Tom Tugendhat MP's speech at the Sam Barker Memorial Lecture 2026

Thank you very much for inviting me to speak to the Conservative Environment Network. It’s been a group that I’ve been part of for nearly a decade now and it is a pleasure to have the chance to speak with you and particularly with Sam’s family here in the front row. He was around when I joined and he was an inspiration to me and I’m very glad to be able to pay some respect back by being here. 

Max Anderson | Head of Communications

It’s also a pleasure to have a chance to speak at a time when our security and our defence is top of people’s minds. It’s one reason why our work, and the task that Sam left us, has hit such a tough moment. Because across the country, the basis for our environmental policy is being challenged and we seem to be the only ones holding ourselves back with policies that others ignore. 

This government has abandoned what used to be multilateral government environmental action and gone instead for unilateral economic disarmament. A road that reminds me of Stalin’s famous phrase “socialism in one country”. Instead of leading the way, our homes are being punished more than others and are feeling the pinch in costs and jobs. Rising energy prices are closing factories and pushing business overseas. 

Now with risks on all sides, it’s time to be honest with ourselves and to recognise where we have got the answers right, and where we need to change. In this I draw inspiration from Sam’s favourite phrase and the pen name he used: “Repairing Lease.” 

It is a line that came from Margaret Thatcher and he loved it, and quoted it often: that no generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy, with a full repairing lease. 

I want to dwell on that phrase, just for a moment, because a repairing lease is not about living in a museum, it’s about living in a home. It doesn’t ask you to leave the building untouched but to enjoy it. To make full use of everything that it offers but when repairs are needed, when your time is up, to make sure that you left it in good condition with the roof mended and the walls painted, so that the next tenant inherits something stronger, something better, not Miss Havisham’s wedding cake, crumbling in one of the rooms untouched and unloved. 

That’s at the heart of the Conservative movement. Sam understood what Lady Thatcher’s words really meant and that they were a reminder for all of us that: conservatism and conservation grow from one root. But he understood, too, that the duty is an active duty, not just a passive intent. 

His environmentalism, and ours, belong less to the curator and more to the builder. You honour what you inherit by improving it, not by ignoring it.

That’s the argument I want to put to you tonight because I think that somewhere, in recent years, we’ve let go of this thread. 

We forgot that our job is to repair and improve; and instead became something quite different. We became misers of the inheritance we had been left, unable and unwilling to invest in a different future. Instead, we worshipped penury, scarcity and refusal, and pretended it was virtue. 

So we find ourselves losing support for the ambition to conserve and are failing to demonstrate the improvements that will release energy and opportunity. We have worn hairshirts and failed to develop the technologies that can replace the carbon-hungry industries because the cost of energy has put the cost of transition out of reach. 

That is at the heart of our current failures. 

Now of course no one wants their children to grow up in a more polluted, unstable world, but nor do we want to deny our children the opportunities that we have enjoyed ourselves. The only answer is investment that can generate the returns that will allow us to pay for the repairs to the lease that we have undertaken. But that’s not quite what we’re doing. 

I want to make this case in three parts. 

First, I’m going to talk about the scarcity we have chosen, effectively ignoring the lesson from the Parable of the Talents in St Matthew’s Gospel. 

Second, I will cover why our choice is the very reason for our continued dependence on carbon fuels. 

And third, I will speak about the cost of this decision not just to our today but our tomorrow as we abandon the leadership that would secure our prosperity and liberty for decades to come. 

The remedy to all three, I argue, is to remember that same understanding of conservatism and conservation that Sam quoted all those years ago: liberty brings opportunity and opportunity brings innovation. Innovation is what has always created the efficiencies that have allowed us to generate greater energy output from the resources before us. 

In essence, strip off the hairshirt, get out of the way and let abundance flow. Let me begin with scarcity. 

For too long we have not been pursuing a policy of environmental transition but of constraint. 

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

Those who want to transform our future, to replace dirty gas with clean nuclear or cut emissions by upgrading transport, must carry the entire burden of novelty, while the regulators and planning committees are under absolutely no obligation to weigh the cost of inaction. They simply object, and the cost of change grows while the cost of inertia falls unseen and unaccounted for on the whole country. 

Our system today is costing us all. 

Our planning process puts such value on immediate objections that Sizewell C and its soon to be built copies, power that would cut carbon and increase national resilience, are delayed in court doing damage to our economy, our environment and our security. 

How many fish have been damaged by the environmental harm of carbon outputs while Natural England demand ever more complex ways of saving the few who may, just possibly, be drawn into the Hinkley inlets? 

