Burnham prefers jobs to climate security. That’s a big risk | Gaby Hinsliff
When the siren sounded Friday night, the first thing I thought of was fire.
Weeks of relentless sunshine in the normally soggy Peak District, where I was visiting my mother, have bleached the green valleys to a dangerously dry, crisp blonde. One of his neighbors had previously pointed out an ominous cloud of smoke on the horizon, coming from one of the forest fires that raged throughout the summer in the moor. When that harsh, discordant cry echoed through every cell phone in the house, I was half-prepared for an evacuation order, not what turned out to be a slightly melodramatic warning to the nation to call off barbecues. Sort of a false alarm, but one that felt uncomfortably like a wake-up call.
Scientists can warn until they are sad about the consequences of what we are doing to the planet, but nothing beats the visceral impact of idly scrolling on your phone and seeing panicked images of llamas leaping over British suburban fences, or terrified horses being released from fields where hedgerows are beginning to light up. A friend who had just returned from the south of France, somewhere far enough from the devastating wildfires to be considered safe, was frightened by ash raining from the sky while she was having lunch in the garden: it felt like the beginning of an apocalypse, she said, or the opening scenes of a disaster movie. Something has changed even in people who were once indifferent to the climate crisis, and judging by last week’s sudden flurry of government activity – a Cobra meeting on fighting bushfires called after heavy pressure from the Greens, extra support for drought-stricken farmers and, finally, that emergency alert that lit up everyone’s phones – Andy Burnham has sensed the dangers of not being seen to respond.
Yet there is something jarring about a new prime minister spending the hottest summer on record talking about the prospect of new drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea, or consulting on easing net-zero targets for carmakers. He rightly rushed to visit people affected by a bushfire near the West Midlands town of Stourbridge, but has been notably slow to respond publicly to warnings from the town’s Labor MP, Cat Eccles, that now is not the time to start extracting even more fossil fuels. So far, their strategy is more a strategy to collect the damage already caused than to attack the root causes.
How serious is Burnham about the climate crisis? It’s very early days, but a pattern is emerging that may be familiar to some in Greater Manchester, recalling the then mayor’s quick rethink of attempts to impose an unpopular clean air zone on drivers. She is far from complacent about the threat to the planet, but when green policies clash with her mission to create jobs and rebuild the social fabric, Burnham and her deputy, Louise Haigh, seem instinctively protective of the latter. This Prime Minister is not swayed by expensive fossil fuel lobbyists, but he is sensitive to unions defending the interests of oil rig workers in Aberdeen, or to car manufacturers who have been warning for years that Britain’s rigid zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate could push them to close factories in what remains of the country’s industrial hubs. Under the mandate, automakers are fined if they don’t meet ever-increasing targets of selling more electric cars as a percentage of total sales. If hard-pressed people refuse to buy enough expensive new electric cars, and governments refuse to subsidize them, the cheapest way to avoid massive fines is to discontinue gasoline and diesel car product lines, to prevent drivers from buying too many of them.
In short, there are compelling reasons for Burnham to present himself as a net-zero pragmatist – the word ministers keep resorting to when asked about the looming and increasingly complicated decision on drilling in the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas fields. (And yes, even that act of apparent climate vandalism has friends in surprising places, with ecoentrepreneurs Dale Vince and Greg Jackson arguing that if we need oil and gas from somewhere, getting it from our own backyard is a cleaner option that could also help reduce the backlash against net zero.)
But if the Labor Party wanted naked pragmatism, frankly, it could have stuck with Keir Starmer. Andy Burnham is looking for something else: the courage to face difficult questions, but also the political skills to sell difficult answers and the emotional intelligence to handle the consequences. As this abnormally hot summer fades into what could be an equally abnormally wet fall, we’ll soon know if it can actually deliver.
