 Allegra Stratton was hired last year by the Prime Minister to be his official spokesperson. The idea was to have daily White House style briefings where his spokesperson would speak directly to the press. Those plans have been dropped. It turns out the government doesn't really like having its position scrutinized live on television because they often crumbled. So Allegra Stratton now has a new role. She is the Prime Minister's COP26 spokeswoman. Her job is to talk about climate change. It's now safe to say her first intervention on the subject hasn't impressed. On Tuesday she tweeted, could not rinsing dishes before the dishwasher be your one step greener ahead of COP26. If that's too hard a habit to kick, pick something else. At COP26 we have big ass for the world on cash, coal, cars and trees, but the micro matters too. Change is coming. Yes, this is the person who is charged with heading the most crucial climate meeting in a generation and her big idea is for us to stop rinsing our dishes before we put them in the washing machine. Sorry, in the dishwasher. I got my white goods wrong. Let's take a look at some of the responses that this provoked. I didn't see anyone respond to this positively. We'll go through some of the best critics. Michael's worthy, the anti-Brexit campaigner tweeted, sure, how about if I stop pre-rinsing plates on my private jet flights from London to Cornwall? Clearly a reference there to Boris Johnson taking the private jet to the G7 in Cornwall instead of taking the train. Assad Rehman, who's director of war on want, responded to that tweet. The planet is on fire and underwater and the government is trolling us with bollocks about rinsing dishes. It reminds me of the big NGO's messaging, change your light bulb, not the world. It's intended to depoliticize climate and make it all about individual behavior and not about capitalism. And even Dominic Cummings got in on the act, he tweeted. Fact, people believing micro matters, orders of magnitude more than micro actually matters is one of the problems with effective communication on climate. It hugely distorts people's scale of what really affects the system. Dalia Gabriel, I want your thoughts on this issue. Do you side with Allegra Stratton or Dominic Cummings when it comes to rinsing your plates before you put them in the dishwasher? This is a government that's just commissioned to coal mine in Cumbria. It's also the same government that has done very little to challenge the power of the city of London in the fossil fuel industry where so many of the insurance companies and the finance institutions that basically make the fossil fuel industry and the projects around the world possible, that's where so many of those institutions are concentrated right in London. Climate change is, as we all know, it's a large scale problem. It's one of those things where actually every little doesn't really help. Every little kind of actually makes not really much difference. Whether it comes to preventing further impacts from climate breakdown or mitigating against the impacts of climate breakdown that is already underway, we really need large scale interventions. The thing is that it's not really rocket science. There are so many things that could be done, whether it's a mass transfer of wealth to the global south to support mitigation efforts, whether it's open sourcing technology that helps in the fighting against the impacts of climate change, open sourcing that so it's not patented in the way that the vaccines have been and we've seen how the impact of unequal intellectual property, the impacts that has on trying to tackle global crises, it also probably does include a reduction in energy use as well as obviously a shift in energy source from carbon intensive industries to alternative sources. But that reduction in energy cannot just happen. I mean, it's not relevant for it to just happen in an individually sort of meated out level. It's rather about stopping companies and industries like our agricultural industry, for one big example, from engaging in very wasteful practices because under capitalism, it's often much cheaper to overproduce and then waste than it is to sort of reduce or redistribute. So it involves these kinds of rewiring and systemic changes that, you know, focus so that our energy system is focused on what is sustainable, what is necessary, what is sort of meets people's general needs rather than than profit. And Allegra Stratton's approach here basically is the equivalent of looking at the Australian wildfires that happened and being like, well, maybe if we all just pull our pants down and piss on it, then maybe we'll get somewhere, like that's literally the equivalent. And I'm glad that everyone across the political spectrum has united to say that this is so laughable. But it also goes a lot further beyond her because it really makes me think about the idea of the carbon footprint, which is sort of so endemic in our understanding of what it means to fight against climate change, what it means to sort of mitigate against climate change. It's sort of in our everyday lexicon, it's key to how we understand climate change. You know, this idea of everyone reducing their carbon footprint was seen as a sort of progressive thing. But it was actually a quite frankly, manipulative marketing tactic that was developed by the fossil fuel industry in order to, as Assad said, individualize climate change to portray it as something that everyone is equally responsible for and that we can approach it by taking these sort of like minor individual behaviors. It was literally cooked up by BP to stave off efforts to hold the company and its other sort of colleagues accountable. Because in some parts of the world, like in the US, we had the lobbying efforts going towards climate denialism and climate skepticism, where in countries like the UK and in other countries in Europe where that wouldn't really fly, because most people sort of believe that climate change is real, they just innovated a different, quite effective strategy of taking the fact that people's real concerns and sort of assuaging that concern by giving them the sense that they can do something to impact the thing that they are worried about. You know, giving them something menial so that they can feel like they're doing their bit. And that way, not only is our anger and our scrutiny not directed to the institutions and the companies that are like responsible, but