Kemi Badenoch is dropping her party’s commitment to reaching net zero by 2050, as she launches the Conservatives’ widest policy review in a generation.
The Tory leader will give a speech on Tuesday in which she will argue that hitting Britain’s legally binding climate target is “impossible”, abandoning one of the most significant policies enacted by her recent predecessor Theresa May.
The net zero commitment was emblematic of the cross-party consensus on tackling climate change, which Badenoch has promised to unpick as part of her determination to move on from the Conservatives’ general election defeat last year.
“We’ve got to stop pretending to the next generation,” she will say. “We’ve got to stop government by press release.
“It’s exactly the reason that the political class has lost trust. The only way that we can regain it is to tell the unvarnished truth – net zero by 2050 is impossible.”
She will add: “The current policies the UK is implementing are largely failing to do this, whilst, at the same time, driving up the cost of energy. We’re falling between two stools – too high costs and too little progress.”
News of the announcement triggered anger among environmentalists in her own party, however.
Sam Hall, director of the Conservative Environment Network, said: “It is a mistake for Kemi Badenoch to have jumped the gun on her own policy review and decided net zero isn’t possible by 2050.
“This undermines the significant environmental legacy of successive Conservative governments, which provided the outline of a credible plan for tackling climate change. The important question now is how to build out this plan in a way that supports growth, strengthens security, and follows conservative, free market principles.”
Badenoch’s speech marks the beginning of what she says will be a multi-year policy review, with each member of the shadow cabinet asked to review their party’s policy platform from scratch.
The Conservative leader has insisted she does not want to set out a full political programme until much later in the parliament, once the review is concluded. However, early policies she has announced have indicated she wants to push her party to the right on a range of issues, including immigration, the climate and tax.
Badenoch has promised to reverse Labour’s tax rises on private school fees and on inheritance tax on farmland, as well as to make it harder for migrants to apply for citizenship.
Her advisers say she has time to think carefully about the future direction of her party while voters are mainly paying attention to what the government is doing.
But the lengthy policy review has caused angst among many Tory MPs, who believe Badenoch is ceding the political impetus to Labour at the crucial early stages of her leadership. One recently told the Guardian: “She was running to be leader of the opposition, but she thought she was running to head up a right-of-centre thinktank.”
On Monday she received support from Iain Duncan Smith, who led the Conservatives for just over two years from September 2001, before being ousted by his colleagues.
Duncan Smith told the BBC’s Politics Live: “The Conservatives are very good at fighting a battle with the leader they select.
“I’d give a little bit of advice to some of my colleagues: the target’s in front of you, not all around you. If you spend your whole time trying to figure out whether a messiah is going to emerge in the middle of you, a messiah doesn’t come in politics.”
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Badenoch will insist in her speech that she believes climate change is happening, but will not say whether she believes human action is to blame.
“I’m certainly not debating whether climate change exists – it does,” she will say. “But it doesn’t look like the west is going to get remotely close to net zero by 2050.”
Greenpeace UK’s climate team leader, Mel Evans, said: “Throwing in the towel on our climate goals means giving up on making life better for British people now and in the future. With green industries growing three times faster than the rest of the UK economy, it also means giving up on the economic opportunity of the century.
“A strong majority of people in this country are concerned about the climate crisis and want to see government action. Now is not the time to step back.”
The 2050 target was first signed into law in 2019 by Chris Skidmore, who was then the Conservative energy minister. At the time, he said: “We’re leading the world yet again in becoming the first major economy to pass new laws to reduce emissions to net zero by 2050 while remaining committed to growing the economy – putting clean growth at the heart of our modern industrial strategy.”
On Monday, Badenoch told a conference in London she was seeking to recapture the mantle of Margaret Thatcher, while also embracing the rhetoric of the US president, Donald Trump.
“Margaret Thatcher didn’t fight to make Britain comfortable with decline,” she told an event organised by the Centre for Policy Studies. “She fought to make it great again.”
Two protesters interrupted her speech. The first held up a banner that said “Abolish Billionaires” and shouted, before being ejected from the hall. Then another began to call out about the cost-of-living crisis.
Badenoch said Thatcher could “hardly” be blamed for the rising cost of living.
Outside, the first protester disagreed, telling the PA news agency the Conservative party had “allowed extreme wealth to be amassed by a tiny minority, fuelling climate crisis and poverty”.
