Abstract
This chapter addresses the contradictions that embody Conservative climate policy in the Age of Brexit. During the years since the vote to Leave the European Union, the Conservative governments have shown moments of world-leading ambition in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and developing rigorous post-Brexit climate policy tools. However, the Conservative governments have simultaneously led the UK into a credibility gap, leading to concerns that the UK will fail to meet near-term emissions reductions targets. The story of these contradictions gets to the heart of the problems that the UK faces when trying to develop its own, distinct climate actorness in the Age of Brexit.
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Notes
- 1.
Admittedly, COP26, hosted in November 2021, does fall outside of the primary remit of this edited volume. However, the conference was due to be held in November 2020 and cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For this reason, and because it was such an important moment in the UK’s Age of Brexit climate action, it has been included in this chapter.
- 2.
It should be noted that this is not a concern that was necessarily shared by British businesses as much as it was a perceived concern on the behalf of businesses by the British public at large. The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) had generally supported the continuation of the UK’s membership of the EU and the EU’s green-growth agenda as a pathway to ensuring clear consistency for British businesses (Burns, Moore, et al., 2019: 281).
- 3.
This was a noteworthy choice by the same Michael Gove who once famously commented ‘I think the people of this country have had enough of experts’, given that Politico.eu is a news source not widely read by the UK general public, being instead preferred by policy specialists in London and Brussels.
- 4.
This Whitehall restructuring was in itself seen as a watering down of the UK government’s focus on climate action and a shift away from the Cameron Government’s preference for making climate change a signature issue.
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Moulton, J.F.G. (2023). Consistently Inconsistent? Assessing UK Climate Action in the Age of Brexit. In: Beech, M., Lee, S. (eds) Conservative Governments in the Age of Brexit. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21464-6_11
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