BLAIR’S BRITAIN, 1997–2007
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aid/GNI ratio of 0.56% at EU level, with a minimum of 0.51% for the
EU15 and best endeavours to reach 0.17% by the same date for the new
member states. This time, the key meeting was between Development
Ministers on the eve of a General Affairs Council meeting in May 2005.
Again, success was (just) achieved, and endorsed at the Gleneagles
Summit – a tribute to teamwork both within the UK system between
Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Hilary Benn, and between the UK and the
Commission, whose attempts to encourage public spending by member
states are normally opposed by the UK.
32 Speech by the Chancellor of the Exchequer at Conference on ‘Making Globalisation Work
for All – The Challenge of Delivering the Monterrey Consensus’, hm-treasury.gov.uk.
33 G7 Finance Ministers’ Conclusions on Development, London, 4–5 February 2005, hmtreasury.gov.uk.
34 G8 Finance Ministers’ Conclusions on Development, London, 10–11 June 2005, hmtreasury.gov.uk.
With the headline commitments now agreed, but clearly representing
a huge and difficult increase from several key donors, Gordon Brown
began a stronger focus on the need for delivery in key sectors. He had long
been interested in better financing for education in developing countries.
In May 2006, he floated at a meeting in Nigeria the establishment of tenyear plans by African governments for basic education, which would then
receive equally long-term commitments from donor governments. By
May 2007, some twenty-five such plans were at various stages of readiness, and Gordon Brown was promoting long-term support for such
plans among the donor community at a meeting in Brussels co-hosted by
the European Commission and the World Bank.
It is therefore clear that in this area both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown
were influential, and over time increasingly so, on what was seen as a set
of issues of increasing international significance and public resonance.
However, Clare Short’s unusually long tenure of six years as Secretary of
State and her own forceful personality enabled her to do much to set the
main directions of UK development policy, at least until the approach of
the Iraq conflict. Her consistency of message, readiness to engage in
policy debate, willingness to stand up to outside pressures and to leave
her civil servants to manage the department, all made her a highly
effective departmental minister. Much of the shape and ethos of the UK
development effort bears her stamp.
Her immediate successor, Baroness Amos, had less impact, having less
than a year in the post, and having to deal with the difficulties inherent in
the immediate aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein. She was in turn
replaced in October 2003 by Hilary Benn, who had already had some
experience as a junior minister under Clare Short and as Minister of State
since May 2003. Hilary Benn made it his business to improve relations
with colleagues in other parts of government, while still using the protection of the 2002 Act to avoid the aid programme being pressured into
activity of marginal developmental benefit. He worked very effectively
with the Prime Minister and Chancellor in the joint effort to achieve the
results set out in the Gleneagles communiqué.
What has been the net Blair effect between 1994/7 and 2007?
As indicated above, Tony Blair left behind a radically strengthened UK voice
in international development, backed by a very significant increase in public
resources, and by institutional arrangements (notably energetic cabinetlevel leadership of the development agenda) that underpin that voice.
The willingness of the Chancellor and the Prime Minister to press the
development agenda with their peers was very significant to the outcome.
As his speeches to the World Economic Forum in Davos in 200535 and
2007 make plain, Tony Blair consistently urged that the problems of
Africa should be given higher priority than narrowly conceived realpolitik might suggest. This reflected his view, set out in the 2007 Davos36
speech, that ‘power over global issues can only be effectively wielded
today by global alliances, based on global values’.
In support of this approach, both he and the Chancellor were unusually open to involving civil society in their policy discussions, to the point
where the ‘Make Poverty History’ and ‘Live 8’ campaigns of 2005 came
near to being a ‘UK Inc.’ approach to exerting effective international pressure on less positive members of the G8, linked to major international
events. It is fair to say that this was qualitatively different from policies
under previous governments of either main party. Indeed it can be seen
as quite a sophisticated form of ‘new diplomacy’ in which international
civil society networks were encouraged to press a range of governments
to move in directions that the British government was ready to support.
In particular, the strength of popular support in the UK, combined with
the forceful arguments of the Commission for Africa – and Bob Geldof
always saw one of his key roles as being to galvanise public opinion
behind the Commission’s findings – proved to be a formidable combination in the run-up to the Gleneagles Summit.
To what extent did policy mark a departure from traditional Labour
(and Tory) policy?
