Please note that this programme transcript is BBC copyright and may not be reproduced or copied for any other purpose. RADIO 4 CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS HOW DID I GET TO BE SO GREEN AND BLUE? TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY Presenter: Camilla Cavendish Producer: Hugh Levinson Editor: Nicola Meyrick BBC Room 1210 White City 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS (020) 8752 7279 Broadcast date: 06.04.06 2030-2100 Repeat date: 09.04.06 2130-2200 CD number: PLN614/06VT1014 Duration: 27.27 Taking part in order of appearance: Claire Whelan Zac Goldsmith Ecologist Peter Ainsworth MP Shadow Environment Secretary Andrew Simms New Economics Foundation RT Hon John Gummer MP Secretary of State for Environment from 1993 until 1997 and Chairman of the Tory Party’s Quality of Life review Tom Burke Former Director of Friends of the Earth and an advisor to three successive Conservative environment secretaries Andrew Cooper Populus Nick Wood Former Media Director of the Conservative Party Sir Crispin Tickell Former British Embassador to the UN Stephen Tindale Greenpeace John Redwood MP Head of the Conservatives Party Commission on Competitiveness Caroline Jackson Tory MEP Amory Lovins Director of the Rocky Mountain Institute CAVENDISH: The scene: a hall in Westminster: the time: the run-up to the Tory spring conference: And the atmosphere: buzzing with excitement. The Conservative Women’s Organisation are holding their annual meeting, and for the first time ever, their chosen theme is the environment. That is not the first topic you may think of when you hear the words Conservative Party. But under David Cameron, climate change, pollution, furry animals, green fields are high up on its agenda. And the activists seem to love it. WHELAN: It’s just so exciting, It does feel as though it’s the beginning of a new era. The whole party does feels like it’s going places. It feels – what we’re talking about is now in tune with the electorate out there in a way that it hasn’t been for some time. GOLDSMITH: Of the political parties the Conservative party is best placed to deliver not least because at its core, the Conservative approach is the best approach in terms of dealing with the environment. CAVENDISH: That was Zac Goldsmith, the billionaire ecologist who’s helping to lead the Tories’ new Quality of Life Commission. Like Bob Geldof on poverty, he is lending some much-needed glamour. But is hanging out with Bob and Zac just part of a vacuous re-brand? Another speaker is Peter Ainsworth, Shadow Environment Secretary. AINSWORTH: I hardly believe this myself but there was an opinion poll in the Guardian last week that put us 30 points ahead of Labour on the environment: which just shows what you can do without any policies. CAVENDISH: He was joking - and that’s not quite what the poll said, anyway - but policies are in short supply. It’s hard to tell yet what the conversion from blue to green will mean if the Tories get back into power. Will they be too yellow to make hard choices? Can they be pro-environment while being anti-Europe? Are there irreconciliable contradictions for a party that has put enterprise and individual freedom top of its agenda? Here is Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation. SIMMS: I think the Conservative party face a challenge which could be as significant as the debate they’ve had internally over Europe. The reason is because it’s got two traditions, two clear traditions, one that believes in continuity and coherence and conservation and the other which is forcefully in favour of free markets. So that I think is the challenge. How to square those two clearly opposite tensions. GUMMER: I think the Tory party’s returning to its roots. Environmentalism is not something new. I think it was something that was played down – but I mean I don’t think this is difficult for Tories. CAVENDISH: John Gummer, Secretary of State for Environment from 1993 until 1997, is Chairman of the party’s Quality of Life review. GUMMER: What happened after the 19th century was that these two great streams of history, the sort of Tory paternalism and the liberal laissez faire attitude to the economy came together and they are now two aspects of the same party. And if you look at the coalition that is the Conservative party – all parties in Britain are forced to be coalitions – in that coalition there are some of us who display more the attitude towards conservatism of looking after, of passing on, and others who are perhaps much more concentrated on the business of business at this moment. And that’s a very healthy tension. CAVENDISH: One man’s healthy tension can be another’s debilitating virus. Tom Burke has had a chance to view the issue from both the inside and outside, as former director of Friends of the Earth and also an advisor to three successive Conservative environment secretaries. BURKE: There is an ideological bit of the Conservative party that in a sense can take the environmental agenda on board and see it in terms of how you promote property rights, how you create a functioning