 Centrists love to mock the Labour left for claiming that Corbyn, while he lost two elections, won the argument in many key areas of British public policy. They mock it, I actually think, in many areas it's true. So one of the areas is clearly, for example, in the issue of benefit claimants. Before Jeremy Corbyn became leader, the Labour Party and Tories were competing over who could be tougher and more horrible, basically, to people on benefits. Another issue is austerity. Obviously, the political centre ground has fundamentally changed. However, there are fewer examples where a pledge or a slogan gets lifted word for word from Corbyn's Labour unadopted by the Conservatives, but it's happened. So today, the Tories are sort of touting their green industrial revolution. Now, if that phrase sounds familiar to you, it should do. It was in Labour's 2019 manifesto. Anyway, he's launched it, or the government have launched it alongside a 10-point plan, and it was sort of announced by Boris Johnson in an article in the Financial Times this morning. Presumably, this was going to be a big speech, but the guy is self-isolating because he had contact recently with someone with coronavirus. We can go to some of the key parts of this article. So he writes, this is Boris Johnson. Imagine Britain when a green industrial revolution has helped to level up the country. You cook breakfast using hydrogen power before getting in your electric car, having charged it overnight from batteries made in the Midlands. Around you, the air is cleaner. Trucks, trains, ships and planes run on hydrogen or synthetic fuel. British towns and regions, Teeside, Port Talbot, Merseyside and Mansfield are now synonymous with green technology and jobs. This is where Britain's ability to make hydrogen and capture carbon pioneered and capture carbon pioneered, the decarbonisation of transport, industry and power. Now, this is definitely something that could have been an appendix to the Labour Party manifesto. This came along with a 10-point plan by 2030. The country, according to this plan, will produce enough wind power to run every home in Britain. That would require quadrupling current production levels. Quite ambitious. An end to the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2030. A 500 million pound investment in hydrogen. An expansion of nuclear power and investment in zero emissions planes. Lots of people still are not convinced that can happen, but you might as well invest in it. It would be nice if we could travel without contributing to climate change. Greenpeace gave the plan mixed reviews. So, Rebecca Newsom, who is, I think, director of Politics Air, said, this landmark announcement signals the end of the road for polluting cars and vans and a historic turning point on climate change. Though it's a shame the Prime Minister remains fixated on other speculative solutions such as nuclear and hydrogen from fossil fuels that will not be taking us to zero emissions anytime soon, if ever. So, very much a mixed review there. A major criticism, a recurring criticism of this plan is that they've only pledged £12 billion. Most of it was already announced. They sort of repackaged it, which isn't nearly enough for the kind of transformation. We need Ed Miliband, the shadow business secretary, had proposed a plan which would involve the state spending £30 billion over 18 months. That's more like it. So, the Tories have stolen Labour's messaging, but don't seem to have matched their ambition. This is Adrian Buller of the Think Tank Commonwealth on what was announced today. A lot of what's been sort of announced today is spending commitments from the manifesto that have been brought forward, which is sort of a trend throughout the crisis. And, you know, there's nothing that wrong with that. It just means that they haven't actually sort of ramped up any kind of ambition, whether that's in job creation or on the climate issue, you know, compared to what we had last December. And, you know, a lot of it is kind of Kevin Anderson, who's an academic, described it as like a feature technology wishlist, which I think is pretty accurate. It's not a lot of sort of substantive planning. It's more, you know, we're going to have a bit here and there for hydrogen and we're going to have, you know, the big ambition is a hydrogen powered town by 2030, which sounds lovely, but that's sort of the kind of piecemeal thing we're looking at as opposed to something that's actually kind of commensurate with the ambition that needs to happen. So compared to the plans that have been developed on the left, these are pretty tepid, you know, they're pretty piecemeal. This is not the kind of ambition that we need to see if we want to properly challenge this great crisis that is climate change. But do we have to give the Tories some credit? Because one thing we can do is compare their policies to what needs to happen. The other thing we can compare them to is what other countries are doing. And at least when it comes to the 2030 ambition to stop selling petrol and diesel cars, they look pretty good on an international level. Adrian Buller again. There are a lot of people of campaigns on the sort of petrol cars for a while and they should be congratulated for bringing that forward a decade because that is the change that's