Starmer has a strong green record – but a rightwing backlash weakened his plans

Keir Starmer has faced a problem no Labour government has needed to deal with before. His energy and climate policies – core to solving the cost of living crisis – have come under attack from opposition parties, which have made dismantling the agenda one of their top priorities, second only to immigration, in their pitch to voters. This is new in British politics, where a cross-party consensus on the climate and environment has held at least since the days of Margaret Thatcher. She warned the UN of the climate crisis in 1988; David Cameron in 2006 urged voters to “vote blue, go green”; Theresa May enshrined in law the requirement to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050; Boris Johnson championed the Cop26 UN climate summit in Glasgow in 2021 ; even Rishi Sunak only tried a partial rollback of green policies as a last desperate throw before calling an election. But Kemi Badenoch has weaponised the climate and energy agenda , with Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, her most frequent named target in the cabinet. She has vowed to abandon the net zero target, boost drilling in the North Sea , scrap the windfall tax on oil and gas profits, and repeal the 2008 Climate Change Act . Keir Starmer and the Prince of Wales during a visit to the Emilio Goeldi Museum in Belem, Brazil, during the Cop30 summit. Photograph: Aaron Chown/PA Nigel Farage’s Reform party has gone even further, openly denying climate science and threatening to withdraw from the 2015 Paris agreement. …