How has the politics of net zero changed in the UK and what does political leadership in clean energy and climate look like?

Today?

We talk about everything from the Labour Party to the spectre of Nigel Farage and the successful social media campaigns of people like Zach Polanski and Zacharin Mandani in the US, as well as the changing nature of electoral politics in the UK and what it could mean for energy and Net 0.

Welcome to the Energy Revolution podcast, where we discuss the big stories that are shaping our energy transition with some of the brightest minds in energy.

If you're new here, I'm your host, Suleiman Elias Jarrett.

I've spent the last five to six years in senior government roles, both in the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero and as an advisor at #10 Downing St.

And I'm also a fellow at the University of Cambridge with an interest in all things energy.

My guest today is Harry Shackleton, Co founder of Inflect, who among other things, run the secretariat for the All Party Parliamentary Group on Net Zero and has been thinking about UK politics for almost 20 years.

He had some really interesting insights and I hope you all enjoy.

Thank you very much for joining us today, Harry.

Thank.

You for having me?

Yeah.

So we're going to talk about the kind of changing politics of net zero and how that's playing out in various form and forums in kind of parliament, you know, the parts of the kind of political debate.

I guess to start with, maybe you could tell us a little bit about yourself and the work that you do and why it is that you know quite a lot about how the political decisions are playing out.

Sure.

Yeah.

So my name is Harry Shackleton.

I'm a Co founder of a public affairs consultancy called Inflect.

I've spent the last 20 years almost working in UK politics and public affairs.

And for people who don't know what public affairs is, it's a sort of slightly euphemistic term that we use to avoid saying lobbying.

So.

But throughout that time I've done a lot of work in energy environment.

It's one of the big sectors, as you can imagine, because it's heavily regulated.

And I've worked, you know, primarily in the UK, but also did a lot of work in Brussels back when that was a thing and also a little bit over in the States.

So you know, influx has been going about five years.

We're we're 12 people now based in London and Manchester do a lot of work around the devolved bodies, the combined authorities and net zero is one of the big focuses of us.

So you know, our mantra as a company, it's about delivering positive change and what better area really can you say could be the possibility of positive change.

Then net 0, not only is it, you know, helping save the planet, which is a good thing probably, but it's also about creating the jobs economy, you know, skills of the future.

And that's the argument that I think we're we're missing at the moment.

And obviously the way that we first met actually was through the all party parliamentary group, where I think it was the inaugural net 0 all party parliamentary group event where I, I spoke on one of the panels and we, we got to chatting.

And I, you know, one of the things that I've been very interested in is kind of how the parliamentary debate has been playing out and how some of the politics, which maybe people don't see day-to-day in that the way that most people engage with politics is kind of, you know, in, in the media, in news, in interviews, et cetera.

But I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about the maybe the hidden parts of the the debate on energy and net zero that's happening in politics at the moment.

Yeah, of course.

Yeah.

So we we run the secretary app for the all party parliamentary group on net 0, which is a cross party group of 42 MPSI think and peers who who focused on net zero and wanted to champion net zero as as a 'cause it's you came to the the first meeting this year.

I think it's been going about four years actually.

And it's one of many all, all party groups.

There's, there's hundreds of the things actually, you're focused on everything from net zero to, you know, specific countries to, you know, very niche issues.

And the idea between of them is to create a forum for debate in parliament to bring different parties together.

And so the net 01's really, really popular both in terms of parliamentary engagement, but also public public engagement, which is really encouraging because, yeah, as we're going to talk about, I think the, the top line debate is fragmenting.

But actually under the surface, you know, in parliament, in the public, I think the the consensus is still there.

What we're missing is, is, you know, people shouting about it in in the media and and elsewhere.

You mentioned the consensus and I'm curious as to your view as to is this a consensus within Parliament and amongst MPs that are kind of engaged with the net zero or is this a consensus that we think we find more broadly in kind of UK society, it's just a bit quieter.

Well.

I think, I think both really, to be honest.

It's definitely a consensus in Parliament.

If you look at the positions of the main parties in the UK and in the devolved nations, the net 0 consensus is there.

The problem is that the attention goes on those people who are anti net zero.