happened here. And I think definitely, you know, there are some things that are encouraging. And I think as far as I'm aware 2030 in terms of the petrol and diesel vehicle ban will be the earliest date around the world. So that is, you know, something not going to pretend that it isn't. That said, in terms of, you know, wind power, a lot of the easiest steps and the ones that we've already made in the UK is in decarbonizing our electricity system. And so that's sort of something that we've already done quite well at. And the sticking points have been transport, which partly is being addressed here with that ban, as well as buildings, heating, installation, all those other sort of less glamorous things, land use changes, agriculture, that they haven't really done anything on and which the plans that they've announced today, if they're not all, don't really, don't really cover. And it's worth saying as well, you know, much like the sort of techno optimism focus on hydrogen, the fixation with electric vehicles is like in and of itself a bit problematic. I mean, yes, we'll need them to some extent, but the focus really has to be on shifting, you know, how we get around altogether and on public transport, because we can't just switch cars to EVs one to one. They're just like, isn't enough lithium in the world to do that. And it would be terrible for, you know, all the communities involved in extracting that. So I think that also to me raises a red flag, even if the deadline is ambitious. Aaron, I want to bring you in now. Do you think this is a case of credit where it's due? I think, for example, that 2030 deadline, fairly ambitious if you compare it to other countries. What do you make of this? No, it's not. I mean, there's two contexts here. The first is what should we be spending? And of course, 12 billion falls massively short, but sort of 30 billion, quite frankly, the labor proposal. But the other context is, of course, COVID, you know, it's very likely that the country's deficit this year, financial year, it could be between 300 and 500 billion pounds. It may be 500 billion pounds. And so alongside 500 billion, and you and everybody's now saying climate change is the big existential crisis of the 21st century, 500 billion deal with COVID over one year, 12 billion to deal with climate change. I think even labor's policy of 30 billion, incredibly conservative and underwhelming, and it's a lot better than the Tories. And I think even that's a sticking cluster. So no, not very good. I mean, you know, we should be thinking as a country in the short term, we need to be spending 100, 120, 150 billion. How do we do that? All the things Adrienne just talked about, you know, decarbonizing energy infrastructure as quickly as possible, moving away from fossil fuel cars, but also we should be driving less, more cycling infrastructure and so on. Probably a couple of new national forests, rewilding subsidies for more renewable forms of agriculture, huge amounts of money. And we should be looking to decarbonize really by 2035. And then you are starting to talk about, well, this will require 150, 200 billion pounds at least. But you know, yeah, 30 billion is it should be the low end here. So no, it's nowhere near enough. And I think what the Tories are doing with the commitment, it's very catchy all by 2030, you know, we'll just have electric cars, there's not going to be the infrastructure to do that. And the great thing with this promise is they can say, well, we told you the cutoff, you know, point, if you've not got a car, that's your fault. And you can personalize it. And they can say, well, we haven't got the infrastructure. Well, that's the council's fault. It's a great way of sort of creating plausible deniability. You know, it's a it's a it's a standard which is being imposed by national government. But ultimately, they're not the ones that are going to have to, you know, carry the can if it doesn't happen, that'll be the consumer, that'll be local government. So I don't think it's I don't think it's a realistic target, because they're not going to be spending the money. You know, if you are going to decarbonize every single car in this country, and Adrin is right, that's not the answer, we can't just shift from like to like. But even if you say we're going to have half as many cars, and they'll be electric, you're looking at infrastructure building on a par with the road building programs of the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s. Are you seeing that right now and building electric infrastructure? No. So, yeah, I'm a bit skeptical. And I think they're all very good points, especially the money. I mean, why is it only 12 billion? It just seems like such an unnecessary paucity of ambition. Back to Adrian Buller, because I asked her to sort of summarize what the left should be demanding, what else needs to be sort of added to this kind of plan? Where are the gaping emissions? For me, there are two things here. And, you know, there's all the technical questions of the actual decarbonizing. Those are really important. And some of those are being, you know, started to be addressed here. But there are two things that we just have to do if we're actually going to be taking this seriously. And the first is that, you know, we just cannot tackle the