How many lives have been ruined by the closure of factories so that the Whitehall warriors can signal their virtue around the world, while the workers in Wales, in the North East, and in so many other parts, pay with their jobs? 

How many subsidies, which is not forget money taken by force in taxation, have been demanded in Westminster to make up for the choices when cheap energy would have boosted innovation and opportunity better than any government grant? 

That’s no way to cut emissions; all it cuts is opportunity. But that’s the system. The incentives for government departments and quangos like Ofgem, the Environment Agency and Natural England are always to avoid risk and blame, never to count the cost to our country. That’s why the default answer is always: no. 

Just look at the record of the past few years: 

We banned new exploration in the North Sea, despite the rolling cascade of energy crises in the previous decade. 

We’ve chosen to buy energy from Norway when we could just as easily tap it ourselves, and paid tax to the British Exchequer and given jobs to British workers. We’ve talked up Small Modular Reactors abroad but failed to support their roll out at home. 

Sadly, it’s even true with renewables. 

The de facto ban on new onshore wind lasted the better part of a decade. 

And now the courts have joined in. A coking coal mine in Cumbria, once approved, was rejected by judges on environmental grounds, leaving Britain’s last remaining steelmakers importing the same coal from abroad, where its extraction and transport produces more carbon, not less. 

This isn’t transition, it’s rejection.

We’re not switching from carbon to renewables; we’ve chosen to reject power. That’s a remarkable step backwards and, ironically, away from a carbon-free future. We didn’t go from wood to coal, or coal to oil, or oil to atom by consuming less energy, but by cutting the cost of power until the transition became affordable. The move to fusion will be no different, and the cost of power in Britain today acts as a brake on that change. 

We weren’t always like this. 

In the two decades after 1926 the entire British electricity grid was rolled out from scratch, beginning the move away from domestic coal and the smogs that smothered cities and suffocated citizens. 

Calder Hall, the first full-scale civil nuclear power station anywhere in the world, broke ground in 1953 and was powering the grid less than four years later, beginning the replacement of the coal stations that had dirtied our skies. 

And we converted the entire country to North Sea gas in about a decade after its discovery in 1965. 

Then something happened. It wasn’t our engineering, or our capital, or our talent. It was a political choice.

We chose to protect what we had rather than strive for what we could be. We felt rich enough to turn inward and scarcity acquired a moral merit of its own. Doing less, self-sacrifice for its own sake, began to feel like proof of virtue. Environmental policy left science and became religion. 

Today, our puritanical politics confuses prudence with restriction and stewardship with abstention. In refusing to plant the trees under which our children will shelter, or build the bridges that will connect them, or the power plants that will enable their industry, we are being profoundly un-conservative: denying the future in favour of today. 

Conservatism, like conservation, is a partnership between the dead, the living, and the as-yet-unborn, and those obligations, as Edmund Burke reminds us, run in both directions. 

We have forgotten all of that and are behaving like the third servant in St Matthew’s Gospel, burying our talents in the ground as we’re afraid of blame and the cost that it might have today, not what we will need tomorrow. As Conservatives, we know that the only way we honour the repairing lease is to invest it, like the first two servants, and generate the growth that builds the inheritance that we owe to our children. 

Let me be clear, because it’s easy to mistake what I’m saying and so I’m going to be absolutely one hundred percent clear. I am not saying that all environmental rules are bad, nor that they have no place in a booming, dynamic and innovative economy. I am saying that a system which treats virginity as virtue and construction as destruction can only end in extinction. 

We will never deliver the industrial transition to a greener future, no matter how urgent the scientific imperative if we continue down this road.

And it’s not right to condemn only this government. Though let’s be fair it has distilled the idea to its purest form, refusing to tap the North Sea gas fields while willingly buying exactly the same gas pumped through Norwegian pipes. 

There’s a danger that they are about to continue this damage in other areas. The Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production at West Burton is one of the most amazing innovations in British science, yet our flagship fusion project must clear exactly the same planning system as everything else. So to protect the environment, the production of the cleanest energy possible may be delayed. That risks costing us all for generations and allowing others to steal a march on the technology that works rather than the one government is trying to push. 

We can see this cost in the data. 

Since 2000, in an age of extraordinary technological progress when electrification is driving transport and industry, Britain has gone in reverse. Our electricity demand per person has dropped by 22 percent in the two decades to 2019, more than almost any other nation on earth. 

In fact, as Sam Dumitriu at Britain Remade has pointed out, only five countries have shrunk their demand faster: Yemen, Zimbabwe, Jamaica, Tajikistan and Syria. That points to the problem. Far from a triumph of efficiency, a collapsing energy demand isn’t a reward for success but a warning of failure. It is the sound of an economy being starved of the one input it cannot do without. 