So obviously reform is big on on kind of net anti net 0 policies at the moment and attract a lot of attention.

And the Conservatives have gone from, you know, legislating for carbon reduction by 2050 to to pledging to scrap that at their party conference recently.

So there's been a massive transition on on the right.

If you look from Labour, Lib Dems, obviously the Greens, SNP, Plied, there's consensus amongst most of the parties and a progressive consensus around next 0 does exist.

It's just that the argument's been lost somewhere and particularly at a media level, we're not having people champion Net 0 as an opportunity for the country when we're allowing the space to be occupied by people who can, who can link it to expensive bills and and things like that.

And in the cost of living crisis, that's what's cutting through.

And, and I wonder what you think is missing basically to take that, you know, relative political consensus and then presumably people speaking up about it in Parliament, but not being able to take that message outside of the kind of Westminster bubble.

It's a good question.

And I, I think there's a narrative problem to start with.

Even the, the term net zero is, is, you know, slightly confusing and has zero and it looks like a reduction of something.

It's not a positive story, is it?

So I think that's a, that's a problem that needs to be addressed.

But you know, the reality is we've had, you know, a government under the previous Conservative government who did roll back from their previous position.

You know, if you think of the high points of of the Climate Change Act and, and you know, back in the early Cameron days when he was very pro environmental concerns, there was a slow erosion of that in narrative from the top of government.

And that has fed through to a lack of consumer confidence.

You only see that in, you know, everything from retrofit statistics to support for the environment, which used to be polling one or two in people's concerns.

It's now four or five.

So it's still a really important issue, but it's not quite got the same cut through as it used to do.

To address that.

I think we need people to, to be out shouting for about it.

You know, the planet is still getting warmer.

The consensus says, I think Labour have done a lot actually since they've been in power, but they they're not managing to convey that to people or what it means.

Most crucially, the reality of most people's experience is an expensive energy bill that lands, you know, once a quarter or once a month, whatever it is, and being able to reform, being able to say we'll cut the 0 subsidies and it will cut your bills.

That's a very simple message.

You know, we know and people who listen to this podcast probably know that the makeup of bills is much more complicated than that.

Policy costs of 1718% of the average bill.

The link to gas is much more important.

All these sort of complicated things, but I've already probably boring people by explaining it.

And actually a very simplistic populist message is what cuts through these days.

And actually we need to find a way to to be able to communicate the positives of decarbonisation and what that means for ordinary people.

And there's got to be around bills, it's got to be around jobs and future opportunity, and it's got to be about, you know, regional and economic growth in places that really need it.

But that's quite a complicated argument to try and make.

Yeah.

And it's interesting that you mentioned the kind of the turn happening under the kind of latter days of the Tory government as well.

Because it's something we felt internally where, you know, there was as a a shift very much from Boris, who I guess started very sceptical, but by the end was like, yeah, let's build lots of big wind farms, to Liz Truss and Jacob Rees Mogg, who was Secretary of State for a while, very, very short period.

And then Rishi Sunak, who came in as Prime Minister and just did not seem to care that much about net zero.

It was clear that it wasn't a priority for him.

And as a result kind of leaned into some of the populist narratives, which at the time was starting to to arise but were relatively marginal.

And it's kind of since I feel like that gave it a certain level of credibility amongst the the major parties.

And then obviously you've got reform in the wings that's been making a huge racket recently and it's and it's been cutting through.

I wonder how you think it is that this has moved from something that was a, you know, populist anti net 0, relatively marginal.

Because for a long time there has been consensus that clean energy is a good thing in the UK towards something that where now you have major political parties rowing back or thinking about rowing back.

I think it's attrition, frankly, it's been going on for a while and I, and I think probably everyone in the, the pro Net 0 camp needs to hold up their hands a little bit.

And, and whether it's through complacency or naivety, probably thinking the battle was won and taking off, off the gas.

There's a problem around messaging.

As I said, you look at HS2 and what went wrong there.

We're talking about shaving 20 minutes off the train time to Birmingham.

And then when money becomes a problem, everyone's like, well, I don't care about that.

