As the Conservative leadership contest enters its final stage, both remaining candidates are trying to prove that they merit the title of “real conservative” by talking up their libertarian instincts.
For those of us who believe in smaller government, this is good news after a depressing time of late. Fourteen years of Conservative government did little to make good on the party’s long-standing rhetorical commitment to shrinking the state.
The lasting damage done by the emergency measures which paid the wages of nearly half of the UK workforce during the pandemic and then the energy bills of millions of consumers when gas prices spiked is considerable. This is not just in how much they added to our national debt or drove up inflation, but more in what we expect the government to do.
Far too many in politics now see the state as the answer to everything, rather than the cause of so many of our woes. It is an attitude that risks leading to ever ballooning public spending, with loud demands for state intervention in every sector, and huge pressure on politicians to heed them.
This culture is a recipe for a permanently bigger state and one which is far less able to discharge its proper functions effectively. And with a left-leaning government now in place, we can have little hope that positive change will come anytime soon.
As the Conservative Party rebuilds after a catastrophic election defeat, Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick are rightly saying they want to slash the size of the state. But it isn’t enough just to want a smaller government; we need to consider how we get it. We should be talking about things like the future of the huge welfare budget, major public service reform, and deregulation, and not espousing the usual platitudes about cutting down on waste.
What Conservatives should not do is to take the easy way out and champion short-term cuts that will ultimately encourage even bigger government in the long-term.
Too many loud voices in our movement are willing to sacrifice serious climate action in order to burnish their libertarian credentials. This is an utterly short-termist approach, more preoccupied with appearances than harnessing our beliefs to actually tackle the problem. It is not action to reach net zero that is a barrier to a smaller state; but our failure to do so certainly would be.
Anticipating genuine future crises is not straightforward, but we can be sure that the impacts of climate change will be severe and far reaching, both for the UK and across the world. Even if we hit the global target of limiting temperature rises to 1.5 degrees, we would see many more floods and heatwaves, severe impacts on our food and energy security, and thousands more migrants coming to the UK from areas rendered uninhabitable. The impact on our society and economy would be immense.
Claiming that we should simply spend money on adapting to all the impacts of rising temperatures without having to mitigate them, as some in Reform UK have claimed, would be eye-wateringly expensive folly. The truth is that there are no cost-free options. Politically and economically, as well as scientifically, the climate change genie is out of the bottle and no amount of scepticism will put it back in.
Enthusiasts for a small state need to accept this reality: if we fail to take climate change seriously, we will only make the never-ending nightmare of big government even worse.
But this does not mean that we should follow the left’s path to net zero. The challenge for those of us who believe in permanently shrinking the role of government is how to tackle climate change in the right way.
Any public spending should be limited to correcting the market failure of greenhouse gas emissions and recognising that smaller, targeted interventions now will prevent much larger ones in the future. The time-sensitive nature of the climate change threat is such that we ought to accept some government grants to accelerate the uptake of zero emission technologies that have not yet reached market maturity. But it is by reducing taxes and regulations and liberalising trade that the economic opportunities of climate action can be realised at the greatest possible scale. There is a significant space opening up for an ambitious, market-led approach to reaching net zero — the Conservative Party should own it.
In contrast, Labour’s net zero plans are a triumph of statist ideology over pragmatism. GB Energy, the government’s new state-owned energy company, risks crowding out private investment in the UK and represents an unnecessary and wasteful use of taxpayers’ money. Ditto rail nationalisation, which, though popular, will come to disappoint anyone who believes that privatisation was the cause of expensive tickets and poor quality service.
This should be fertile ground for Conservative Party. Despite the successes of the last government in cutting emissions, conservatives should have done a lot more to pursue a free market approach to net zero based around tax cuts and radical supply side reform to incentivise significant private investment and competition across the sectors we need to decarbonise.
Done right, climate action does not have to be an impediment to a smaller, less interfering state. Our belief in the power of free markets, free trade, and individual choice should guide our approach to reaching net zero. As some amongst us claim that curbing emissions is a luxury we cannot afford, we should also remember that inaction comes with an even heavier price tag attached. Conservatives should recognise that failing to tackle climate change would be an expensive mistake which would only bolster those who think that the state is the answer to every problem.
Imagine the impact that inaction on climate change today could have on the size of the state tomorrow – government bailouts to keep farm businesses afloat, vast spending on protecting homes and infrastructure from weather extremes, and ever growing demand on public services from soaring net migration. Indeed, the OBR’s estimate of the cost of inaction on climate change is a staggering 289 per cent increase in public sector net debt by 2100. If you thought the last few years were bad, you haven’t seen anything yet.
First published by The Critic. John Flesher is the Conservative Environment Network's Deputy Director.
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