Why Keir Starmer will soon have to choose between Rachel 'growth' Reeves and Ed 'net zero' Miliband

The Chancellor and Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer have been telling Cabinet colleagues to ditch policies that could stand in the way of efforts to boost the nation’s economic fortunes.

Reeves told a meeting of fellow Labour MPs on Monday that ministers need to go “further and faster” on “kick-staring economic growth”. “Over the past six months as Chancellor, my experience is that government has become used to saying no,” she said. “That must change. We must start saying yes.”

‘Really challenging’

As she was speaking, Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband was elsewhere in the Westminster village, telling another group of MPs the government will somehow achieve its goal of decarbonising Britain’s electricity system by 2030.

He told the Environmental Audit Committee he did not recognise an analysis by industry consultants Cornwall Insight that projected the government will miss its targets for developing new solar and wind power over the next 60 months.

“It’s really challenging,” Miliband said. “But it’s doable and it’s absolutely the right thing for the country, for our energy security and the climate and so on.”

One of the things to which Reeves said “yes” in a speech on Wednesday is the fabled third runway at Heathrow, along with expansion plans for other airports. Questioned on the government’s apparent prioritisation of growth over climate commitments, Miliband insisted any airport expansions that are inconsistent with meeting legally binding limits on UK emissions “won’t go ahead”.

Increasingly divorced from reality

But there is no disguising the fact that any such moves would be at odds with the drive towards net zero. They would also appear to run counter to the goals of C40 Cities, which is co-chaired by London mayor Sir Sadiq Khan and describes itself as a “global network of mayors of the world’s leading cities that are united in action to confront the climate crisis”.

And the argument that the government’s headlong drive towards decarbonisation is having anything other than a catastrophic impact on energy costs – and therefore the economy as a whole – is increasingly divorced from reality.

Miliband and Reeves are two senior members of the Cabinet who are now very clearly pulling in opposite directions. Something will have to give. This government ain’t big enough for the both of them. And all the indications would seem to suggest that it is Miliband who will have to go.

Indeed, earlier this month Downing Street said it had “full confidence” in Reeves and will be working with her in her “role of Chancellor” for the whole of this Parliament.

In a further sign of Labour’s shift in focus from the environment to the economy, the government has rejected a proposed law that would compel the UK to meet new legally binding requirements on climate change. Ministers and other opponents of the Climate and Nature Bill, proposed by Liberal Democrat Roz Savage, said it would have handed powers from elected MPs to “unelected and unaccountable” members of a citizens’ assembly.

The government won a motion, by 120 votes to seven, to end debate of the bill, meaning it is unlikely to become law, as a group of protesters including TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall gathered outside.

Wrong kind of growth?

Miliband had to toe the party line and is thought to have made concessions to Labour MPs by promising to consult the bill’s supporters on future environmental legislation and to hold meetings with backbenchers who are concerned about climate policy.

But Labour MP Clive Lewis, who co-sponsored the bill, was unimpressed and attacked his party’s new prioritisation of growth. “What kind of growth do we want?” he asked. “What are we growing? Are we growing pollution in our rivers? Are we growing roads that go through ancient woodlands? Yes, that is growth but not the kind of growth we want.

“I don’t want to see growth that comes at the cost of my daughter and her generation’s future. You cannot have growth on a dead planet, politicians need to understand that. You can’t say climate will come after growth, it is all interlinked.”

Perhaps, in opposition, Lewis’s stance would have been closer to Labour’s official line. But in power, his party is coming to terms with the reality that when it comes to finding favour with the electorate it really is the economy, stupid.

This requires affordable and reliable energy. For example, we can hardly hope to enjoy an electricity-intensive artificial intelligence boom when we are struggling to keep the lights on.

Starmer is under the same pressures as other leaders who find themselves having to reconcile economic prosperity with ambitious climate targets.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, big businesses and national governments piled pressure on Brussels to ease regulations designed to tackle climate change, voicing concerns that Europe is “losing competitiveness” and becoming “uninvestable”.

And in the US, Donald Trump’s hostility towards green energy did him no harm at all in November’s presidential election.

‘Times They Are a-Changin’

A couple of years ago, Miliband posted online a video of himself in a wind farm strumming a ukulele and singing “the answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind”. It was a light-hearted but earnest appeal to then-Energy Secretary Grant Shapps, urging him to speed up the rollout of green energy projects.

But now the wind has changed. Politicians such as Miliband can no longer breezily dismiss out of hand or simply ignore the valid and honestly held views of those who disagree with him – least of all from the growing numbers of communities concerned about the impact on their surroundings of increasingly conspicuous turbines, solar panels and pylons.

With the biopic A Complete Unknown in cinemas, Miliband perhaps now has another anthemic song by freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in mind: The Times They Are a-Changin’.