You talk about capacity and actually the, you know, being able to get people on the railways in the future or lowering the cost of fares, and that's a different story.

But that's not where it was set up.

And I think that 0 suffers the same messaging problem.

What we need to do is find a way to to, you know, educate people that, you know, renewable energy is the lowest cost form of energy out there.

That's not the reason your bills are expensive.

And you know, worryingly, I think because of the economic situation, we'll see what happens in the budget at the end of end of November.

But there's rumours coming through the papers about, you know, looking at cutting back on eco, looking at coming back on retrofit money.

And what we need in this country is growth.

That's the number one mission of the government.

What we can't seem to do is link the energy transition to the great narrative where in my mind is completely clear, these are jobs of the future.

The the future economy is a, is a clean energy economy.

You know, if we can steal a March in the US whilst Trump is rolling back on this stuff.

And actually there's a global opportunity for Britain, which I don't think we're seizing quite enough at the moment.

And the Labour government have come in and prioritized growth and they're prioritizing planning reform.

And in, you know, the energy sector, we all know about problems around grid connections taking a decade and all that sort of stuff.

What we're not hearing enough about is that innovation piece actually, how do we create the next clean tech supergiant in this country?

How could we do, obviously not on the same scale, what China did around pump priming EVs or solar energy and actually own some of these future markets or own the the IP around them.

That's the conversation we should be having, not arguing over the cost of heat pumps.

Yeah.

And is there a question about how the conversation happens and how it's conveyed?

Because you know, some of the the points that you're making I, I agree, I think they're great points.

But then also you do see this kind of narrative in government press releases etcetera around we're building future economy etcetera.

But clearly that's not cutting through towards people day-to-day.

So what's what's missing?

Is it the, the medium of the message?

Are politicians not using the right channels?

Are they not being proactive enough?

It's probably all of the above.

I think there's a, you know, the the stats on people getting the the news through traditional media is collapsing year on year.

Yet the government still chooses press release, as you said, as their primary form of communication.

That's not even picked up by mainstream media anymore.

Most of the time it's literally shouting into the wind.

But that is still how many press releases that the government churn out every single day.

And, you know, to almost no effect.

And we saw, you know, Rachel Reeves gave a speech yesterday and and had some TikTok content creators in the front row asking questions ahead of the traditional media.

Is that the way forward?

It's probably part of the solution, but it's not quite so simplistic as that.

We need to find a way to engage people in politics.

You know, and this has been a problem for 20-30 years.

This is in the current government's problem.

The disenfranchisation of of kind of people with what's going on is a real problem.

But then there's, you know, there's sort of seeds of hope.

You look at the Mandani election in America, you know, turn out almost doubled since the last election.

Even in carefully and Wales the turn out was up a lot because people thought it mattered.

And probably what we we're seeing is, is, you know, slowly but surely I think we're seeing the electoral reform conversation creeping back in.

You can start to hear it in parts of the Labour narrative, although they're going to be hesitant.

It's a massive political fight.

But if people don't feel that their vote matters, then they're not going to engage with any of these issues because they feel disconnected from what politicians are doing.

Yeah.

And you know, we were talking about the Mamdani campaign a little bit just before we started airing.

And, and one of the things that I'd noted as well as how is such an interesting mix of like obviously great use of social media, but also like a really authentic focus on local issues, which people cared about day-to-day.

And if you look at debates and he was very much focused on kind of rent and bus fares and things that mattered to the saying everyday New Yorkers.

Guess for here, it's not so much everyday New Yorkers, but you know, a lot of the messages feel like they are abstract national messages around this will be a great thing for the country.

But making that something which people can resonate with, maybe having more of these conversations actually at a local political level as well.

I think that's right.

And actually, you see in in that zero that some of the metro mares are really leaning into it in a way of national government.

Can't you look at what liberal city region have been trying to do around Mersey title historically, although they've they might roll back on that a little bit since the economic case for title has been questioned again.

But you know, Manchester, there's massive retrofit programs that Andy Burnham's driving as a key plank of his, of his mayoralty.

You know, locally you can, you can make this really real for people be, you know, improving the quality of homes in Manchester.

