philosophically equipped to grasp that there’s more to life than bread alone. And on a more practical level, we should realise that while technological and economic progress may be unlimited, our existence on this Earth is bound by other constraints. For instance, the greater prosperity of the last few decades has enabled us to pay the financial costs of family breakdown, but the personal pain and social disintegration that comes with it cannot be healed with money. Our humanity, like the natural world that surrounds us, is fragile. We need to take care of both.

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RELATED LINK: Peter Franklin on the green dimension to David Cameron's first 100 days.

Peter Franklin on David Cameron's first 100 days: The environment

This Thursday David Cameron will have been Conservative leader for 100 days.  Every day this week ConservativeHome will be dedicating YourPlatform to a different take on those first 100 days.  Peter Franklin, who works in Parliament for Greg Clark MP, writes this first essay in a personal capacity.  In the recent past Peter has been an advisor to Tim Yeo and Oliver Letwin. 

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the environment has become the signature issue of David Cameron’s first hundred days in the top job. Green issues have cropped-up with unprecedented regularity in the Leader’s speeches, campaign events and questions to the Prime Minister. And to give the man his due, he practices what he preaches – riding a bicycle to work and installing a wind turbine in his garden.

More substantially, we’ve seen the establishment of the Quality of Life Policy Group, headed by environmental elder statesman John Gummer and charismatic green campaigner Zac Goldsmith. In Parliament, our green benches are looking all the greener – Peter Ainsworth now leads the Shadow DEFRA team, assisted by Greg Barker and Bill Wiggin. Meanwhile, Tim Yeo, another of our environmental elder statesmen, has become chairman of the influential Environmental Audit Committee. In other words, David Cameron has appointed the greenest possible candidates to every significant environment-related position in his gift.

David Cameron gives every impression that he means business on the environment. But before we ask whether or not rhetoric is likely to translate into manifesto promises, it’s worth asking why the change in tone.

The environmental content of our 2005 manifesto was meagre to say the least and compared badly with that of our opponents. This was the direct result of an election strategy focused entirely on the top five or six voter issues. It would seem that our highly paid strategists had overlooked the fact that while the environment may not have been among the top concerns of the electorate as a whole, more detailed polling showed that it certainly was for a significant minority of voters. Other polling showed that we were seen as the weakest party on the environment and that the environment was our weakest issue. Indeed, it was the only issue on which we couldn’t even get the support of a majority of our own voters.

It seems clear that the polling evidence has concentrated minds wonderfully. But there is more to it than that. The party leadership has been won over on the actual issues too. In this respect Oliver Letwin has played a pivotal role. Following our third successive election defeat, he came to his new role as Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment as a mild sceptic on many green issues. However, as if very often the case with those who take the time to review the evidence, he, much like Margaret Thatcher before him, was persuaded of the enormity and urgency of the challenges posed by climate change and other environmental threats.

It has been fascinating to see the chain reaction of events that has followed – Letwin’s influence on David Cameron; the re-emergence of our environmental elder statesmen; the influx of green-minded newcomers led by Zac Goldsmith and our increasingly warm relationship with a green movement that feels betrayed by New Labour. Most intriguingly, green issues have formed the basis of new spirit of cooperation with the Liberal Democrats and other opposition parties – for instance, in the adoption of a joint position on climate change.

So will all this greenery result in real change in either or policies or our popularity? Too early to tell, of course – but there was a poll putting David Cameron well ahead of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in the greenest leader stakes. Then there is the Conservative Party’s apparent shift on the nuclear issue, with Tory energy spokesman Alan Duncan openly voicing his “suspicion” of the case for a new generation of nuclear power stations.

There will be some internal opposition, of course. But it unlikely to be sustained, not least because such opposition is usually based on a disregard for green issues rather than properly informed engagement. The real crunch will come when tough decisions have to be made in the latter stages of the policy development process. Of course, many if not most environmental measures are relatively painless other than for polluting vested interests. But some necessary actions, such as those required to curb aviation emissions, won’t be easy for anyone. And it is here that Cameron’s green Conservatives will face their toughest test.

TOMORROW: IAIN MURRAY WILL LOOK AT THE NEED FOR DAVID CAMERON TO REACH OUT TO LOWER INCOME FAMILIES IN LABOUR'S HEARTLANDS.