markets for things and how you make markets work for the environment. There’s another ideological bit of the Conservative party that’s the sort of Poujadist bit, the small traders bit, that voice most clearly these days reflected these days by Digby Jones and the CBI, saying basically take all this stuff away, and get it off our backs and let us get on with the business of doing business. Now they’re both there and nobody’s ever squared them up very much. Not only just in the Conservative party but inside any of the political parties. CAVENDISH: Tactically, the particular problem for the Conservatives is that most outside the party think of them as the party of the CBI and enterprise, not caring and polar bears. Many people have greeted David Cameron’s new green credentials with amazement. That is exactly the point, says Andrew Cooper of Populus, the polling organisation. COOPER: Most people don’t think the Conservative party is a party which is strongly associated with environmental issues or particularly cares about climate change, indeed probably most people who follow the issue would probably have taken the opposite view. So by suddenly taking a stand, by saying climate change matters, by saying climate change is one of the key things which we’re going to talk about, what David Cameron is doing is above all else he’s saying that the Conservative Party is changing. CAVENDISH: So how important is the environment to voters? COOPER: It is not a very salient issue for many people. Indeed there are very few voters for whom it is a really important issue in deciding which party they vote for. When you ask people to list the issues that matter most to them, only 8% of people count the environment in the top three issues, let alone as the most important issue of all. CAVENDISH: But if only 8% of people care about the environment, why is turning green going to help the Conservatives? COOPER: I think part of what David Cameron is trying to do is to get the Conservative party to re- enter the human race in a sense and associate itself in that same part of the spectrum as a party that really does care about making services better for everybody, making schools better for everybody, dealing with threats to the planet. Why should Conservatives be the only people in the world who don’t want to make poverty history? CAVENDISH: By neutralising questions like that, Conservatives hope to retake ground from both Labour and the Liberal Democrats. And there is huge ground to make up: most polls still put Labour way ahead of the Conservatives on tackling public services, poverty and the environment. The AB voters who left the Conservatives in 1997 have not come back. Nick Wood, former media director of the Conservative Party, warns that a green rebranding could woo them but alienate others… WOOD: Cameron is seeking to win back this AB group, the gravel drive brigade, who if you talk to any Tory MP when he’s out on the campaign trail he’ll tell you the longer the drive, the less likely a vote at the end of it.. Conservatives have not done too badly at holding on to what used to be Thatcher’s working class supporters. It’s held a fair bit of the C1, C2, D boat. Those people are the sort of people who will feel the pinch from a green approach, particularly to taxation.. The guy with the big Mercedes is not going to be too bothered about it, but I’ve got my little Ford Escort and if I have to pay £5 a week more for my petrol bill, that’s for me, is make or break really. CAVENDISH: Mrs Thatcher won many of those voters over by positioning the Conservatives as the party of opportunity, offering the respectable working class both the right to buy and the right to drive. She is less commonly remembered as a prophetic voice on climate change. THATCHER SPEECH: The danger of global warming is as yet unseen, but real enough for us to make changes and sacrifices so that we do not live at the expense of future generations. CAVENDISH: In 1990, Margaret Thatcher’s speech to the Geneva climate conference was one of the first by a world leader on global warming. She urged other politicians not to waste time disputing the science or blaming each other, and to create a global convention to reduce greenhouse gases. Reading it today, the words jump off the page. She sounds more forthright, and less apologetic, than many of today’s politicians. Her supporters say her influence was crucial in getting the first President Bush to sign the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Where did her apparent conviction come from? Partly from Sir Crispin Tickell, then the British Ambassador to the UN. TICKELL: The environment was something that did interest her. And I think the fact that the more people expressed opposition to it, especially among her cabinet colleagues, the more interested she became in it. You must remember Mrs. Thatcher was not only a woman in a man’s world, but she was also a scientist in a world of classical scholars, lawyers and the rest of them. So she felt always that those were the two things that were her. GUMMER : I remember ringing her up when I was minister of