That's a really tangible message for people who are voting in, in those elections when the government's talking about, you know, millions of this and that and, you know, installation here, that sort of stuff.

It doesn't mean anything to people.

You know, they again, their experience of this is an energy built landing and they're like, that's more expensive than it used to be.

They're not linking that to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and gas prices and, and all of that stuff.

They, you know, it's, it's complicated.

They're looking at, you know, my Bill's gone up.

Someone's telling me it's net zero's fault.

You know, that kind of makes sense.

Yeah.

And I can imagine that government could even sometimes run into a problem where at the moment people don't particularly like the state.

Yeah.

And so, you know, coming out with the state saying or government in representing the state saying this is this great thing that we're doing, we love net zero, et cetera, because it feels like this big abstract thing that's being imposed from above.

People can almost have a reaction against it.

Whereas actually when it is something that's more, you know, tangible, you know, whether it's a local politician or just a politician that's engaging very genuinely at a local level.

Yeah, maybe that message is is a bit more fertile.

I think that's true and I think this is the real challenge for the next stage of decarbonisation in this country.

We've done a great job on on decarbonising the, you know, the power sector and some of the industrial sectors.

That's actually been a real success story that people don't really know about what the next stage is really hard because we're going to have to make individual consumers make difficult decisions.

And we need to find a way to mobilize them to do that in a way that, you know, a subsidy here, an incentive here, very complicated.

You know, retrofit schemes or which the government's tried about 8, none of which have worked over the last, you know, 15 years clearly are not cutting through.

The big question politically is how do you, you know, drive the demand for these net zero technologies for clean energy, for businesses that are decarbonizing?

I was talking to someone at the net zero APG and last week actually about, you know, a small business in the logistics sector who, you know, they've got a truck that runs on diesel.

It's got a 2030 year lifespan.

Why should they move to a hydrogen or battery powered vehicle when it's going to cost them a couple 100 grand and then there's no need.

The way to do it to incentivize that business to make that decision is demand LED.

It's not buy sticks from government is to, you know, drive their market so that the consumers or businesses that are buying those services demand that from them.

And that's the nut that we haven't cracked.

And you know, I don't have a silver bullet.

I don't know what the answer is, but that's what we need to do is how can we build that groundswell of of opinion to be like, I want this.

Yeah.

And it's hard for the kind of centralized state to drive that kind of popular movement when there isn't that high level of trust already.

Absolutely, like in an age of, you know, anti establishment, anti governments, you know, are people going to take that message from, from government telling them what to do or telling them that this is good for them?

It it's hard to see that, you know, what, what we need to do.

And you know, comes back to what I'm saying.

How do you rebuild trust in to make some of these difficult, difficult decisions and and difficult things to get people to to do.

We need people to to feel they're all in it together, to coin a Cameron phrase, and that it's not there at the moment.

There's a disconnect between the state and and, you know, the general public, which is, you know, worrying from a democratic point of view.

But in terms of achieving some of these big policy goals that we want to do as a real deficit there that that, you know, the government, this government and previous governments can't surpass at the moment.

Yeah.

And I guess it leaves one of the tools that's left for sort of these governments, if you, if you're unable to get that social or individual change based on are they saying we should do it and we kind of trust them?

Is it leaves markets and financial incentives, which are, which are great, But, and, and you need them like you can't, you can't just win people over and tell them that renewables are great and EVs are great and expect them to adopt it if it's more expensive.

But the market incentives are A, obviously a little bit more costly.

And B, people don't actually always act rationally when it comes to individual like personal economic decisions that there's loads of data around behavioural economics that people think emotionally, etcetera as well.

So it feels like obviously you need that kind of market incentives etcetera, But unless you have this getting greater social buy in, you know, there was kind of a running joke in the department that, you know, Martin Lewis was as influential as any politician because if he said this is a great thing, you should do it.

People had this sense of trust and belief in him and actors like that both outside of traditional politics.

But hopefully you we will see more kind of people that are in the the political tent that are able to do more of this need to build some of that social buy in.

Yeah, I think so.

And I, I, you know, that's a great example.

I think Martin Lewis or someone who does have that innate trust that a politician is probably never going to have given the people's cynicism towards politics.