Good projects sit in a queue simply to reach the grid, stalling growth and hurting jobs. 

Every revolution, agricultural, industrial and technological, has been partnered by a fall in the cost of energy. We are opting out of the future. It’s no wonder we’re now poorer per capita than every US state, including Mississippi. We have powered down while they powered up. 

And we’ve regulated out the fix. In every other market, a high price is a clarion call for more efficiency and new supply. Forbid the new supply and the signal goes unanswered but the warning light doesn’t stop blinking: the price stays high and the economy slows down. That means fewer jobs, lower pay, higher food costs, less time with families. A price we all pay in our own way. 

We set out to cut carbon and ended up cutting power. You cannot build a clean future with a framework designed to stop you building anything at all. 

Which brings me to my second point. Environmentalism is about protecting our climate, but that means climate action that works. And the only kind that has worked did so because the cleaner option was the cheaper option. 

Britain’s domestic emissions, the carbon we produce on our own soil, are down by roughly half since 1990, a figure heralded as a triumph. But our consumption has a higher bill. The carbon in everything we use, including everything we import, is down by only about a quarter. The gap is not a saving, because the byproducts of emissions are neither static nor

geographically confined. It is the carbon we have quietly shipped overseas, to be produced in someone else’s workshops and sold back to us. 

Between 1996 and 2022 Britain’s emissions fell from 407 to 211 million tonnes, while the emissions embedded in what we import rose from 259 to 404 million tonnes. Production halved and imports rose by more than half. That’s no saving. 

The environment doesn’t care whether a tonne of carbon is emitted in Scunthorpe or in Shanghai. Worse, the plants we were outsourcing to are less efficient than the ones we are closing. So a tonne saved in Port Talbot is exchanged for two in Shandong. That’s a false economy, and a self-deceit that people can now see clearly is wrong. It’s no wonder the British people feel conned by net zero. Done alone net zero means zero jobs but double carbon. 

No one believes Britain can solve a planetary problem alone. We account for 0.8 percent of global emissions but are acting like a flagellant: we’re beating ourselves until the others convert. 

History teaches us clearly that anchorites, stylites, ascetics, mendicants, hermits, eremites, cenobites, dendrites, and boskoi converted almost no one. 

Still the fakirs and anchoresses of this faith believe, apparently, that they will inspire China to cut production. But Beijing knows the self-imposed constraints would risk poverty, civil unrest and the Communist Party’s control. 

They should instead have listened to Tony Blair, that is the first time I have ever said that in a speech, who said his first lesson in socialism came as a waiter in a Paris bar. He’d been told that everyone put their tips in the jar, and at the end of the week they were shared out, but when he saw it was only his tips being shared amongst everybody, he realises that socialism was a con. 

This is sadly on that line. This is a global crusade on a national bill. 

Let’s look at what it has already cost. 

When Tata closed the blast furnaces at Port Talbot in 2024, some called it a win for the environment. But did demand for steel in Britain fall? No. Not by a single tonne. Production moved abroad, much of it to coal-fired blast furnaces in China and India where steelmaking emits two tonnes of carbon for every tonne of steel compared to 400kg in the United Kingdom. So we cut jobs and quintupled emissions. How is that either economically or environmentally wise? 

Then we let Grangemouth close. Did our demand for jet fuel and diesel fall? No. Not by a drop. We just import it at a higher carbon and security cost, from refineries with lower environmental and weaker labour standards. And according to OEUK, gas produced in the North Sea and delivered to British homes carries a far lower carbon ticket than imported LNG, once you count the liquefaction and the shipping.

And then there is Denby. For 217 years Denby Pottery has put plates on tables around the world, and Derbyshire families have worked there for generations, engorging and disgorging the three great kilns around the clock. A few weeks ago the last of them went cold. 

Denby’s energy bill had roughly trebled, from just over £1 million a year before 2022 to almost £3 million now, and the compensatory subsidy, the accounting trick that passes for industrial strategy under this government in steel and chemicals, was never extended to the potteries. 

So a company that kept a town alive and gave dignity and opportunity to generations was pushed to the wall by the cost of its power, to satisfy a domestic creed. A man-made tragedy as surely as the heresies of old, and just as avoidable by a simple return to the truth. Britain will go on buying plates only now from kilns abroad, fired on dirtier power and shipped halfway around the world to reach us. Another dependency on higher carbon output rewarding others and punishing our own. 

The lesson is plain: when we close our plants, the choice is never between power and no power. It is between cleaner or dirtier energy. Time and again we chose the dirtier and pretended we were clean.

