How "New Economics" captured Labour

I find it constantly surprising that people are still surprised by the discovery that Net Zero policies are “not working”. “Energy is more expensive!” they discover. I am no less puzzled by the determination to confront this by somehow producing physics that shows that global warming isn’t happening — for physicists should surely now about efficiency, and that’s the least efficient use of their time.

The frustration is that the green imperative for economic degrowth and deindustrialisation has been, for most of the duration of the green agenda, explicitly stated. One did not need to see far past the slick Blairite gloss to understand what was being said by this Miliband:

“We need the choices people make … to respect environmental limits” means we are depriving people of choice and making them poorer. Yes, the fact is buried by the then Secretary of State’s language. But there was a wealth of material stretching back to the 1960s from the movement whose mere lobbying had, in the 2000s, turned into the colonisation of UK politics by green freaks. I typically cite two examples to make my point here…

Very wealthy men, on behalf of even richer men, have been telling us for 6 decades that wealth is ‘not the answer’. Yet all their prognostications about what economic growth would do, were it not halted, have failed.

For decades, then, the message was clear: we must be poorer, we must have less stuff, we must deindustrialise. Ehrlich (pictured above) expressed it arithmetically:

Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology

Various revisions of this formula appear over the next decades, but the message is the same shameful expression of contempt for people.

I am repeating the point again, because this motif of environmentalism was so clear, so obvious, and so flawed, because nobody should have been surprised by rising energy prices and scarcity, by deindustrialisation and by economic degrowth. But they are. We’re criticising features of the green agenda, folks, not bugs.

Back when the older Miliband was pioneering politics by Youtube, a Labour-aligned think tank, The New Economics Foundation, released a report called “Growth Isn’t Working”, which argued that economic growth was failing to solve the issues of sustainability and poverty.

They could have hardly been more wrong. Economic growth was indeed abolishing poverty — at an extraordinary rate. (We shall discuss some other time why that progress has stalled.)

Despite this stark, historically unprecedented fact, the idiots at the New Economics Foundation — who claim to be motivated by ‘social justice’ — remained committed to their anti-growth agenda. In 2010, they released a follow-up report that argued that “Growth is not Possible”.

The Conservatives — by then the major party in the coalition after the 2010 General Election — did no need think tanks to develop the Tory anti-growth agenda. They had Zac Goldsmith and John Gummer, who wrote

….beyond a certain point – a point which the UK reached some time ago – everincreasing material gain can become not a gift but a burden. As people, it makes us less happy, and the environment upon which all of us, and our economy, depend is increasingly degraded by it.

It was news to many of us that we were sufficiently wealthy — and certainly not as wealthy as those multimillionaires, one of whom inherited £300,000,000 in 1997 (worth twice that in today’s money). Yet now both the major nominally left and nominally right political parties were captured by the anti-growth agenda.

This is significant if we want to understand what ideas are in play, and how they have developed. The battle between the left and right, put simply, had been one about the matter of ownership, and thus how best productive life can be organised for society’s needs: conservatives tending to hold with the institution of private property, the left and its factions variously arguing for state ownership. But look, and as I’ve argued recently: now we have an argument against economic growth, and against economic and technological development; environmentalism is orthogonal to the left-right axis.

Arguing about that end of this new political axis’s claims, in terms of the consequences of the policies, or the soundness of its scientific basis is, I argue, a bit like arguing 20 or so years after Herod’s policies why so few boys were applying to university.

We knew what the agenda was two decades ago. It was stated plainly, at least by the movements that influenced the government if not so plainly by ministers themselves. And we knew what kind of counterfactual bullshit these idiots traded in two decades ago, too. They would stand on data that showed tens of millions of people each year emerging from rural subsistence poverty into productive economic life, and claim that something was deeply, deeply wrong with the world, which required radical change.

Such lunatics and idiots are why we are now getting poorer, why we are deindustrialising, why things are becoming more expensive, and why our infrastructure is likely to become less reliable.

I wrote about a few of these characters for a recent Daily Sceptical article, below. More to follow…

“We are determined to fix the youth unemployment crisis and restore opportunity across the country,” explained Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero Miatta Fahnbulleh, after her appearance on BBC Breakfast on Monday. She had been invited to the show to talk about the plight of North Sea oil and gas, and in particular to explain how the Government was going to navigate between its goal of ‘pragmatism’ versus the views of her predecessor, Ed Miliband, who before returning to government called the plans to develop Rosebank and Jackdaw fields “climate vandalism”. Perhaps to distract from the controversy and the Government’s lack of clarity, Fahnbulleh, on the show and then on X, talked past the sale. “We’re creating 400,000 extra clean energy jobs by 2030 and working with companies like @nationalgriduk to help young people seize these opportunities,” she tweeted.

The figure of “400,000” has been Labour’s shiny bauble of distraction for a long time. But the promise of green jobs and green opportunities in general have for just as long belied the reality of deindustrialisation, economic torpor and what some have called the ‘enshittification’ of the ‘Yookay’. The tactic is obvious: most people aren’t particularly moved by abstract climate goals such as emissions-reduction targets. But everyone wants young people to have good jobs to look forward to. You might think climate policies are BS, but are you going to argue against jobs for young people? Since Fahnbulleh is new to her position, perhaps she needs a refresher on the promises that were made.

Let’s think about how much good is being done for young people by the green agenda. Someone born on the eve of the 2008 Climate Change Act being made law would now be approaching their 18th birthday. That legislation required policies that would lower emissions by 80% on 1990 levels by 2050, when our climate legislation baby would be 42. Back in the late 2000s, jobs were becoming a major concern in the wake of the financial crash. The unemployment rate rose from a low of 4.8% in 2005 to 7.6% by 2009. But things were much worse for young people (16 to 24). From an unemployment rate of 12.3% in 2004, rates for the younger cohort sailed through 19.2% in 2009, through to 21.4% in 2011. That rate dropped through the years before the lockdowns, to 11.4%, has been rising since 2022, and now stands at 16.4%.