But, you know, there's still stuff that we can do as a country that the government can do.

I think it's really encouraging that Kier Starmer's gone to cop when originally he wasn't going to go.

So that's a positive step because, you know, we need to demonstrate what we're doing as well as, you know, tell people it's good for them.

We need to show the global leadership and say we're still on this journey.

As I say, other countries and investors are, you know, seeing this as the future economies.

You know, if we decide that we're not doing it, it's kind of irrelevant.

Other people will.

So we're we're taking a bet on on.

Things not panning out the way that it looks like they are, which seems short sighted.

And what we need to do, you know, if we're serious about growth, building houses is great.

You know, we need more housing in this country, but we also need a competitive future oriented economy.

And that's thinking about where's the economy going to be in five, 1050 years, you know, long term horizon stuff that government is really good at doing and making those difficult decisions now, you know, we need to invest in those skills.

We need to, you know, be thinking about our education system to create the heat pump engineers of the future.

That is a much better pipeline of talent than trying to convince an oil worker to retrain and lose 50% of their salary, which is, which is a completely legitimate concern from the from the unions, which is putting pressure on the Labour Party.

You know, there are opportunities that we can create individually for people regionally for areas that you know, need new industries or, or reindustrialisation.

And we just, you know, that innovation leadership linked to net zero is, is lacking I think.

Yeah, is is there anyone that you think's doing a particularly good job actually?

Well, I mean like the America was, yeah, yeah, prior to Trump.

You can, you can argue with the economics of the Inflation Reduction Act and whether it was indeed inflationary in itself.

But actually the, the irony of that is, even though the measures have now been pulled back, the, the economic successes of it are going to be felt by Trump, not by Biden.

Because you know, these things, it's a long term bet.

And the problem that we have in this country in in so many ways is that we're so short termist and you know, not to point the finger at your former colleagues in the Treasury, but actually, you know, some of these things we need to take really long term views on and think about where we want to be.

You know, to use the China example again, when they started investing heavily in solar, you know, 10/15/20 years ago, there wasn't a market for it, but they bet that there would be.

The same with EVs, you know, they obviously have the scale and the ability to spend hundreds of billions in, in these technologies, but it's paying off now.

And actually, you look at what the EV market, you know, European American manufacturers can't compete with China.

So they're having to, you know, slap tariffs on on things to to distort the market to protect themselves.

But that's because of the a word scale, but it's also because they invested early and they invested big and they and they went after it and there's a little bit of a sort of, you know, delayed reaction in this country.

We'll, we'll see, you know, put a few 100 million into a battery factory and actually, well, it's, it's peanuts compared to what's going on globally.

We need to think about where we can add, you know, value to the global economy because despite the protectionism that's going on, we still do live in a global economy.

And yet there might be tariffs and things like that.

But you know, the UK trades globally.

It's a service economy.

You look at a company like ARM that designs chips but doesn't make them.

There's loads that we could do around that.

Zero technologies and future technologies and skills that I think the government is quite slow to respond to at the moment.

Yeah, and you're right, I do think this short termism is a challenge and we should say very much not just for this government.

It feels like a a very structural challenge.

And in fact it was definitely even worse in the this sort of dying days of the the last government.

But it's something where the I think it's a few things.

One, there's the obviously the election cycle, but also is that as the centre ground becomes less and less stable, it becomes harder to do that long term thinking.

Because it used to be that yes, maybe there is this election cycle and you don't know if you're going to be here in five years time or not.

But people can broadly agree on this is a sensible thing to do in the next 5-10 years for the country anyway.

But there isn't as much of that kind of centre space for people to kind of do that long term legislation and policy.

No, that is a problem.

And, and from the businesses that we work with in the energy sector and who are doing decarbonisation work, you know, most of these are global businesses or certainly the money's coming from global investors.

They want to know what's the environment on the 10:20, 30-50 year horizon.

Not like what's going to happen in three years.

Is there going to be a complete vault fast because of a change of government?

That's not how they work.

And you know, frankly, if that's what's going to happen in the UK, then they'll take their money elsewhere.

