It shouldn't take Tony Blair to expose the myth about green jobs

Telegraph

21-02-2025

As Ed Miliband pursues his relentless and expensive quest for net zero he would do well to pause and heed the warnings emanating from another, rather more successful, former leader of the Labour Party.
Tony Blair's think tank, the grandly titled Institute for Global Change, has warned in a report this week that the Government is overestimating the potential for jobs to be created in 'green' industries, and that they may not replace the jobs lost in British manufacturing. The report calls for Labour to adopt a 'hard-headed' approach to industrial strategy which is less reliant on the green agenda.
The report will surely be welcomed in the Treasury, and indeed by anyone in the Government who is remotely serious about trying to achieve economic growth. Far from being an engine of such growth, the net zero agenda is stifling it, closing down British industry, draining public funds and increasing costs for consumers.
It's increasingly hard to understand why Ed Miliband continues to believe in his own agenda, let alone persuade his colleagues to go along with it. The UK's rush to achieve net zero ahead of all its competitors is self-defeating, because instead of reducing global carbon emissions it has simply moved them elsewhere.
How can any industry survive the highest energy prices in the world, roughly four times higher than the US and China? The most obvious victim has been the steel industry; having once been the world's largest producer of steel, the UK is now closing the last of its blast furnaces, and in future will only have the capacity to produce recycled steel, aided by a £2.5 billion government subsidy and providing a far smaller number of jobs. The demand for steel has in the meantime been met by production elsewhere, most notably China – the country responsible for nearly a third of global carbon emissions, and where those emissions have more than doubled over the past 20 years.
The British car industry is beginning to follow a similar pattern. Aided by inward investment, UK vehicle production has been a success story, our biggest single manufacturing export and a major employer, particularly in less wealthy areas. But the quotas and fines imposed by the Government to fulfil the electric vehicle mandate, combined with competition from Chinese factories producing cheap electric cars, is hitting balance sheets and pushing down demand, so that British car production has dropped to its lowest level since the 1950s.
The Tony Blair Institute is therefore only stating the obvious when it points out that jobs created by green initiatives will not compensate for those lost in manufacturing and related industries. But it's not only a question of jobs lost, painful though that process has been, but the cost to the taxpayer of creating 'green' employment. These costs are not just direct, in the form of state subsidies to industry to become environmentally friendly, or public sector jobs in 'sustainability', but also the indirect cost of British electricity, for both producers and consumers, leaving us all worse off.
Blair's report will surely increase tensions between Rachel Reeves and Miliband, illustrating the folly of some of the Energy Secretary's claims about green growth. Sooner or later the Prime Minister will have to decide whose side he is on, because Britain cannot afford to go on indulging Miliband's 'luxury beliefs' any longer; the price is simply too high.