Out of the blue, comes green

While right-of-centre parties are not typically seen as the natural friends of the green movement, the British Conservatives used their annual party conference last week to prove exactly that. Under their relatively young new leader, David Cameron, the Conservatives are saying the sorts of things that would make many conservatives in the US break down and cry. Specifically, global warming is a fact, and we all have to deal with it, and tackling the problem needs to be a frontline political issue.

The question is how much of this is spin, and how much is for real?

The Conservative Party has been out of government since 1997, when they lost the general election in a landslide. The winners were, of course, the Labour Party led by Tony Blair. Since that time, the Conservatives have lost two more elections, the ones in 2001 and then 2005, giving the Labour Party the longest winning streak in its history.

In the nine years since 1997, the Conservatives have had to deal with three key problems. The first was the patina of sleaze that stained the Conservative administration during the middle 1990s. In historical terms, these “scandals” were pretty trivial, but at the time they lent credence to the opinion that the Conservatives had been in power too long (having won power back in 1979 under Margaret Thatcher and held onto through elections in 1983, 1987, and, under John Major, 1992). For the most part, the sleaze issue has gone away by itself, as the MPs involved have long since retired and a more importantly, plenty of new sleazy scandals have been unearthed involving Labour Party politicians.

The second problem for the Conservatives has been that they have seen many of their strongest issues being poached by the Labour Party. Two in particular, economics and defence, are difficult to distinguish between the two parties. The economy under Tony Blair has been no better or worse than under the Conservatives a decade before (which perhaps says more about the impotence of governments to manage economies than anything else). Traditionally, the Labour Party has been seen as weak on economics, partly because of the power of the trades unions to manipulate government policy. That time seems to have passed, and the Labour Party under Tony Blair operates free market policies that have their roots in Thatcherism rather than Socialism. As a wartime Prime Minister, Tony Blair has been able to exorcise the demon of pacificsm from the modern Labour Party. Where the Labour Party of the 70s and 80s was endlessly involved in debates over unilateral nucelar disarmament, under Tony Blair, the UK has been involved in military campaigns of a scale unheard of since the Second World War — and this in the face of public opinion, which is consistently hostile to the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The final problem for the Conservatives is that their activists are getting old and dying. The average age of Conservative Party members is 65, compared with about 50 for the Labour Party membership. While both parties (and indeed all parties) have had to deal with declining participation in politics, the Conservatives have been hit especially hard.

So, David Cameron can basically forget about the sleaze issue. Yesterday’s show-business. Stealing back policies from New Labour is certainly on his agenda, but making the Conservatives more attractive to young people is also very important. And green issues, for good or for bad, are often much more important to the average voter in his teens or twenties than, say, social security. Green issues also divert attention away from policies that the Conservatives have trouble with (specifically, further European integration, an issue which still divides the party cruelly).

But beyond talk, has David Cameron done anything concrete? On the plus side he’s agreed to significant committments should the Conservatives win the next election, including year-on-year reductions on carbon emissions and independent “carbon audits” that will check how well the government is doing its job. On the flip side, not much has been said about emissions from cars and aeroplanes, or about how alternative energy sources will be developed.

David Cameron is either being very clever or very stupid. The Conservatives have traditionally been the friends of big buisness, and businesses, by and large, aren’t wild about things like environmental monitoring and improvements that increase costs and reduce profits. His gamble is that any loss of support from that quarter will be amply covered by attracting younger, greener voters who don’t much care for traditional left/right politics.

If David Cameron is right, New Labour will have a job of work to do. Tony Blair’s likely successor, Gordon Brown, has run the economy for almost a decade and yet under his tutelage the UK will almost certainly fail the 20% carbon emission reduction target set by Labour when it came to power. While unlikely to be the deal-breaker, green politics will certainly be important in the next election. By stealing policies from the Labour Party that they tried to make their own, David Cameron is giving them a taste of their own medicine. It’ll be interesting to see if his prescription can heal the ailing and ageing Conservative Party as well.