While the Tory leadership contest between foreign secretary Liz Truss and former chancellor Rishi Sunak drags on, something more important than the next prime minister of the UK is plaguing my mind.‘’
I’m writing this from a sweltering London. It is 31°C again today. It has been above 30°C for the past five days, and in July the mercury hit 38°C for two days running. From the window of my flat on the 11th floor I have spectacular views of the City of London to the east and of Hampstead Heath to the west. The sky is blue and cloudless, the air dry and still. But it is eerily quiet for a Sunday morning; the blazing heat has driven even mad dogs and Englishmen out of the midday sun.
Whereas before the British would cheer this kind of weather as “glorious”, it has now become “ominous”. It hasn’t rained for weeks. A drought has been declared in several parts of England as the driest summer in 50 years annihilates lawns with hosepipe bans, and scares the living daylights out of farmers. The source of the Thames is even beginning to run dry, and the village of Northend in Oxfordshire has run out of tap water completely, with bottles and tankered water being delivered to those in need.
These are unreal scenes for this normally damp, cold and grey island. So many British societal norms are anchored in discussing the national obsession that is the weather, which can rotate between all seasons on one day. “If you don’t like the British weather”, it is said, “don’t worry, it will change in five minutes.” The status quo historically has been bad weather though, and it gets even worse as you go further north to Manchester and up to Scotland. As such, the British escape to Spanish resorts in Magaluf or Ibiza for the summer.
But now that Britain will officially be a hot country, as scientists have declared, what will become of the British sense of self? The parched pastures of this once lush and verdant land are catching fire, and along with the rest of Europe the UK is becoming engulfed by flames and submitting to dangerous heat. With this now the norm, climate change is finally moving up the media agenda.
Yet the two contenders for the UK premiership have barely mentioned their policy strategy for climate change, which will bring about the most fundamental shift in UK living standards and priorities. The country simply does not have the infrastructure to cope with heat at these levels, never mind the uninhabitable 40°C and even 50°C summers that are undoubtedly just a few years away.
The problem is that the Tory party is in thrall to a small but powerful hard-right wing of Brexit supporters and climate sceptics. And there is a strong area of overlap in the Venn diagram containing members of the Brexit-supporting European Research Group and the recently established, climate-sceptic Net Zero Scrutiny Group (NZSG).
The NZSG is a group of Conservative politicians who are, according to investigative journalism by The Guardian, “on the front line of a new climate war and are attempting to derail the government’s green agenda ... by attempting to link the government’s net zero agenda to the cost of living crisis and calling for cuts to green taxes and an increase of fossil fuel production”.
It is an outrage that even as the evidence of climate change is clear to see all around us a small group of hardline climate sceptics with seemingly dubious funding streams already have the next prime minister of the UK self-censoring on the most important issue facing this country today.
• Dr Masie, a former senior editor of the Financial Mail, is chief strategist at IC Publications in London.
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