TOM TUGENDHAT MP: DITCH STALINIST APPROACH TO NET ZERO TO UNLOCK GROWTH, CHEAP ENERGY, AND CLIMATE ACTION

• Tom Tugendhat MP will call for Britain to abandon Labour’s ‘socialist’ approach to net zero for the sake of growth, security, and protecting our environment in response to the growing threats and challenges facing Britain.

• Delivering the Conservative Environment Network’s annual Sam Barker Memorial Lecture, he will call on our nation to shift its approach to the environment from one of scarcity and rationing to one of abundance.

• The former Security Minister will argue that the best way to protect our environment is to shun regulators that are blocking key infrastructure, unlock cheap and abundant energy, and realise that security and clean energy must go hand-in-hand.

The former Security Minister Tom Tugendhat will tomorrow [15th June 2025], in a speech to the Conservative Environment Network, argue that for too long our approach to environmentalism has been a socialist, Stalinist one, rather than one that promotes growth, security, and a cleaner world:

“The government has gone down a road that reminds me of Stalin’s famous line about “socialism in one country”, and every home in the country is feeling the rising energy prices that are closing factories and pushing business overseas. 

“We worshipped penury, scarcity and refusal and pretended it was virtue. So we find ourselves losing support for the ambition to conserve and failing to demonstrate the improvements that will release energy and opportunity. We have worn hairshirts and failed to develop the new technologies that can replace the old, carbon hungry industries because we have put the cost of energy and the cost of transition out of reach. 

“That is the heart of the problem we face today. No one wants their child to grow up in a more polluted, unstable world, but nor do they want to deny their children the opportunities today that we enjoyed yesterday. 

“It was a political choice to protect what we had rather than strive for what we could be. The nation turned inward and scarcity acquired a moral merit of its own. Doing less began to feel like seriousness, and sacrifice for its own sake began to feel like virtue. 

“That’s not an economic argument but a religious one.”

Tugendhat will argue that this approach of rationing has led to the state facilitating and encouraging the rise of blockers in the form of regulators. This has been detrimental in preventing the deployment of the essential infrastructure and clean energy Britain needs:

“For most of the past two decades, we have not been pursuing a policy of environmental transition but constraint. 

“Government policy has militated against construction and legislated against development, layering burdens one on top of another, with each rule and each report seeming to justify the existence of the regulator, not protect the future for our children. 

“The simple truth is that the statutory remits of Ofgem, the Environment Agency and Natural England all quietly bias them, every time, towards the easy answer: no. 

“Even with renewables, we demand less, not more. The de facto ban on new onshore wind lasted the better part of a decade and even today, our nuclear industry struggles to achieve the speed needed to take off. 

“We haven't chosen to switch from carbon to renewables, we've chosen to reject power. That’s a remarkable step backwards and, ironically, away from a carbon-free future.”

The former Security Minister will go further, arguing that this approach has led to innovative, clean and cheap technologies being neglected. He warns that without cheap energy, Britain will be left with a stagnating economy and will fail to encourage the uptake of essential, clean technologies:

“There is a deeper problem still, and it goes to the technologies that will actually finish the job of cleaning up our economy. Nuclear power, large and small, long-duration storage, geothermal, fusion, direct air capture, hydrogen, and the smart, flexible grids that tie all of it together all share a single feature: to be economic, to be worth building at all, they need abundant, cheap electricity. 

“It is a simple, eternal truth: make a thing cheaper and better, and take-up follows. That is how we will decarbonise, and it takes building and abundance, the one strategy our framework makes impossible. 

“Heat pumps tell the same story. Until electricity is cheaper than gas, they’re a cost not a help and because we load levies onto the electricity bill not the gas, the ratio is the wrong way round. We have made the clean choice the expensive choice and act surprised that so few choose to be penitents.

“So let me put it plainly: a climate strategy built on scarcity is fragile by design, it cannot survive a recession, or a war, or an oil shock, because the moment times get hard the public withdraws its consent, and understandably so.

“Cheap, clean, home-grown power can revive an industrial base and lower bills at the same time. China doesn’t have to be the workshop of the world if we choose an environmental policy that will survive hard times, because it does not depend on punishing people. To get there we will need to generate far more energy and correct our course to stay competitive. That, as I see it, is our only credible choice.”

Finally, Tugendhat will state that the goals of decarbonisation and energy security should not be in competition. They should, and must, work hand-in-hand:

“Energy security and environmental progress are not competing priorities to be balanced. They are, for the most part, the same priority with the same solution. 

“And you cannot rebuild a sovereign defence industrial base on imported energy bought at four times the price your competitors pay. Sovereign steel, sovereign aluminium and the processing of the critical minerals a modern military depends on all rest on the same foundations: electric arc furnaces, low-carbon hydrogen and domestic refining. Reshoring our strategic industries and cheapening our industrial power are the same task, and cleaner and more secure are both impossible at scale without cheap, clean power.”