BLAIR’S BRITAIN, 1997–2007
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have simply coincided. To seriously tackle climate change, however, ‘The
UK cannot afford to bask in speculative forecasts of energy consumption
reduction and chance connections of policy agendas.’28
New Labour’s agenda-setters
Blair, and later Brown, only began to steal a march on the climate change
agenda towards the latter years of the Blair decade. Prior to this, much of the
UK’s work (internationally at least) was under the stewardship of Margaret
Beckett and John Prescott. Both Beckett and Prescott had been heavily
involved in the negotiations at the UN Conference at The Hague and Bonn
over the new Kyoto Protocol, with Prescott keen to be credited as personally
responsible for promoting the climate change agenda on the UK’s behalf.
Beckett likewise had developed a strong interest in climate change, and
indeed the decision to promote her to Foreign Minister in May 2006 was
partly out of Blair’s desire to send a signal that climate change was a key
foreign policy issue, and also galvanise the Foreign and Commonwealth
Office (FCO) into following his international lead on the issue.
Gordon Brown, on the other hand, has been much derided by the environmental NGOs given his apparent lack of enthusiasm, certainly before
the G8, for environmental and climate change issues. In addition, the fact
that his Budgets resulted in a steady decline in ‘green’ taxes as a proportion of total tax revenue (from 9.4% to 7.7% from 1997 to 200529) made
the Chancellor an easy target.
Nonetheless, it was Gordon Brown who introduced the successful CCL
and he who commissioned the Stern Review, largely without the prior
knowledge of, or consultation with, Blair and No. 10. Nevertheless the
Stern Review fitted neatly into a milieu of which Blair had been the chief
architect. It had always been part of the government’s political strategy to
incorporate an economic analysis of climate change, as it was clear that it
would be impossible to have a breakthrough on the issue unless it was
understood as more than an environmental issue. To this end, Brown and
Stern brought the hard-nosed high-level economic analysis that propelled the agenda to a new level.
By the time the Stern Review had been published, Brown had also
taken a leading role in publicly reinforcing the threat and challenge posed
28 Tim O’Riordan and Elizabeth J. Rowbotham, ‘Struggling for Credibility: The United
Kingdom’s Response’, in T. O’Riordan and J. Jäger (eds.), Politics of Climate Change, A
European Perspective (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 263.
29 Friends of the Earth, ‘How Green was Gordon?’
by climate change. In his speech at the launch of the Stern Review, Brown
referred to climate change as ‘the world’s largest market failure’ and ‘not
just an environmental and economic imperative, but a moral one’.30 To
some extent, the climate change agenda reinforced his development
agenda, given that the poorest countries and people would suffer the earliest and the most from the impacts of climate change.31 For instance, the
2006 Budget contained a commitment to £10 billion World Bank fund to
help developing countries invest in renewable energy. By demonstrating
and presenting issues of development and climate change as so closely
interconnected through the Stern Review and the G8, the government has
managed to propel both issues to a much higher level than may have been
originally anticipated.
Blair, on the other hand, developed a much earlier interest in climate
change and most vividly demonstrated his commitment to the cause with
his speech on the environment at the Banqueting House on 14 September
2004. The speech came in response to criticism from the Conservative
leader Michael Howard in a talk at the Green Alliance, lamenting the government’s record on climate change. Blair’s speech itself was a bolt out of
the blue for the audience of intellectuals and business people, as he
promised to give climate change his own personal attention and elevate it
to one of two key issues at the Gleneagles Summit in 2005. Indeed, the
decision to make climate change a priority at Gleneagles was taken a long
time before the run-up to the summit, with suggestions that Blair had
decided upon this as early as January 2002 at the Earth Summit in
Johannesburg.
It is also clear that Blair had pushed the climate change agenda on to
the international stage at the G8 despite senior advice to the contrary
from the people in No. 10 and also from the FCO. There was a concern
that there was little opportunity in 2005 for Blair to make any material
difference on the issue, as Kyoto was not an active global treaty, the US
had already withdrawn from it, and the FCO thought it extremely
unlikely that Russia would ratify it. In particular, with the Bush administration unwilling to undertake action on domestic emissions trading, or
any other measures to reduce the carbon intensity of the US economy, it
was assumed that there was no hope that any of the rapidly developing
economies (particularly China and India) would accept the case for doing
anything more. Nonetheless, Blair took personal control over the climate
30 James Sturcke, ‘We Must Pay Now to Avoid Climate Disaster, Says Blair’, The Guardian,
30 October 2006.
31 Stern Review, The Economics of Climate Change, p. vii.
change strategy that the government adopted on the international stage
in the run-up and aftermath of the G8 Summit, including his own article
in The Economist on 29 December 2004.