There's, you know, stability in the Middle East, other countries in Europe, opportunities in Asia where they can probably see a better return.

And also they've got that long term stability.

And this is a problem we've had for years now.

You think how many prime ministers we've had in the last sort of 10 years, you know, the changes of policy, the, the reactionary nature of, of politics at the moment is unhelpful.

And actually we need a little bit more stability, consensus.

We need to find a way for all the parties to come to, you know, agreement on some of these issues to be like, we are doing this, which we did have around net zero.

That's the, that's the sad fact of the matter.

And it's, it's ebbing away.

And I think This is why we really need, this is a moment, I think where we need to, we need to fight back, really we need to rewin the argument, which is something I wouldn't have thought I'd needed to say a few years ago, but it's clear we do.

There's people chipping away at a public confidence is, is not there in, in what we need to do.

Whilst, whilst people still think, you know, climate change is real, you know, they, they want the government to do stuff.

The link between that and the economy, which is the people's number one concern in almost every poll is, is not there.

Even the link to the NHS, which is normally one or two in in public voting concerns, you know, poor quality housing because of, you know, ageing housing stock, because, you know, of bad heating situations, mould, all that sort of stuff.

It has a massive public health benefit impact.

And we're not linking these these issues together.

It feels like we're still working in silos.

And you know, Labour did in some ways try and address that through the idea about missions and and, you know, cross cutting priorities of government, but that seems to have evaporated somewhat.

You know, the reality of government seems to have make them put that to one side.

But you know, we need to find a way of Desner's Department of Health in DWP to all be like this is our shared problem here.

How do?

How are we going to fix it?

Yeah.

And I would say because the, the Mission Control structure is really interesting, because I think actually the Clean Power 1 is probably the one that's worked the best.

And, you know, I'm obviously slightly biased that I work very closely with them, but I think they did do a good job sometimes where I was like, you know, here is a thing which is interdepartmental.

We need it, we need some help on this.

And Chris Stark and team would go knocking some doors and, and it would move things along.

But again, to speak to some of the structural problems, it's very much a, it's a relatively small functioning team that they have to do that long term thinking, you know, this single Commission unit, etcetera.

And yes, obviously in in theory that the Prime Minister is supposed to be in in charge of all of the, the missions and kind of oversee them etcetera.

But particularly when you've got that instability in cabinet and people are kind of vying for their own maybe future political careers, it's it's harder to have that kind of coalescing around the missions.

I think that's true and and you know, I think Labour have have found it surprising how difficult government is.

You think you can pull a lever and something changes and and that's not how it works.

And particularly the lack of an executive function around the Prime Minister in this country, it's becoming problematic.

I mean, there's, there's undoubtedly ways that we need to look at the state working better, but you know, at, at the, at the base of it, we need to find a way to, you know, move from, you know, policy ideation, which the civil service is very good to policy execution in the real world where it, it fails a little bit.

You know, again, look at the Green Deal, look at other, other things that have happened.

Great ideas, but they don't work in practice.

And that's the gap we have.

I think is, is not the will from the civil service to, to do some of this stuff that's absolutely there.

It's it's marrying the will to the reality of executing something.

And also actually that that connection between the, the policy formation in government and and being able to get that to the people, you know, be able to be able to communicate why this matters, why it's a good set of policies that will help people day-to-day.

And again, I think this is where something where obviously like civil servants, but just generally kind of institutional functions are not very well set up to do really.

You need personalities and politicians and leadership, which again, you know, I should, I should say, and I've said this on the podcast before, like I think Ed Miliband Stan a done a great job of kind of championing energy in this.

I.

Think he has, I mean, you look at the, the record of what the government's done and actually Ed Miliband and designate so probably the most recognizable success area.

And that's, I was at Labour conference a month ago and that was certainly the mood there.

Like, you know, there's a lot of net 0 chat at conference and in the policy and people are really pro in the Labour Party and think Ed bin Laden's doing a good job.

So you know, why is that?

Because he knows what he's doing.

He's you know, what he shepherded through the 2008 Act years ago.

He knows the sector, he's really well plugged into the stakeholders.

He understands the policy and he's getting on with it.

