Robert McIlveen: Don’t axe this tax, the carbon floor price is the best of a very variable bunch

Robert McIlveen was a Research Fellow at Policy Exchange in the Environment and Energy unit. He is Deputy Chairman of his local Conservative Association and writes in a personal capacity.

Matthew Sinclair’s criticism of carbon taxation – that at a time of economic difficulty adding to the tax burden of our biggest employers is the last thing we should do – has a certain logic to it. It’s certainly true that the carbon floor price, effectively a tax, will add costs to those industries which use a lot of energy. But I feel he has the wrong target. Our focus should be on the absurdly bad value for money policies, not the ones that actually make sense.

A year back while still working at Policy Exchange, I wrote the first half of a report, the second half of which, by Prof Dieter Helm, laid out the design of a carbon floor price. Guilty as charged, I was a bystander in the call for a carbon tax. But not any old carbon tax. The political argument made in the report was that those who take the risks of climate change seriously ought to take the costs of tackling it seriously too. For too long the politics of climate change have been hippies versus accountants; one side carefree about costs if their preferred solutions made them feel good, the other missing the big picture by counting pennies. But those who are concerned about climate change have a responsibility to take the costs of tackling it seriously too.

Which brings in the first half of that report. It looked at the costs of various climate change policies, which range from the low (about £3/tonne) to the absurd (about £460 for the Feed-in Tariff for microrenewables, i.e. a subsidy for mini-solar panels and others). I’m proud to lay claim to pointing out just how bad value for money the Feed-in Tariff scheme inherited from the previous government was, which the Coalition have rightly reined in. The alarming thing was that the figure for the cost per tonne came from DECC’s own analysis – meaning that the Labour government knew how bad value it was, and happily signed it off anyway.

Robert McIlveen: Liberal interventionism – naïve, dangerous and profoundly un-Churchillian

Robert McIlveen lives in Sheffield and is doing his PhD there on the Conservative Party, its organisation and electoral strategy. He welcomes David Cameron's recent speech on a "liberal conservative" approach to foreign policy.

Liberal interventionism is rather like carbon offsetting: an expensive way to make ourselves feel better about the world. It’s hard not to feel that “something must be done” when we see images of brutality and desperation from around the world on the TV news or on the web. The horrors of Darfur, Congo, Zimbabwe and Burma are undeniable. Yet the idea that invading and freeing the people from repressive regimes is the right thing to do is rarely challenged. 

David Cameron’s speech in Berlin provoked an interesting discussion about foreign policy, in particular his rejection of liberal interventionism. The role of scepticism in foreign policy has been neglected by Labour in office with disastrous consequences.

Darfur is important because it underlines exactly what is wrong with the current international system. No-one is in any doubt that, given agreement and the willingness to do it, the Khartoum government could be taken down in a matter of days. The same could be said for Robert Mugabe or the Burmese generals.

Robert McIlveen: The centre ground should be on our terms

Robert McIlveen lives in Sheffield and is doing his PhD there on the Conservative party, its organisation and electoral strategy.

The Labour party, and much of the media, tell us we’re “lurching to the right.” Many in this party, and on this website, despair that we’re “charging to the centre.” Apparently David Cameron is doing both, neither or some combination of them, depending on who you read. But what is the centre that we are heading towards or fleeing from? Where is it and does it matter?

The idea that political parties gravitate to “the centre” of the ideological spectrum has been around since Anthony Downs’ An Economic Theory of Democracy. It’s pretty common parlance to hear people claim elections can only be won from the centre. But that doesn’t tell us what the centre is. Downs’ idea works when you have two parties (we have at least three), one issue dimension (we have at least two, maybe more) and voters vote for the party closest to them (they often don’t). So should we forget the centre and go for something else?