agriculture, well I was minister of state at agriculture and my job was to look after the sea defences. CAVENDISH: John Gummer GUMMER: And I had become convinced of the probability in those days of climate change and she said well John, there are only 2 people in the government who believe in climate change – you and me and that makes a majority. LAUGHS CAVENDISH: Margaret Thatcher’s environmental mission helped to kill two birds with one stone. The miners’ strike in 1984 had convinced her of the need to reduce dependence on coal, a much dirtier fuel than gas in terms of carbon dioxide emissions. She privatised the power companies and encouraged a “dash for gas” in the 1980s. This switch away from coal is still probably the single most important factor putting Britain on course to meet its carbon dioxide commitments under Kyoto. Today, the gas is running out. The easy choices are over. Back in the late ‘80s, how deep did Mrs. Thatcher’s green streak run? Tom Burke. BURKE: I’m not sure how much of a conversion there was. It seemed to run up to the point that she realised doing something about it might interfere with a car- owning democracy which she was also very committed to. So I think she never really thought through a position. CAVENDISH: The Tory Party in power never had a serious internal debate about the environment. If John Gummer says that he and Margaret Thatcher were the only two in the government who believed in global warming, then once she was gone he was alone in a pretty big room. Conservatives like to say that they created the first department of the environment and published the first environmental white paper. They also introduced the fuel duty escalator, which kept petrol prices rising faster than inflation. Yet they were out of power by the time the fuel protests scared government into abandoning that policy. And at that point their DNA was unmistakeable. Under Iain Duncan-Smith, the party announced policies to speed up road-building, and to abolish unnecessary road-humps. The Poujadists were behind the wheel. Pollster Andrew Cooper again: COOPER: The Conservatives, because of the context in which they fought and won the elections in the 1980s where there was a lot at stake in terms of the political spectrum in terms of the left-right divide, became a party that defined itself by economics alone. And also I think failed for a long time to really come to terms with the consequences of their own period of government. And that actually presiding over the transition of Britain from being this sort of basket case economy into being one of the most stable and prosperous economies in the world – the sort of liberating Thatcherite economics, on the other unleashed all kinds of forces which meant a whole range of other things started to matter and the agenda changed on them. And they just didn’t respond to it. CAVENDISH: The battleground is no longer jobs and social security, it’s public services and quality of life. This new battleground can be treacherous. The environment is often seen as a soft issue. But it soon cuts into hard-edged policy choices. Nick Wood warned us of the man in the old Ford Escort, outraged at having to pay more for petrol. When Ken Livingstone proposed a congestion charge for London, investing the proceeds in public transport, it caused huge controversy. The Tories opposed it, while Labour blew hot and cold. So will the new Green Conservatives be prepared to impose green taxes? A question for John Gummer. GUMMER: I don’t want the environment to become a bad word so there are two things we have to be very careful about. One is puritanism. An awful lot of environmentalists are actually puritans in a new guise. They want us to feel uncomfortable because they think it’s better for us that way. It’s like my mother and medicine. When I asked her why California syrup of figs tasted so filthy: she said “because you wouldn’t know it was doing you any good unless it does taste nasty.” I’m a catholic, not a puritan, and the 2nd thing is we have to fight against is the people who want to use the environment as a means of increasing their tax base. That’s why people are very leery of the concept of green taxes and why I’m a great believer that you need to have green taxes which manifestly raise money which is then used for an environmental purpose. I don’t think people mind paying money for example for driving their car into a major town if they see the tramway being built at the same time and there is a real connection. CAVENDISH: And how does that sit now with the belief in individual economic freedom and free markets? GUMMER: I think you’ve got to do two things. You’ve got to get rid of unnecessary regulation and you’ve got to have much smarter regulation.. One of the things Tories bring to this whole issue is practicality. What we need to do is set business standards which are just this side of the possible. Business will always tell you it can’t do whatever it is you want to do. We have got to be much smarter at pulling the standards up much quicker. And then people won’t have to change their lifestyle. They’ll still