That’s dressing vice as virtue and making the country pay. It’s time to stop playing this game. 

But there is a deeper problem still, and it goes to the heart of the promise for the future. Nuclear power, large and small, long-duration storage, geothermal, fusion, direct air capture, hydrogen, and the smart, flexible grids that tie them together all share a single essential ingredient to get started. To be economic, to be worth building at all, they need abundant, cheap energy. 

Today, China’s investment in solar power has nothing to do with tailoring Mao jackets to match our hairshirts. It’s down to what engineers know as Wright’s Law. The cost of a technology falls predictably the more of it we make. Mass production generates efficiencies in itself and rapid innovation generates even greater improvement. 

Solar is about a tenth the price it was a decade ago because Beijing builds panels at a colossal scale. It is a simple, eternal truth: make things cheaper and better, and more people will use them. That’s how to decarbonise but abundance is the one strategy our current framework makes impossible. 

We see the consequences everywhere. 

Artificial intelligence will reduce the number of people we need to work in our country. It will cut transport, accommodation and food demands, reducing carbon needs and achieving more than any ban on towel rails or underfloor heating, but it depends on electricity, and we can’t compete when our industrial power costs are many multiples of what American firms pay. 

That cuts us out of the AI revolution at the very moment everyone knows compute is a strategic asset and the US has shown it’s willing to withhold access to the latest AI models.

The AI revolution demands three things: talent, capital and power. We have the first two, and we’re struggling because of the third. 

This is true of model execution and information storage. 

Britain has about 1.6 gigawatts of data centre capacity, and the government’s ambition is 6 gigawatts by 2030. Texas alone had a connection queue of 226 gigawatts last November, almost 40 times our entire national ambition, three quarters of it is going on data centres. The four largest American technology firms will spend over $370 billion in a single year; Britain’s proudest boast is £44 billion of private investment across the whole of the last 12 months. We are not just losing the race; we’re struggling to get our shoes on and tie up the laces. 

Heat pumps tell the same story. Electricity levies mean gas-fired boilers are cheaper. We have made the clean choice the expensive choice and act surprised that so few choose to be penitents. 

People aren’t stupid, but they are busy. For years the promises that net zero would create jobs were believed. We could see the argument and we thought we were all in it together. But we’ve woken up to find that while our government was keeping us on a diet, countries around the world are wolfing down the feast. 

Look at Germany, which has spent over €500 billion on its electricity transition but still burns the filthy lignite coal to keep its energy-intensive industry running. 

That’s why the politics of scarcity is destroying public consent for climate action altogether. Across Europe we have seen the farmers’ revolts in the Netherlands, the gilets jaunes in France, the rise of the populist right in country after country, and at the core of almost every one sits the same thing: a backlash against the cost of a transition built on restriction rather than abundance. 

Net zero has gone from settled consensus to contested battleground in three years because Britain isn’t Stalinist, we don’t think we can or should carry a burden others won’t for an effect that makes little difference. We believe in fairness. 

The choice to pile the cost of our climate ambitions onto the electricity bill, and onto the households and factories least able to carry it, is why we have the widest gap between electricity and gas prices anywhere in Europe, and why, time and again, the clean option turns out to be the dear one. 

Today, the share of Britons ranking climate among the country’s most important issues has fallen from 69 percent in 2023 to 53 percent today. It was not the science that changed in those years, it was the bills. 

But a choice can be unmade, and this one could be unmade tomorrow. The last government began shifting some of these costs into general taxation and removing some constraints. We must finish the job. To do that, we must lift the levies from the electricity bill, and stop

charging VAT on top of them so that families and factories no longer pay a tax on a tax, letting the clean choice be the cheap one at last. 

Groups like Looking for Growth point to a different future. This morning they released their Emergency Energy Bill proposal that would scrap the rushed Clean Power 2030 target that has the government buying wind at any price, auction grid connections and use the revenue to cut bills, and end the scandal that last year paid renewable firms £1.5 billion to switch off power and throw it away. 

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

Cheap, clean, home-grown power can revive our industrial base and lower bills at once, an environmental policy that survives hard times because it does not punish people. To get there we must generate far more energy and correct our course. That, as I see it, is our only credible choice. 

Which brings me to my third point. 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. 

In my time in government I lost count of the number of times the energy brief and the security brief overlapped. Today’s blocking of the Persian Gulf has made that only clearer still. 

Every barrel of oil and every cubic metre of gas we choose to import rather than produce ourselves must travel to us through a chokepoint somebody else controls, hostage to political events far beyond our shores. The secure choice and, as I’ve said, the clean choice turns out, again and again, to be the same choice. 