climate and environmental crises without radically reducing economic inequality. You know, that's not just nice to have, it's a need to have the discrepancies in how energy is consumed, how resources are used, how emissions are created between the ultra wealthy and the vast majority of people are immense, both within countries and between them. And we need to be rectifying both of those if we want to have sort of a shot in the dark chance. And there's a lot of academics that work on this, like Julius Steinberger. And, you know, they have work showing that it's just not feasible to do, you know, what conservatives like to talk about a lot, which is fully decoupled economic growth from emissions, for example. So that's one part of this. And that's something that, you know, they're obviously not enthusiastic to do, because being fabulously wealthy isn't something that the conservatives have a problem with. And the other is a focus on the financial system, you know, as a seat of global financial power, that's sort of one of the most important ways that we impact the climate issue globally, especially with Brexit approaching, there's sort of this opportunity to rewrite some of the rules governing our financial system. And the chancellor made some announcements with respect to that last week or earlier this week, last Friday. But they're quite tepid. It was like, oh, you know, some of the big financial institutions will maybe have to disclose what they're doing about climate by, you know, five years from now or something like that. When you have groups like Lloyds of London, which is the world's sort of biggest insurer of energy projects, without which, you know, that insurance, without that insurance, the projects wouldn't go ahead. And so we're enabling fossil fuel projects to be built all over the world, we're financing them. And that often has a much bigger impact, I would say, than even our domestic commissions do. That was Adrian Buller from the Think Tank Commonwealth. Aaron, I want to get your thoughts on one other thing about this, actually, because one thing we can talk about in terms of this green industrial revolution is, you know, where it succeeds and where it fails in terms of policy. The other is this the first indication of the new direction of the Conservative Party, at least presentationally, there have been many people sort of saying today, Claire Perry is one of them, who was a former climate change minister, who was saying that one of the reasons why the Tories hadn't made a speech like this previously is because Dominic Cummings didn't think that people who lived in the Red Wall cared about climate now that he's gone. And we understand that Carrie Simmons has more influence within the Conservative Party, and she is an environmental campaign, or I don't know, she's the kind of environmental campaigner that wants a Green New Deal, I think she works on oceans. Do you think this is going to be at least the kind of presentational change we can expect from the Conservative Party, or do you think that's reading a bit too much into the timing here? No, I think that's spot on. There was a report a couple of months ago, really interesting report, but how do the Conservatives make headway within younger voters? And it talks about how they can appeal to certain minorities, it talks particularly about South Asians, and, you know, animating their historic kind of themes of hard work, prosperity, personal success. And they think that works with, I mean, they're making that stereotype, by the way, not me. And as well as appealing to sort of second, third generation South Asians, they think they can also appeal to people under 35 on climate issues. So I think it's very possible that it's always basically staying where they are. And look, will it be a successful electoral strategy? I have no idea, because maybe it's a zero sum game and you get some of those people, but you lose some others. And that's why Dom Cummings was circumspect about it. But you could certainly see how it fits in with a broader strategy of, wow, we are losing, when people say they're losing the young, you know, under 45s voted Labour in the last election, even though Labour got smashed under 45s, you know, something who's 44 is not young. Sorry, if you're 44, you're middle aged, you're not young. And so I think, well, if somebody 44 has kids, they have a house, they might have a business, you know, whatever. So I think, I think it's a pitch to basically say, we need those people too. We're going to need them in five, 10, 15 years time. So I think it's smart. That said, Dominic Cummings, you know, really pulled a rubber out of a hat in 2019 and with the Brexit referendum. So who knows if it's going to work in the short term. But I can certainly see an electoral calculus within this. And look, it may be that the Tories basically don't offer much, but they just notify what Labour have to say on climate. And you can see how they do that because they've got the media on the side, they've got a clear message, and Labour isn't even talking about their own policy, which is so much better. You know, as we've said, they're talking about Jeremy Corbyn being suspended from the party or he wasn't, he said the whip removed. So I think it makes sense for the Tories to sort of lean into this. Yes.