And actually that's what we need more of probably is, is that expertise in, in, in government and, and kind of just just sort of executing what you're doing.

I think there's a real need for the Prime Minister probably as the only sort of ability to join things up to, to, you know, make those policy connections elsewhere.

Because as I say, these, you know, a policy does not sit in Department of Health and stay in Department of Health or, or in Desnetes or anything.

You know, we, we don't live in that world.

Everything is interconnected.

And if we, it's a difficult story to tell to make people realize that, to realize actually, you know, if you, you know, change your heating system in your house or if you improve your insulation, that's going to have a better effect on your health, which will have, you know, enable you to go back to work, which will create contribute to economic growth.

That's not how people think really.

And particularly if there's an upfront capital cost, you know, when people are feeling squeezed, they're not going to make that connection.

So that we do need to find a way to tell that story.

I think the the reality is that, as I said with government press releases, the government isn't very good at reaching most people.

It thinks in a very, you know, 20th century way still.

And, you know, you still think about the Today programme and the Sunday shows and press releases and traditional media, and actually most people get their news from TikTok today.

Yeah.

And this is what I was thinking as well, actually, as we were talking about, you know, Ed doing a good job.

But it, it feeling like, I mean, we, we can't really talk about this without talking about the, the hostility from particularly certain sections of the press who take any opportunity possible to kind of say that there is a bad thing.

To the point that again, Simon Evans has done some great work, like fact checking Simon Evans and Carbon Brief more generally have done some great work like fact checking people like the Telegraph and just shows that they're, they're very willing to say things which are factually untrue.

But I think that we, you have to accept that, that, that that media landscape is there.

It is people, not just Ed Miliband, but people around him or elsewhere in the political party or elsewhere, just generally in the renewable energy sector that are able to circumvent the kind of traditional media forms and have that direct connection with people, which I think the the kind of populist right have done very effectively.

People, In fact, we Benjamin Dani, I think he's done a very good job of this despite lots of kind of criticism from lots of mainstream press because there was that direct connection and resonation with individuals.

Yeah, it didn't, It didn't matter so much because yes, maybe you're getting criticized a lot, but people are hearing your side of the story directly and that's it.

That feels like a little bit of a missing link.

I think it is and I think.

With Mandani, with, you know, even Nigel Farage and other people like that, there's an authenticity that lacks in a lot of our political class.

And, you know, trying to convey, you know, asking people to make difficult decisions about, you know, decarbonising their home or or, you know, making a difficult choice around transport that, you know, you need people to buy into what you're saying.

It comes back to that trust point.

We were talking about the problem with a lot of political class, you know, of the current government, but this has been going on probably since, since Blair.

Is that over professionalization of communication that makes people feel really, wouldn't people don't connect with that?

So, you know, if someone's sitting there telling you that the planet's on fire and we need to do something about it, but they're doing it in a really robotic way, then people aren't going to pay attention.

Like we need to find a way to connect with people how they want to be spoken to.

And we do not have the politicians to do that at the moment.

You think, you know why did and Angela Rayner cut through more because she seems like a real person.

Like she seems like a real person.

Whether you like her or loathe her, she's a real person.

She's not like a media trained robot who's just going to parrot the same party lines.

We need more of that.

We need more authenticity.

And and particularly if we're going to ask people to make these hard choices because they need to want to do it.

We can't.

We can, you know, bully them as much as possible with, you know, sticks and fines and all sorts of that.

But the reality is there's 30 million, I think, households in this country.

That's a lot of people to to kind of bully into doing something they don't want to do.

We need to build the groundswell of momentum to say this is a good thing for me, is a good thing for the country and it's a good thing for the planet.

And the Angela Rainier example?

Is a really good one as well, because it also I guess shows the the risk of why sometimes politicians aren't as willing to kind of be more authentic.

And I do fear sometimes that the current way in which we do politics, the kind of media landscape, the the kind of level of scrutiny kind of beats out the authenticity of a lot of people because it means that you have to.

It kind of puts a bit of a target on your back.

It does.

Yeah.

Yeah, I know.

Enough politicians to know that I would never want to do the job so.

That's off to all of you, and I'm not.