When the Strait of Hormuz closed, the effects were enormous. Brent crude went above $100 a barrel, European gas prices doubled, diesel rose 70 percent and the price of jet fuel doubled. Six weeks of somebody else’s geopolitical choices, and the bill landed on the kitchen tables of British families and the books of British businesses. Without the Royal Navy ships or the North Sea supplies, we depend on the decisions of others. 

Roughly a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil and a fifth of its liquefied gas move through Hormuz. The Red Sea is similarly contested, and the Northern Sea route is, increasingly, Russian. 

None of these waters are ours. 

Yet we are now importing electricity at record levels, a net 33 terawatt hours in 2024, around 15 percent of our supply and nearer 20 at peak, through interconnectors running along a seabed that Russian survey vessels have spent the better part of a decade secretly mapping.

Now set our response to the crisis against Norway’s. Oslo has announced it will bring three North Sea gas fields it had shut back into production, to help steady the market. We banned new exploration in the very same body of rock. The cleanest gas available sits in our own waters, and still we import it from far away. So when the US Ambassador publicly urges Britain to develop more of its own North Sea fields, we should understand exactly what he is saying. It’s not a friendly suggestion. It’s a warning that we are making ourselves weak, we’re choosing to disarm. 

There is another factor behind all this, and it goes beyond bills. 

The grid itself is not merely an economic asset but essential to our national security. The blackout across the Iberian Peninsula last year, which knocked out around 60 percent of Spain’s power for the better part of a day, made that unmistakable. A war-gaming exercise run this spring by RUSI and Public First confirmed it: the grid held under pressure, but our exposure to global gas markets pushed bills up so fast that social and political cohesion came under real strain within weeks. And for Britain, that exposure is most of the time. 

During the worst of the 2021 to 2023 crisis gas set the price 97 percent of the time, the highest in Europe, against just 7 percent in France. Gas generates barely a third of the power we use but as the vital, final, marginal element, household bills stay hostage to events in the Gulf and decisions in the Kremlin. 

NATO now lists resilient energy supplies among the seven baseline requirements of national resilience, alongside food, water and the ability to communicate. We are some distance from meeting that standard. 

Sovereign AI, sovereign steel, sovereign aluminium and the processing of the critical minerals in a modern military depends on exactly the same foundations: cheap, reliable energy. Reshoring our strategic industries and cheapening our industrial power are the same task, and a cleaner and more secure future is impossible without cheap, clean power. 

So here, at the end, the three threads come together into a single rope. 

As Sam understood, ten years ago, that abundance, growth and stewardship were never in tension, they were always partners. He believed that responsibility and innovation align, and more importantly conservation is at the heart of the same message of free markets and free ideas that drives the Conservative principles we all share. 

Delivering a cleaner world and a richer one at the same time is not a contradiction, it’s the only way to achieve it. The same markets, the same rule of law, the same innovation, applied to the same power stations and grids and gas fields, deliver our security. A cleaner Britain, a safer Britain and a stronger Britain, all at once if we are willing to allow people the freedom to achieve it. It was always one project. We simply stopped noticing. 

And it’s a reminder of the cost of socialism at every level. Here we have it in environmental policy and, as always, socialism is failing. Their abstinence isn’t virtue, it’s signalling, and like all tokenistic politics, it delivers nothing and costs everything. Emissions for so many of the things we depend on are up, but like the jobs that used to make them, are now abroad.

Industry is hollowed out and the transition technologies are slower to arrive. Allies are losing patience and our resilience is down. Adversaries are taking note as we are slower, costlier and more politically brittle state. 

Now let’s look at a Conservative vision for our environment. Just think what we can achieve. Cheaper, plentiful power, delivered from every source will see our manufacturing boosted and innovation encouraged as our costs fall. We will see a burst of investment and energy into the transition technologies not because they’re ordered but because they are wanted. 

We will see people choose what works for them and protecting what they value. 

That’s the system we can create. Instead of direction, selection. Instead of constraint, abundance. Conservation through innovation. Security, energy, economy and our future all aligned. 

A repairing lease asks you to leave the house in better condition than you found it. Strong walls, a sound roof, and clean, abundant, power running through the wiring. That’s what stewardship really means, and that’s what it means to every conservative in this room. 

We hold this country, as Sam never tired of reminding us, on a full repairing lease. It’s about time we remembered what that freedom truly demands. 

Thank you.

This speech was delivered by former Security Minister Tom Tugendhat MP to CEN at our annual Sam Barker Memorial Lecture on 15th June 2026.