When the siren sounded on Friday night, my first thought was fire.
Weeks of unrelenting sun in the normally soggy Peak District, where I was visiting my mum, have bleached green valleys a dangerously dry, crispy blond. One of her neighbours had earlier pointed out an ominous cloud of smoke on the horizon, coming from one of the wildfires raging all summer on the moor. When that harsh, discordant shriek blared from every mobile phone in the house, I was half-braced for an evacuation order, not what turned out to be a faintly melodramatic warning to the nation to lay off the barbecues. A false alarm, of sorts, but one that felt uneasily like a wake-up call.
Scientists can warn until they’re blue in the face about the consequences of what we’re doing to the planet, but nothing beats the visceral shock of idly scrolling on your phone and seeing panicky footage of flames leaping over suburban British fences, or terrified horses being turned loose from fields where the hedges are starting to catch light. A friend just back from the south of France, somewhere far enough from the raging wildfires there to be considered safe, was spooked by ash raining from the sky as she ate lunch in the garden: it felt like the beginning of an apocalypse, she said, or the opening scenes of a disaster movie. Something has shifted even in people who were once blase about the climate crisis, and judging by last week’s sudden flurry of government activity – a Cobra meeting on fighting wildfires called after hefty pressure from the Greens, extra support for drought-stricken farmers, and finally that emergency alert lighting up everyone’s phones – Andy Burnham has clocked the dangers of not being seen to respond.
Yet there’s something jarring about a new prime minister spending the hottest summer on record talking up the prospect of new drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea, or consulting on easing net zero targets for carmakers. He was rightly quick to visit people affected by a wildfire near the West Midlands town of Stourbridge, but has been noticeably slower to respond publicly to warnings from the town’s Labour MP, Cat Eccles, that this is not the time to start extracting yet more fossil fuels. So far, his is more a strategy for picking up the pieces of damage already done than for gripping the root causes.
Just how serious is Burnham about the climate crisis? It’s very early days, but a pattern is emerging that may be familiar to some in Greater Manchester, remembering the then mayor’s swift rethink of attempts to impose an unpopular clean air zone on drivers. He is not complacent about the threat to the planet – but where green policies clash with his mission to create jobs and rebuild the social fabric, Burnham and his deputy, Louise Haigh, both seem instinctively protective of the latter. This prime minister isn’t swayed by expensive fossil fuel lobbyists, but he is sensitive to unions defending the interests of oil rig workers in Aberdeen, or car manufacturers who have been warning for years that Britain’s rigid zero emission vehicle (Zev) mandate could push them into closing factories across what is left of the country’s industrial heartlands. Under the mandate, carmakers are fined if they don’t hit constantly rising targets to sell more electric cars as a percentage of total sales. If people feeling the pinch refuse to buy enough expensive new electric cars, and governments decline to subsidise them, the cheapest way of avoiding massive fines is to mothball product lines for petrol and diesel cars, to stop drivers buying too many of them.
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Nobody in this government needs reminding of how a big employer closing its gates in places where jobs are scarce can rip the heart out of a community, nor how the far right feeds off that sense of hopelessness. Britain isn’t the only country considering watering down targets that few in the car industry now expect to be met. Nor, I suspect, will Burnham’s be the only government staring down the barrel of higher gas bills this autumn – caused by Donald Trump’s disastrous war on Iran – and worrying about how this new cost of living crisis might be exploited by rightwing parties blaming it on supposedly “woke” net zero policies they are desperate to revoke.
There are compelling reasons, in short, for Burnham to pitch himself as a net zero pragmatist – the word ministers keep falling back on when asked about the looming and increasingly fraught decision on drilling in the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gasfields. (And yes, even that act of apparent climate vandalism has friends in surprising places, with the eco-entrepreneurs Dale Vince and Greg Jackson both arguing that, if we need oil and gas from somewhere, getting it from our own back yard is a cleaner option that might also help reduce the backlash against net zero.)
But if the Labour party wanted naked pragmatism, frankly it could have stuck with Keir Starmer. It looks to Andy Burnham for something more: the courage to face up to difficult questions but also the political skills to sell difficult answers, and the emotional intelligence to manage the fallout. As this unnaturally hot summer fades into what may be an equally unnaturally wet autumn, we’ll soon know whether he can actually deliver.