have a washing machine but it may well be a waterless washing machine. The impact is huge if these small things we do aggregate up to the big things that they could do. And that’s a very conservative concept. CAVENDISH: There is over a year before Mr Gummer’s group reports with concrete recommendations. What do environmentalists think the party needs to do to prove its credentials? Here are Stephen Tindale of Greenpeace and Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation SIMMS: The tough choice they need to make in policy terms right now is whether or not the findings of their quality of life commission are going to take precedence over the findings of their commission on economic competitiveness. TINDALE: And possibly most important of all is the issue of airport expansion, which could completely trash our environmental targets. And if the Conservatives are serious about climate change, they have a real opportunity to come out against the government’s aviation white paper, which is a scandalous piece of policy. CAVENDISH: So what about this cussed issue of aviation? The head of the party’s Commission on Competitiveness is John Redwood, high priest of the free market REDWOOD: One side of me says it’s very hard to say to people on relatively modest incomes now we’ve got to the point where we can deliver air travel you can afford, so you can now have what were the privileges of the rich 20 – 30 years ago, we’re going to take it away from you because we’ve discovered it’s bad for the environment. But on the other hand reading the science and the figures it is quite obvious that aviation is relatively very dirty. On the one hand we’re the party of enterprise and consumer choice and so we should be celebrating the advent of mass air travel at prices people can afford. On the other hand we are a very environmental party and we recognise that this is a serious source of worrying emissions of CO2 and others. And I don’t yet know what our answer is going to be. CAVENDISH: It’s refreshing to hear such frankness. But what about the biggest environmental question: climate change. It’s still not clear what magnitude of change the Conservative Party thinks are needed to deal with this. Peter Ainsworth, environment spokesman AINSWORTH: Climate change is - if we believe the scientists and I think we better had - the biggest single threat facing this generation of politicians. CAVENDISH: How long do you think we’ve got? AINSWORTH: Well you have to depend on the scientists for that and I think we work on the basis that we haven’t got very long at all and that we need to be moving much faster than we’re moving are at the moment. To be honest I’m sometimes daunted by the scale of the challenge. Which if you think about it too much keeps you awake at night. Because climate change is the biggest threat we face and if we can do our bit in this country to help solve that problem that will be a huge step forward, because we may be a small country but we do have a big voice in the world. CAVENDISH: So do you agree with David King that climate change is a greater threat than terrorism? AINSWORTH: It has killed more people already than international terrorism has. That is a fact. So it’s hard to disagree. CAVENDISH: Mr Ainsworth is actually going further than Sir David King, the government’s chief scientist. His statement puts him towards the extreme end of views about the risks posed by climate change. John Redwood takes a much less apocalyptic view, and the contrast is striking. REDWOOD: There’s quite a good literature which says that if you have a sudden outbreak of massive volcanic activity it would completely swamp anything mankind had been doing. I’m told by scientists who know that sunspot change on the sun could do far more than humankind. So there are all these uncertainties. So what does John Redwood say about it, he says he doesn’t know. I can see there is a danger that the actions of mankind is having an impact on all this. Quite a lot of scientists believe that is true. And on that basis I’m very happy to go along with the Conservative party saying this matters and we will do our bit. But I also very strongly believe that it has to be a global response. Britain is so tiny that Britain on her own can really make no difference to the out-turn. We have a sense of the relative importance of India, China, and the United States of America compared with the United Kingdom. So I think a future Conservative government will primarily concentrate on being a good broker for international agreement. SIMMS: I think the lie to the nation that Britain is a small country whose emissions are not terribly influential is this. CAVENDISH: Andrew Simms SIMMS: If a country like Britain that’s been burning fossil fuels without a second thought for at least the last two and a half centuries doesn’t radically change its act, then countries like China and India and Brazil will turn round and say well why the hell should we do anything different if you’re not going to lead the way. The onus is on us to act. CAVENDISH: The global pacts that John Redwood wants have so far proved elusive. But