In terms of those that acted as significant influences on the Prime
Minister, Sir David King, the government’s chief scientific adviser, had
been extremely important. Indeed, King had been working with Blair
when the foot-and-mouth crisis broke out, and risked escalating into a
national crisis right at the time of the 2001 general election. The successful management of the epidemic played a pivotal role in shaping Blair’s
outlook to a realisation that science could actually deliver for government. King himself had taken the initiative to organise the Hadley Centre
conference to this end, and had also stirred greater public engagement on
climate change through his article in the journal Science in 2004, where he
referred to climate change as a more serious threat to humans than the
threat of international terrorism.32
There was also a strong symbiotic relationship between the government and UK business in driving and addressing the climate change
agenda. This is in contrast to meetings held with NGOs and pressure
groups which were often considered negative and unconstructive. Indeed
at the end of his speech at the Banqueting House in 2004, Blair made a
personal, unscripted plea calling for business input to feed into the concepts and policies required to encourage climate-responsible business.
Focusing efforts to tackle climate change through business and highpowered groups such as the Climate Group, Blair was keen to emphasise
that climate change would not be resolved exclusively through environmental polic
y. Rather it was an environmental problem that necessitated
wholesale societal shifts, in which business could take the lead.
Blair’s leadership
It is clear from what has already been discussed that through Blair’s own
leadership climate change has achieved an unprecedented position of
prominence on the national and international agenda. In addition,
through Blair’s efforts, the UK finds itself in a position of unparalleled
international influence within that movement. The Gleneagles Summit
was fundamental to this success and marked a rare occasion when any G8
leader has managed to use the grouping to gain leverage on specific
issues, as opposed to general international economic concerns. This
32 David A. King, ‘Climate Change Science: Adapt, Mitigate, or Ignore?’, Science, 9, 2004: 176–7.
achievement was even more significant given Putin’s failure to do the
same with energy at the summit the following year.
Much that was achieved at the G8 in 2005 was through Blair’s personal
endeavour. His insistence that the G8 must develop a climate change dialogue that incorporated the world’s most rapidly developing countries was
initially met with derision. Yet it has been through his persistence, and the
work of Sir Michael Jay (former head of the diplomatic services), that the
Gleneagles Dialogue was eventually agreed to, leading to the G8 Energy
and Environment ministerial meetings in London in November 2005 and
in Mexico in October 2006. Further to this, Blair himself was critical in
convincing the Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to make time
for a report back from the Gleneagles Dialogue at the G8 meeting in 2008.
Arguably, Blair’s most significant achievement on the climate change
agenda has been convincing the Bush administration to come on board.
It is only through Blair’s personal relationship with Bush that such
change had been affected, and is indicative of the influence that Blair
alone has over the internal debates of the American administration.
Though it would have been easy and tempting for Blair to play the environmentalist and anti-American card and shame the US over its inaction
over climate change, it is testimony to Blair’s restraint, or at least his
affinity for the Bush administration, that he refrained from indulging in
such an opportunity. Nonetheless, it would be naïve to dismiss the notion
that, as a secondary motive, international leadership on climate change
was seized upon by Blair as the ideal way to pander to a Labour Party
increasingly disaffected by the war in Iraq. Nor is it possible to dismiss
Blair’s personal motives, in that the climate change agenda offered an
opportunity to outdo Brown on the development agenda and also secure
a personal legacy that was not so mired in Iraq.
Conclusion
The change in discourse achieved over the last ten years, has cemented the
threat from climate change as a priority on political agendas across the
world. It is clear that there have been significant political shifts, with new
concepts of sustainable development and low CO trajectories widely
2
accepted.
Internationally, there are now EU binding targets on emissions and
regulations across a variety of industrial sectors in order to meet these
goals, and the G8 leaders have also committed themselves to a climate
change Plan of Action. In the case of the US, despite the antipathy of the
Bush administration which continued to reject any specific commitment
to cut carbon emissions at the June 2007 G8 Summit in Germany,33 individual states such as California have taken measures to tackle the threat
through their own emissions trading schemes. Though Blair has played a
critical role in this change, the issue will not subside in his absence. The
climate change movement has developed too strong a momentum to be
ignored. This is even more so with the IPCC’s 2007 Report making its
strongest statement to date that the warming of the climate is unequivocal and 90% likely to be due to human activity.34
More importantly, the vast majority of developed and developing
nations now see it as in their economic interests to act to tackle climate
change, with the Stern Review laying the foundations for this approach.