In terms of policy, the changes that have taken place may be regarded as less
than radical. Many strands of UK development policy, such as free trade,
readiness to work with the grain of a globalising world, an aid programme
largely directed to poor countries, a pragmatic attitude to debt problems,
and a positive attitude to competent international organisations, are in the
blood stream of policymakers across the political spectrum and strongly
reflected in the attitudes of the civil service. And the concept of a development agency that combined virtually all forms of British bilateral and multilateral aid (including contributions to the Multilateral Development
Banks) in one institution has been a reality since 1964.
35 Prime Minister’s speech at World Economic Forum in Davos, 26 January 2005.
36 Prime Minister’s speech at World Economic Forum in Davos, 27 January 2007.
What has been new has been the top-level commitment to international development as a matter of real significance, the willingness to
resource it much more seriously, and the readiness to broaden alliances
(e.g. to the European Commission and to the civil society campaigners)
to support it.
How enduring might those changes prove?
Many things could change. It is not axiomatic that future prime ministers
and chancellors will be as personally interested in development issues as
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown; that the UK’s aid programme will continue to rise beyond the period set in the 2007 public expenditure round;
or even that the structure of a specialist department under a cabinet minister will prove enduring.
But the continuous pressure from the poorer members of the ever
more populous but ever more present ‘global village’ is surely a fact of life
that any
British government is going to want to take seriously. Secondly,
progress towards ‘global public goods’, from climate change to dealing
with risks of infections such as avian flu, and avoidance of ‘bads’ such as
terrorism or failed states, will increasingly require rich countries to find
constructive ways of working with middle-income and low-income
countries. Thirdly, the UK is in a vastly better economic state to play a
forward role than when the Wilson government sought in the 1960s to
give a coherent push to the UK’s role in international development. For
these three reasons, the changes brought about by Tony Blair, Gordon
Brown, and successive Secretaries of State for International Development
in the direction of whole-of-government attention to issues affecting
developing countries, backed by an effective aid programme and a strong
UK voice within the international system, seem likely to set the tone –
whatever the political leanings of future governments – for a significant
period ahead.
26
Climate change
Introduction
Over the last decade climate change has developed into the most pressing
environmental issue facing policymakers in the UK today. It remains,
however, one of the most difficult problems to tackle.
Firstly, the production of greenhouse gases (GHGs) is deeply embedded in the way that modern society has developed and operated since the
industrial revolution. Breaking humankind’s addiction to fossil fuels
without harming our aspirations for growth necessitates seismic socioeconomic and political shifts in order to develop radically new concepts
and models of sustainable development. Tony Blair himself even talks of
the need for a new ‘green, industrial revolution’.1 Without this change
there will never be the popular ambition to tackle climate change, and
governments will forever be paralysed by electoral constraints.
Secondly, even with such a colossal change in the zeitgeist, controlling
GHG emissions requires coherent and collective action across society, the
entire machinery of government and the international system. Citizens,
consumers, businesses and governments all produce emissions through
their own activities, and thus have a responsibility to bear in tackling
climate change. As such, the issue impinges on an array of major policy
areas including transport, housing, energy, business and international
relations. Tackling climate change therefore requires an unprecedented
level of coordinated action, and ‘joined-up thinking’ within and between
societies and governments across the world.
This chapter assesses the extent to which Blair and New Labour
have led and developed the climate change agenda in light of these
challenges.
11 Tony Blair, ‘International Action Needed on Global Warming’, speech at the Banqueting
House, 14 September 2004; available at: www.number-10.gov.uk/output/page6333.asp
(accessed 20 May 2007).
The climate change agenda in 1997
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, climate politics was not high on the
political agendas of any of the main three parties. Indeed the UK was still
being branded the ‘dirty man’ of Europe due to its reluctance to reduce
the high levels of sulphur emissions from its power stations in the 1980s.
Nonetheless, a speech by Thatcher in 1988 on the importance of environmental protection marked a watershed, with climate change and damage
to the ozone layer being the chief beneficiaries of this newfound focus.
Behind the scenes, Sir Crispin Tickell was widely acclaimed as the man
responsible for the ‘greening of Thatcher’.