there is one series of international agreements that already affects our environment here in Britain. They weren’t signed at Montreal and Kyoto, they were signed in Rome and Bruges and Maastricht. We all know how the Tory Party wracked itself over Europe. But few have noticed how intimately British environmental policy has been bound up with the EU. John Gummer again GUMMER: The fact is that the European Union is certainly crucial as far as the environment is concerned. Just for a practical reason. Half the pollution, air pollution we have in Britain is blown over from the rest of Europe. Half the air pollution we produce in Britain we actually give to the rest of Europe. So you can’t deal with air pollution, you can’t deal with the standards for motorcars, the way in which we deal with factories, the way which we deal with homes unless you do it on a European basis. I mean you can’t even deal with migrant birds can you? A very high proportion of our birds are migrant. Well if the Italians shoot them before they get here then you, you don’t have them. So you have to have a European dimension if you are going to deal with the real issues of the environment. CAVENDISH: Europe is of course one of the few areas where the Cameron Conservatives have made a specific policy pledge: to withdraw Tory MEPs from their alliance with the European People’s Party. Eurosceptics feel it is wrong to sit alongside parties that are overtly in favour of ever closer union. I talked about this with Tory MEP Caroline Jackson, who has been closely involved in EU environment policies for many years and was chair of the parliament’s environment committee. She is horrified at the proposal to leave the EPP, and here’s why JACKSON: The European People’s Party group is the largest group in the European Parliament. It has more members than the socialists, more than the liberals, more than the left, more than the far right. That means we have more opportunities to take the lead and really moulding the way in which the parliament’s attitude is shaped. CAVENDISH: So can you tell us a little bit more then about what difference it would make if the Conservatives left the EPP. I mean is there another coalition there waiting to be formed? JACKSON: There are only there options if they left the European People’s Party. One is to form another grouping of their own. This would be an unknown quantity. The two candidate parties who might join with us are the Polish Law and Justice Party, currently in power in Poland, with a very nasty selection of right-wing peasant nationalist parties and the Czech ODS party, who might join us. After that you’re into the Latvian nationalists and the Slovakian Lepidopterists and Slovenian Woolgatherers really. Funny little parties whom I would imagine William Hague is now interviewing. CAVENDISH: What’s your view of the quality of life group that’s set up under John Gummer? JACKSON: I suspect it’s partly cosmetic with Mr. Goldsmith sitting there. What I think is interesting is how far the Conservatives are able to operate a group looking at new environmental policies without being able to get in touch with the people who are actually pulling the strings in Europe. If you are threatening to leave the largest political group in Europe, whose members have the chance of influencing European environmental legislation in a major way then it is a disaster that you can’t go and talk to them. I suspect they haven’t really tried to talk to them. Because all they will want to talk to you about is not the refinement of environmental policy but why the hell you’re trying to leave their group. CAVENDISH: So, according to Dr. Jackson, the Tories are about to forfeit their influence. But what exactly has their influence been? JACKSON: I think that in a strange sort of way what we have done is to be a realistic brake on the coach in environmental policy. What we have had for the last 10 years or so is a selection of rather naïve fundamentalist commissioners for the environment who brought forward very very green initiatives and good for them for doing that. But somebody had to say – hang on, wait a minute, this is going to cost a lot of money. What are the costs and what are the benefits? CAVENDISH: And you do think the same philosophy will apply in Britain? JACKSON: Well I don’t think what the Conservatives are currently doing on the environment gives us much of a clue as to what they would do in government. But I’m pretty certain – and I’ve seen this happen – that what you would find in government the Conservatives will converge on precisely the same policy that the Labour Party has been operating, as exactly as happened when Labour came in 1997 and operated exactly the same policy that the Conservatives had done. The rhetoric may change but the policy will remain the same. CAVENDISH: The most current example of where she claims the Conservatives have been a brake on the coach is in the REACH chemicals legislation. Both the Worldwide Fund for Nature and Friends of the Earth believe that this is crucial to protect public health . They say the chemicals legislation has