If politics is the art of the possible, then British Premier Tony Blair is spending far too much of his energy on the impossible.
Like all leaders long in office, once absorbed by the great powerplay of global conflicts, the banalities of the mundane pall. But it is the politics of the impossible to imagine that he can have any significant influence now over the necessary step-by-step cooling of the Lebanon crisis.
He can hardly help prevent a terrifying Middle East conflagration when he has helped throw fuel on that fire. Eagerly Downing Street lists his many phone calls with key leaders, but you will find scant mention of Blair’s role in the foreign press.
Instead the draft UN resolution is being negotiated between France and the US. Chirac, cynical old arms salesman, has carved himself a niche as peace statesman, leader of the planned new UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon.
That may be bitter for Blair the global moralizer, but it is the price for getting Iraq so wrong. As Baghdad disintegrates into ungovernability, war-party Britain is just a minor US adjunct and Yo Blair isn’t even wanted as a US go-between. Britain’s age-old grand illusion about its place in the world led Blair into this Iraq disaster: now some humility on war and peace would be more dignified than further grandiose self-delusion.
Instead let him return to that greater global threat — climate change — about which he has been almost as rhetorically loud on the world stage.
With Europe and America sweltering and drought parching southern Britain, he was in California striking a usefully symbolic carbon-trading deal with Arnold Schwarzenegger. He has upped Britain’s pledge in a tougher carbon trading regime for the second EU round.
But since 1997 UK emissions are up 3 percent. In hard reality, we are middling in the EU emissions tables; no aspect of Britain’s climate-change policy leads the world, except rhetorically. But it is well within the politics of the possible to change that.
As it is, Germany has a 1million-homes-a-year insulation scheme: ours is in the thousands. We have the EU’s biggest wind capacity, but fall far behind in wind farms. We have the dirtiest cars and the most expensive public transport. Market leaders in biomass, wave power and solar energy are elsewhere.
However, at last it looks as if Labour’s younger generation of ministers are seizing the initiative. Blair and Brown have shied away from anything that might mean voters taking any pain. When the prime minister dropped into Radio 1 to promise every household a carbon audit, replace all Downing Street light bulbs and turn down the central heating, that was useful but still the easy bit.
It is David Miliband and Douglas Alexander who are confronting the hard questions. Significantly neither was a minister during the event that scared Blair and Brown into paralysis.
It seems extraordinary that a handful of right-wing farmers with tractors laying siege to power stations could so warp climate-change policy. But the fuel protests frightened Labour from ever suggesting the public should make any sacrifice in its use and abuse of cheap energy.
Now Alexander is putting forward a bill to introduce charging on trunk roads all over the country, with a congestion-charging system for any city that wants one. The environment audit committee is calling on him to set a £1,800 excise-duty differential between the most and least polluting cars. If the money raised is poured back into better public transport, this will shift more journeys from cars on to buses and trains.
Miliband’s rousing end-of-term speech advocated the one idea that could make most difference — a personal carbon-trading scheme. If all energy from gas and electricity at home, petrol in cars and air travel were apportioned fairly as a quota per head, people with above-average use would have to buy any extra they needed, while under-users sell their spare capacity. People would save points from car travel in order to take an extra flight, or turn down the heating to earn more petrol.
Before he was brutally evicted from Defra, along with any minister who had doubts about new nuclear power, Elliott Morley had commissioned a feasibility study for this idea, starting by applying it just to surface transport. That plan, landing on Miliband’s desk, looks relatively easy.
Just as people have petrol loyalty cards, so they would have a transport credit card awarding points. Use more than your ration and the card can be topped up for a price, while unused points can be traded in for cash. Miliband said a full scheme including all domestic energy would take 10 years — but Morley’s first step for transport could be done quickly.
In the end fair rationing is the only way. Despite recent price rises, energy in Britain is almost the cheapest in the EU. Only huge energy taxes would change most people’s habits. But a system that allowed non-drivers (the poor) to sell their quota to gas-guzzlers and frequent flyers would be massively redistributive.
Since British politics of left and right still feels the need to talk presumptuously in terms of “leading the world”, there is no reason why Britain should not lead the world and show that a domestic carbon-trading scheme can work. It would make the public razor-sharp about how much energy they use. Suddenly cutting carbon would become a one-upmanship game that might, I suspect, particularly suit the British psyche.
Up on the island of Lewis, if the Scottish Parliament gives the go-ahead, Britain might at least start to catch up.
Two large wind farms will produce 20 percent of Scotland’s electricity and 6 percent of Britain’s renewable energy target. But that’s just the start.
The Western Isles council plans to turn the area into a mighty alternative generator, plowing money back into wind and wave, creating jobs and trouncing the wind-doubters.
In the meantime, Friends of the Earth is pressing the government to put into the Queen’s speech a legally binding law to cut emissions by 3 percent a year — a cross-party bill drafted by Michael Meacher, Norman Baker and John Gummer. The distant target of a 60 percent cut by 2050 will be far too late.
And will Gordon Brown have the nerve to put a windfall tax on the oil companies’ gigantic profits from Middle East calamity, to pay for alternative research?
Meanwhile we can wring our hands over the unfolding crisis in the Middle East, to which Britain has contributed in Iraq. But beyond offering support to the best chances of peace, it is better not to be further deluded about British usefulness now.