Internationally, concerns over global warming and carbon dioxide
emissions were gaining ground, leading to the creation of the InterGovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988. The IPCC is
primarily responsible for assessing the available scientific information on
climate change, assessing the likely environmental and socio-economic
impacts of it, and formulating responses to the problem. Further to this,
the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was
devised and signed at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, with the express aim
of ‘the stabilisation of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere
at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with
the climate system’.2
In responding to this new dynamic, the Conservative government set
the UK the target of returning CO emissions back to 1990 levels by 2000,
2
and in 1994 produced the UK’s first Climate Change Programme. Key
policies developed in this period included the introduction of the fuel
duty escalator in 1993 at a rate of 3% (later 5%) per year, the imposition
of VAT on domestic fuel in 1994 (though not to the full 15% rate), the
creation of the Energy Saving Trust (EST) in 1992, and the introduction
of a Non-Fossil Fuel Obligation on electricity generators to supply a proportion of their electricity from renewable sources.
However, environmental concerns were often compromised by other
policy priorities. As such the Climate Change Programme itself remained
heavily focused on voluntary measures, in what it termed its ‘partnership
approach’. This was most clearly the case in the energy sector, where the
primary focus of policy had not been to reduce CO emissions, but
2
instead, to secure energy supply at the lowest possible cost through the
privatisation of the oil, gas, coal and electricity industries. For instance,
12 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (Bonn: UN, 1992), p. 5.
in 1995 the government rejected the Gas Bill and its call to place an environmental duty on the regulator, arguing that competitive markets would
suffice to encourage energy efficiency measures.3 Other policies and initiatives focusing on increasing energy efficiency, such as the EST and the
Home Energy Efficiency Scheme, were undermined by chronic shortages
of funding in a political climate urging the retreat of the state and cuts in
public spending.
Nonetheless, the fuel duty escalator tying future Chancellors to annual
increases in the price of petrol, was a bold initiative that would reap significant carbon savings whilst also encouraging more fuel-efficient cars. Yet,
typical of much ‘environmental’ policy at the time, these decisions were
made with rather more concern for the budget and macro-economic
strategy than the environment. For instance, there was no change to the
fuel duty escalator as falling petrol prices buffered its impact, despite the
Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (RCEP) insisting that a
9% escalator was necessary to meet the UNFCCC objective.4
What success the Conservative administrations had in reducing the
country’s CO emissions between 1990 and 1995 was more through chance
2
than intent. The Department of Environment itself acknowledged at the
time that the drop was due to the economic recession in
1992, and then the
shift from coal to the less CO -polluting gas in the supply of electricity,
2
with nuclear power also making a greater contribution than expected.
Clearly, by 1997 climate change had neither registered as a fundamental threat nor become a lens through which economic, transport, and
energy policy were to be directed. Rather, the Department of
Environment remained relatively weak in the ministerial hierarchy and
environmental measures were moulded to fit the Treasury’s priorities,
which under the Conservative administrations inevitably meant budget
cuts. However, one could argue that, at this time, neither were the British
public of the mind to accept that such core policies should be ‘compromised’ by climate change concerns.
The climate change agenda in 2007
In contrast, ten years on, the climate change agenda has developed an
irresistible momentum within the UK and internationally. The threat
13 Ute Collier, ‘“Windfall” Emission Reductions in the UK’, in Ute Collier and Ragnar
Löfstedt (eds.), Cases in Climate Change Policy: Political Reality in the European Union
(London: Earthscan, 1997), p. 93.
14 RCEP, Transport and the Environment, 18th Report (London: HMSO, 1994).
that climate change poses has been absorbed by politicians, businessmen
and women and individual consumers alike, to the extent that it is appreciated as being much more than just a marginal environmental issue.
In terms of popular opinion and attitude, climate change has leapt
up the league table of people’s concerns, with a 2006 MORI poll indicating that many see climate change as the most significant threat to the
world’s well-being, over and above global terrorism.5 The groundswell of
popular support over the climate change agenda mirrors the way in
which anti-poverty campaigns successfully promoted issues of international development on national and international agendas. Climate
change has also managed to infiltrate popular culture, as exemplified by
films such as The Day After Tomorrow (2004), and the Academy Award for
Al Gore’s seminal documentary, An Inconvenient Truth (2006).
Business has also seized the initiative, with companies seeking to outdo
each other in terms of environmentally friendly policies. The growing