Highlighting and undoing the ruinous 14-year Tory legacy will run and run – it’s the gift that keeps on giving for Labour, even if it’s already a bit irksome. But journalists are picky about which bits of the legacy they want to see undone – and very few seem to have recognised Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s speech at Kew Gardens on September 17th as a total demolition job of the Tory’s record on both climate change and international aid.
It was a cracking speech – personal (referencing his deep connections with Guyana), hard-hitting and as visionary as any senior member of Starmer’s government gets to be. Worth checking out: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/foreign-secretarys-foreign-policy-speech-on-the-climate-crisis
Importantly, it’s geared as much to domestic audiences as to the international community.
Both Lammy and Ed Miliband (Secretary of State at the Department For Energy Security and Net Zero) are working overtime to persuade middle-of-the-road voters that seriously getting to grips with the Climate Emergency is as good for them today as it is for the rest of the world or indeed for ”future generations”. The poisonously short-term, nativist agenda of the UK’s right-wing media demands nothing less.
Interestingly, Lammy was bold enough to seek to demonstrate that “confluence of interest” through the most controversial lens of all – migration.
He noted that past policy failures already “pour fuel onto existing conflicts and regional rivalries, driving extremism, displacing communities and increasing humanitarian need ….. We are already seeing that climate change is uprooting communities across the world. And by 2050, the world bank’s various worst-case estimate is that climate change could drive 200 million people to leave their homes”.
We should seriously welcome this approach. Leave it to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper to get on top of the “small boats” dilemma over the next couple of years, whilst getting as many as possible to focus on the “migration apocalypse” awaiting us if we don’t properly and urgently take account of the Climate Emergency .
As it happens, the world bank’s worst-case that Lammy quotes is seen by more and more climate scientists as a serious underestimate. Together with my co-authors Robin Maynard and Colin Hines, we’ve just updated our report (“Exodus Equator: 1 Billion On The Move”). It draws extensively on the latest climate science, showing that as many as 1 billion people could be forcibly displaced as average temperatures rise across the entire Equatorial zone over the next 25 years. The world is entirely unprepared for this, financially and politically, raising the very real possibility that this will become the worst humanitarian disaster in the history of humankind.
But with the world literally collapsing around us, in the Middle East, in Ukraine, in Sudan and so on, how can we possibly expect today’s leaders fighting these fearsome fires to look beyond the flames with which they’re surrounded?
We have to. David Lammy and Keir Starmer have to. The prospect of 1 billion forcibly displaced people within the next 25 years demands nothing less.
All of which tells us that David Lammy is going to have to go so much further than his eloquent demolition of the Conservative Party’s 14 year record.
In his speech, Lammy went out of his way to commend the work being done by his “good friend” Mia Mottley, Prime Minister of Barbados and the driving force behind the Bridgetown Initiative. This proposes unlocking up to $1 trillion to enhance climate resilience in developing and vulnerable countries.
The scale of this takes us way beyond the $100 billion per annum of climate finance – agreed nine years ago and still not being delivered, as Oxfam’s analysis so devastatingly points out. https://www.oxfamnovib.nl/Files/rapporten/2024/Climate%20Finance%20Short-Changed%202024.pdf
The UK itself is not in a particularly strong position to deliver on any heightened climate finance ambition. The decision by the Tories to get rid of the department for International Development back in June 2020 has had very serious consequences – not least in the context of migration. As Communities Secretary Lisa Nandy put it: “if you’re worried about people fleeing persecution, war and climate change, why did you abolish DFiD and trash one of the best things this that this country has ever given the world?”.
Keir Starmer himself in 2022 (on Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart’s podcast “The Rest is Politics”) pledged to bring back DFiD if Labour got back into Government.
One of the key recommendations in our Report is to create a new department of International Development and Global Stability, to work alongside the Foreign Office and DESNZ to provide exactly the kind of leadership that Lammy was calling for. People are understandably suspicious of spurious “machinery of government” reforms – but “cometh the moment, cometh the machine”. And there has never been a moment as telling as this in terms of what needs to be done on both the Climate Emergency and migration.
4.11.2024