been watered down to placate the pharmaceutical lobby. So plenty of beartraps for David Cameron there, as a green and a eurosceptic. Caroline Jackson is right that it’s easy to say things in opposition and hard to achieve them in power. But is the Tories’ new-found interest in greenery already changing the political landscape? BROWN BUDGET: So today I want to do more to encourage cleaner fuels and cars. And I propose to radically reform vehicle excise duty. CAVENDISH: Gordon Brown went out of his way to give the Budget a pale green tinge two weeks ago, with cash for wind and solar schemes and more tax on owners of gas- guzzling cars - although the extra adds up to little more than a cappuccino a month. If you want to look at how this plays out politically, consider the climate change levy. This is a tax, mainly on manufacturers, to encourage them become more energy efficient. Tories opposed it for years and called it a stealth tax on business. Now, the party is grudgingly supporting it as a green measure, while complaining that it is a very blunt instrument. Are there more sophisticated, Tory-friendly weapons available, which could deliver green solutions without damaging competitiveness? Amory Lovins, Director of the Rocky Mountain Institute, has some answers. LOVINS: The whole climate protection debate has been distorted or spoiled by a sign error. We should be talking about profit, jobs and competitive advantage. Not cost, burden and sacrifice. Firms like du Pont, IBM and ST Microelectronics that cut their energy use per unit of production by 6% every year recover their investment in that efficiency in 2 or 3 years which is a very handsome return. It really passeth understanding why anybody should suppose from economic theory that what’s empirically profitable is actually costly so we need much higher energy prices to induce it. CAVENDISH: Amory Lovins is an unusual green guru. He is apolitical, he doesn’t believe there should be a left/right split on this issue and he works with business. He’s helped some of America’s biggest corporations to design, for example, buildings and lightweight hypercars that save up to 80% of energy. Lovins makes a powerful argument that markets are hampered in delivering greener outcomes because of distorting subsidies and perverse incentives. LOVINS: Just to give you an idea of how big the market failures are, the United States by 1990 had already misallocated $1 trillion, $ 1 million million of capital to air conditioning equipment and power supplies to run it that we wouldn’t have bought in the first instance if we’d optimally designed the buildnggs to give the best comfort with the least cost. Well the reason we didn’t design the buildings right is that each of the two dozen partners in the value chain is systematically rewarded for inefficiency and penalised for efficiency. For example, we pay our architects and engineers for what they spend, not what they save. In most countries including yours and mine we generally reward distributors of electricity and gas for selling more energy and penalise them for cutting your bill. CAVENDISH: Could the Rocky Mountain way be a means of achieving Peter Ainsworth’s aims while satisfying John Redwood? Even the airline industry receives what are increasingly viewed as indefensible subsidies, such as an exemption from fuel duty that was agreed in 1944. But airlines are a classic case in point where removing such exemptions can only be done on an international basis. The Conservatives will still need to get their heads around the Europe issue. And the most difficult tension that the party has to reconcile may be that modern environmentalism is not just about conservation, it’s about transformation. Tom Burke again: BURKE: There is an assumption that somehow doing the right decisions on the environment is somehow going to put everybody off. That’s not true. The idea that somehow the people of Britain can’t be informed about the real challenges that they face – aren’t themselves already informed and aren’t willing to follow a strong and clear lead about what needs to be done on these terms – just shows a huge lack of faith in the British people. I think it’s more because the political parties have got so divorced, structurally, from the base of society that they’re unwilling to lead. And remember what political leadership does is expand the realm of the possible. Politics is the art of the possible it’s true. Political leadership is the art of expanding the realm of the possible. This is an area that cries out for political leadership and it’s not getting it. CAVENDISH: We are at an important juncture in politics: one where there is everything to play for. Yet most of the people we’ve spoken to, including campaigners, are terribly keen to reassure us that we won’t have to change our lifestyles to preserve the planet. That contrasts sharply with what Mrs Thatcher was saying more than 15 years ago. One thing seems clear: politicians who are serious about tackling climate change will have to be willing to lead public opinion, not follow it. Is David Cameron brave enough? Is anyone? 16