in fact, our scrutiny is deflected towards each other as we like become curtain twitches on whether or not people are like composting right or recycling enough. So really like the government here, despite hosting, as you said, these very important climate negotiations in Glasgow later this year, not only is the government sort of showing us that it doesn't bode well, because not only are they not really standing up to the fossil fuel industry in a way that is necessary, but they're actually doing the propaganda for them. They're actually doing the propaganda of the fossil fuel industry for them. And that doesn't bode well, especially as we've talked about it before, these negotiations have historically been hijacked and happened on the terms of companies and states that are responsible for this mess, and have silenced the communities that most urgently are most urgently impacted by climate breakdown. And these comments by our so-called climate spokesperson suggests that COP this year, the climate negotiations this year isn't going to be any different. That's a very important point. So I want to go back to the issue of Allegra Stratton. Some people might be watching you saying you're judging her on a tweet. There was a whole article. Now, she was sharing a Telegraph article, which was based on a comment piece she'd written in the Telegraph. So we can go to that for the full context. I'm not sure it makes it much better, to be honest. She writes, But all the more achievable because of it ahead of COP26, choose one thing, go one step, greener. She goes on. On your own, we are not pretending these steps will stop climate change. But here in the UK, you are not on your own. The Prime Minister's green 10 point plan to build back greener means the government is getting stuck in businesses large and small are lowering their emissions. And the NHS is two with one step greener, it will add up. The very obvious thing to say is I find it quite worrying that the Prime Minister's COP26 spokesperson is very obviously putting in basically sponsored content to statements on climate change. COP26 principal partner, Wreckett, who make Finish says you don't need to rinse your dishes because their dishwashers are so good. The broader point, Allegra Stratton, if you want to be very sympathetic to her, is saying these steps on their own will not stop climate change. And the point I want to put to you, Dalia, is potentially, is there an argument that even though these small individual actions that you can take recycling your glass bottles or what Allegra Stratton wants us to do, freezing half your bread, even if that on its own doesn't solve climate change, is there a sense that that could make everyone feel included in the fight against climate change? And so the habit of trying to be green makes you more committed to the things that matter that are green. Do you think there's anything to that, or am I trying too hard to defend the Prime Minister's spokesperson here? I mean, I think that, you know, I'm not obviously, you know, I recycle. I'm not going to begrudge and not going to be like you shouldn't recycle because then you're like being, you know, sort of scammed or whatever. I think that that's not the point. But the point is, is that you would actually be much better off if what you want to do is feel included in the fight against climate breakdown, you'd be much better off being involved in campaigning and political activism to, for example, divest the institution that you work in or institute your pension fund or things like this to divest it from fossil fuels. You'd be better off getting involved in demanding those large scale things. And that's the kind of political, I think it's, it's very sad that, you know, we've kind of entered this sort of era where political activity and political consciousness is very much something that we individualize rather than something that we kind of collectively achieve. So obviously it's, you know, I guess it's part of it. And I guess like having an ethic of, you know, redistribution and an ethic of, you know, not wasting, not being wasteful. But frankly, you know, the waste that's done on an individual level, it's just nothing compared to corporate waste. It's nothing compared to the scale of waste that we see, for example, by supermarket chains, the scale of waste that we see in industries like Amazon, you know, that is sort of factored into their business model. It's so minuscule that I worry that any kind of over focus on these individual behaviors allows us to kind of deflect from the real issues and invest in solutions that are just not going to get us where we need to be fast enough. I worry that it's actually, it can be a bit demobilizing is what I'm saying. And it can be a distraction because it makes, you know, maybe you're better off giving your money to a campaign group than buying a new, I don't know, green waste paper. But what trendy things to buy that are green? I don't know. We've got one more climate story for you in case you've been living under the illusion that our establishment are taking climate changes seriously as they should. It's a story revealed by the Guardian today, the Queen lobbied ministers in the Scottish government to make sure she is exempt from climate legislation. So they report the exemption means the Queen, one of the largest landowners in Scotland is the only person in the country not required to facilitate the construction of pipelines to heat buildings using renewable energy. Her lawyers secured the dispensation from Scotland's government five months ago by exploiting an obscure parliamentary procedure known as Queen's Consent, which gives the monarch advanced sight of legislation. So the monarch gets advanced sight of legislation. She saw there was going to be a policy forcing her to put pipes on her grounds to have a more green form of heating. She didn't want that. There's an opt out in the legislation. Now this does make it seem a bit of a joke when they're telling all of us, you should take individual action. Because when you add it all up, it makes a difference. The people who can make a difference on their own, because their consumption habits are so ginormous that personal decisions by them actually could make a big difference. They get to opt out. So this does seem like a complete joke to me and God save us from four degrees of heating because our leaders definitely aren't going to stop that from happening.