Whereas issues such as international development and fair trade are
forever constrained in as much as they rely heavily on conscience and
principle, the issue of climate change has crossed this divide and has been
brought to marry with states’ own egoistic interests and priorities.
Indeed most recently, at the behest of the UK, the climate change
debate has attempted to take another leap forward into the realm of
national and international security. In October 2006, Margaret Beckett
delivered a speech at the British embassy in Berlin warning that the failure
to tackle climate change will lead to mass migrations of an unprecedented
scale and a succession of failed states unable to cope with the consequences. Indeed, in April 2007, the UK pursued this agenda further when
climate change was raised for the first time at the UN Security Council in
the face of stiff opposition from the US, Russia and China who refuse to
see it as an appropriate Security Council issue. Though the government
has refrained from citing specific examples of global-warming-related
conflicts, this nevertheless marks a continued attempt to shift climate
change into the realms of high politics. Whether such an attempt to transform climate change into a security issue is legitimised by citizens, politicians, media outlets and other opinion-formers within the UK, let alone
in other countries, remains to be seen. It is clear, however, that any attempt
to do so will inevitably be much the weaker in the absence of Blair.
The politics of climate change has also left an indelible mark on British
politics. There are already emerging signs that all the main parties see the
issue as a key vote winner and as such are attempting to outdo each other at
33 Andrew Grice, ‘Bush dashes Blair Hopes of Breakthrough on Climate Change Deal’, The
Independent, 7 June 2007.
34 Peter Walker, ‘World “Must Act to Avoid Devastating Global Warming” ’, The Guardian,
4 May 2004.
every turn. For instance, in September 2006, David Cameron wrote a letter to
the Prime Minister, backed by the Liberal Democrats and Friends of the
Earth, calling for the new Climate Change Bill to incorporate annual CO2
reduction targets, which Labour has so far been reluctant to do. More superficially, concerns over climate change have come to shape a media agenda
that the main parties are constrained to tally with. In this way, climate change
and the environment have become fully fledged weapons in the Conservative
Party’s media arsenal, with some of Cameron’s most iconic moments to date
involving him cycling to work and sledging across the Arctic ice sheets.
Yet, on the other hand, New Labour has been less successful in institutionalising coherent and coordinated strategies across domestic
policy
and Whitehall. Whereas the Prime Minister has been prominent in terms
of international leadership, there has been a vacuum in terms of domestic
leadership. The lack of a strong central body driving climate change concerns through all aspects of government policy has meant that the UK is
likely to fail to meet its self-imposed emission targets. With this, Britain
risks whittling away its international credibility and influence on the
climate change agenda.
Whilst climate change is commonly understood to be a real and dangerous threat, there is still little appreciation of the sacrifices, nor consensus on the policies, that the threat necessitates. Much of Blair’s time has
been spent arguing that tackling climate change is the pro-growth strategy, and to all extents and purposes it is. However, difficult decisions will
have to be made, as even Stern recognises that stabilising CO levels to
2
sustainable levels by 2050 would cost at least 1% of GDP. Where Blair has
failed is in making the bold decisions to sacrifice economic growth or
populist measures, for instance in aviation and road transport, for the
sake of tackling climate change.
It remains to be seen whether there is the public will to see bold climate
change policies through, or whether there are leaders strong enough to
push them through. The following decade may indeed prove testimony to
a new era where the long-term challenge of climate change suppresses and
overcomes the short-term pressures of modern democratic politics, eliciting the sustained inter-governmental and inter-generational response it
necessitates. Alternatively, the ‘mismatch in timing between the environmental and electoral impact of climate change’35 may continue to paralyse
British and international politics, leaving the progress achieved from 1997
as little more than a false dawn.
35 Blair, ‘International Action Needed on Global Warming’.
27
Foreign policy
Tony Blair made a big difference to British foreign policy during his
decade in Downing Street. He rose rapidly to the status of a key world
leader, taking to foreign affairs more quickly and naturally than most
Prime Ministers. His policies partly defined the turbulent international
decade of his premiership and it was in foreign policy that he hoped his