In 2023, it was reported that the then leader of the opposition Keir Starmer interrupted a shadow cabinet presentation by Ed Miliband to declare “I hate tree huggers”.
Starmer’s spokespeople denied that the incident ever took place, and the fiasco was quickly shunned to the memory bin.
Despite this blowing over pretty quickly, it hasn’t exactly silenced the scrutiny that the Labour leader has faced regarding the pursuit of his flagship pledges regarding the green transition.
At the Labour conference this month, the party sheepishly admitted the original £28 billion annual green investment plan was scaled back to less than £15 billion, with only a third being new funds.
Notably, the home insulation scheme saw its promised spending reduced from £6 billion per year to an average of £1.3 billion annually.
Despite these adjustments, Labour maintains its commitment to achieving clean power by 2030 and continues to advocate for policies that support the green transition.
When the capital-coddling wing of the Labour Party yearns for the days of the Blair ascendancy and his hurtling drive for market efficacy with a light touch on state support, perhaps it’s here, in the where that lament is loudest.
Although Blair’s premiership was effectively silent on green pledges, Blair himself hasn’t shied away from the issue since his departure from office.
His criticisms of governments in the Anglosphere’s commitment to green pledges unsurprisingly cannot be marooned from his Third Way worldview upon which his political milieu was entirely cladded in.
When asked about AOC’s ‘Green New Deal’, he asked: “You’re going to decarbonise the US economy and not use market mechanisms to do it?” – dismissing any overtly statist or interventionist vision as unrealistic, even naive.
Labour, the party with the deepest industrial base in Britain, has always faced an awkward balancing act when it comes to green commitments. From coal miners to steelworkers, Labour’s electoral backbone was built on industries most threatened by decarbonisation. This history explains why previous leaders—from Wilson to Blair—tended to treat environmental pledges as secondary to jobs, growth and union security. That Labour was built upon mines and cotton mills is the answer to why photosynthesis has never been at the top of any CLP agenda. Starmer, however, cannot afford that luxury. Today, no party can credibly present itself as serious about government while neglecting the politics of the green transition.
The modernity project of Labour has long been hailed as a secular salvation – the days of coal boards and “everybody out!” are an anachronism, and the party instead looks towards growth models and the ever-pressing issue of the green transition.
Members, instead, now raise their pint of bitter in their flat- roofed Labour clubs to the end of the wilderness years and the rebirth of a party that now looks outward toward growth models. Right? Far from it.
Despite the ceremonial toasts to modernity, factories continue to close, shipyards shrink, and promised green industries have yet to sprout.
The machinery of decarbonisation exists in blueprints and acronyms – GB Energy, the National Wealth Fund, the Industrial Strategy Council, but not yet in the livelihoods of workers across the North and Midlands where Labour’s green transition has so far struggled to match its own rhetoric. The manifesto’s promise of 650,000 new green jobs has yet to materialise a year into government, even as traditional industrial decline deepens.
When the Titanic sank in 1912, Belfast ship builders defended their industrial pride with all of the admirable parochial hubris in: “She was fine when she left here!”. Samson and Goliath still stand tall over Belfast’s skyline as a potent symbol of industrial virility in a sector which has been beset with decline since WW2.
Yet Harland & Wolff, forever burdened as the architects of the tragic vessel, now limps along under a rescue deal with a Spanish state company. Port Talbot and Scunthorpe steelworks face layoffs as they move to greener electric furnaces; Grangemouth refinery has been shuttered and repurposed as an import terminal by its Chinese owner.
Public institutions meant to anchor the shift exist largely on paper and their impact on employment still
theoretical. Meanwhile, the skills gap remains one of Britain’s most consistent policy failures.
Unite’s Sharon Graham has warned that, without real investment and retraining, workers risk becoming “the miners of net zero”: casualties of a transition that happens to them rather than with them.
And while Britain preaches decarbonisation, the global supply chain for solar panels and batteries is still dominated by coal-powered production in Guangdong, making the economics of domestic green manufacturing
uncompetitive.
So where now? For all of the allegations of Labour playing a deceiving trick on the nation in crimson drag, there is still arable ground for socialist renewal. In a bizarre twist, we can learn a lesson on modern socialism from our transatlantic allies. The Green New Deal in America refuses to maroon climate action from social justice, nor does it sublimely detach a state-led Congressional resolution from economic equality, and the remaking of American society, linking decarbonisation to job guarantees, universal public services, and redistribution.
But this is also why Starmer’s project is not “socialist” in the American or eco-socialist sense. He is not rejecting markets, nor advocating a command-and-control overhaul of the economy.
His approach is a public–private partnership; the state builds the scaffolding via infrastructure, guarantees, seed capital, planning reform, and in turn, expects market mechanisms to do the heavy lifting, scaling industries and creating jobs. It is a model of managed modernity, marrying the moral and economic imperatives of decarbonisation with the operational logic of capital.
Starmer’s Green Prosperity Plan could be an Attlee moment that Labour members and citizens alike have so patiently waited for like unwitting pantomime spectators; GB Energy acts as a mini-NHS for power, not merely correcting market failure but guaranteeing a universal good.
Yet the hinge is fragile – watering down the original £28 billion pledge risks slipping into Blairite tinkering, a gentle pat on the back of markets while the green jobs of the future are being built in Guangdong.
With a Reform party already seemingly getting ready to claim hundreds of seats in 2029, a government serious about socialist action (Starmer once exclaimed he was one) ought to be planting seeds so unimpeachably fertile that a British public is sufficiently shielded from a looming return to Thatcherism.
When Bob Dylan took the stage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and put down the acoustics to adopt an electric Gibson, he stubbornly ignored the vicious boos he was met with from a crowd lamenting the dreaded transition into vigorous modernity which beckoned him to return to the sepia tones of comfortable familiarity of which he was the immaculate emblem.
To truly lead a green revolution, Labour must, like Dylan, boldly step away from the constraints of market-led strategies and steer the ship of social democracy back into socialist reins, doing so with state-led initiative of its heralded progenitors such as Attlee, Bevan, Wilson.
Put simply, Starmer must vow to strap on the electric guitar of state-led ambition and ignore the boos of market purists, delivering a hefty two-finger salute to the lanyard class. Only then can it – perhaps literally – plant the seeds of true socialism on the arable soil of collective ownership.
Featured image via No 10 / Flickr.
