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The recent local elections in the UK have revealed starkly where British politics is at. There were serious forward advances for the Lib Dems and Greens. Labour and the Conservatives both fell back calamitously. And Reform, of course, was the biggest winner of all.
What was clear is that the old duopoly parties are dying and ‘populism’ is on the rise.
Reform has undeniably connected with the British population at greater scale thus far than the Green Party has. That situation cannot stand: for the high likelihood is that the future of British politics will be fought out between the Greens and Reform, as the old parties fade into irrelevance, in the crucible of the dire challenges now upon us.
These two new insurgent parties, Reform UK and the Green Party, both of which stunned by unprecedentedly winning multiple seats at the 2024 General Election, both of which have genuine anti-establishment appeal, will surely be the huge gainers at the next general election.
If Reform gain far more than the Greens, that is a grim prognosis for this country.
So what is badly needed is a way of beating them at their own game, albeit without descending to their level. What must be avoided is the stoking of culture wars, let alone spreading lies and disinformation to whip up hate and mutual mistrust.
In short, what we need is climate popularism. Reform is weaponising climate policy as part of their latest culture war. We don’t get to beat them unless we de-weaponise climate: but that requires making real climate action into the new common sense.
This begins with focussing on the lived impacts of climate decline, and resilience to them. Rather than beginning with questions of footprint and abstractions like ‘net zero’. Both of which are far less relevant to ordinary working people.
Climate is relevant to ordinary Brits primarily by way of its impacts: rising flood waters and seas, gathering storms, extreme droughts, heatwaves, and wildfires; food price rises and food scarcities. It is deeply relevant also in terms of the way that our grossly high energy prices are a result of dependence on fossil fuels and of the pitiful state of insulation of most buildings in this country.
So climate popularism synergises climate action with reducing the cost of living. Plus, making more direct sustenance available to people: we need community orchards, forest gardens, agri-wilding, edible landscapes, and more—at scale—and we need them soon.
How do we pay for it? Well, most of this agenda saves money. But if there are aspects of it that require an initial pump-priming, then we pay for it by taxing the rich.
But what we don’t indulge in is class war rhetoric. Nor do we rely on the phrase ‘climate justice’, which for most voters will be opaque and remote. Instead, we come from the basis of the shared emergency: what I outlined in the previous paragraph, and forms of rationing (starting with a frequent flyer levy) are simply the new common sense, in this crisis that we are all in.
This approach has the great benefit of depolarising, of dialling down the temperature of public debate, even while attracting wide support for being authentic and clear-spoken about the transformative degree of change that is needed.
The situation is analogous to that in war. What we need is: climate Churchills. A broad church approach, appealing to the #climatemajority. What we need is leadership that can bring us together in the face of an existential crisis, not a retread of the performative, slogan-heavy politics of the last decade or the last century.
Our big Green tent needs to include people who liked Jeremy Corbyn (as I always have done, in many ways). But it has to be much bigger, and less ideologically exclusive, than some of those people would like, if it’s going to have any chance of actually winning substantial numbers of votes/seats in first past the post elections.
‘Climate popularism’ is core to how we can do this. The hard and unstable times that are coming require a new kind of moral and political leadership: steady, and welcoming. Grounded, and practical. Determined, and ambitious. Courageous, and thoroughly based in reality. What leadership is at this time is changing.
Our answer needs to do more than just speak to (very reasonable) everyday economic concerns; it needs to key in to what is, increasingly, the leading edge of the harm