Meaning to be overly critical because it's, you know, a really difficult job, you're putting your entire life on display and open to criticism.

And you know, particularly, you know, if people do show that their true selves, it gets attacked.

You know, the the landscape in some elements of the media and on social media is, is unpleasant, if not toxic.

But, you know, that said we, we need political leaders to stand up there and be willing to do that.

And, you know, oh, good luck to them.

It's not going to be me.

That's true.

That's the deal.

You know, in difficult conversations, like you said with the, you know, media, certain elements of the media, not, not, you know, always being truthful about net zero.

We need someone to stand up and be like, that's not true and point out the truth of it.

You know, renewable energy is the lowest form, lowest cost form of energy in this country.

Even nuclear, which has a public perception of being expensive.

Once you look at the lifetime costs and other things, it's not like we would be in a much better place as a country.

We'd made these decisions and had people who'd willing to stand up for them 1520 years ago then we are now where we're scrambling around looking at, you know, gas fired power stations running to the end of their natural life and wondering what the hell we're going to do.

You know, we'd built a generation of new nuclear plants, you know, 30 years ago when the Blair government was considering it.

You know, we'd be in so much more of a, you know, good position now to to think about options, about what we want to do.

We'd we'd have the capacity there to be like, actually, we could go this way or we could go that way.

Now we're scrambling around because we don't have the time or the options.

Yeah.

And I guess that.

You know, we've talked about the professionalization and I guess this creates a risk because, you know, it means that the people that are able to progress higher from politics generally are a little bit more polished and less willing to take that risk.

And, you know, when I think about probably the the closest equivalent that we've got to someone that's running a campaign similar to how Mamdani ran a campaign is Zach Polanski, who because he's, you know, a little bit more of a political outsider has been able to come in and kind of just, you know, throw all the rules under the rug a little bit.

That's not saying throw the rules by the wayside a little bit.

And and it does feel increasingly that these the the authenticity and the the challenges, yeah, the direct connection is coming from the the fringes on various sides.

But it's harder it seems for people that are kind of currently in power to kind of do that.

I think that's true and I think obviously.

There's a, There's a, a license you get from knowing that you're never going to have to form the government that you can kind of say what you want, which which is understandable.

But what's happening with the Greens is really interesting.

I think, you know, we've seen them over the last few years increase their parliamentary presence, but you know, they're up to fourteen, 1617% of the vote on some polls.

Actually, you know, here's what Zach Polanski wants to do to broaden their appeal beyond pure environ environmentalism.

It could work.

I mean, you've seen already the membership numbers have exploded.

The according to the Green sources say unverified, but they say they've got more members than the Lib Dems and the Conservatives now.

And actually the broad church parties like the Labour and the and the Conservatives, which are in some ways a product of our electoral system.

Maybe they're not fit for the future.

We are if you look at the polls, we're living in a five party kind of national picture.

If you look in the devolved nations and actually again, it's it's it's splitting the vote quite considerably.

And you know, if we can have progressive parties that are pushing net 0 as a core part of their identity, which the Greens obviously are innately, the Lib Dems do pride, SNP do, as I said, like there is a broad political consensus around that.

Zero.

It's just not the story we hear in the media.

Maybe this is a good opportunity.

For a quick break, but actually, yeah, when we come back, it would be good to talk more about the changing party politics landscape because we focus quite a bit for now on the kind of the current government and what they're doing.

But as you, as you say, we are seeing some quite seismic shifts elsewhere and be good to get your views on some of those.

Sure.

So yeah, there's there's been a lot of.

Change in kind of the way that parliamentary politics and kind of ballot box politics has been happening over the last even just a few months, it feels like.

And I wonder if you could talk us through what some of the big trends that you're seeing are.

It's a big question.

Yeah, I mean, the parliamentary politics is changing in this country and voting demographics is changing.

As much written about over the last few years.

We were talking just before we started recording, but in 2019, Boris won an 80 seat majority and everyone said that's, you know, 2 terms locked in.

And, you know, five years later Labour went to, you know, historic win, 170 seat majority.

That was being unheard of 10 years ago, 20 years ago.

And that's because of the volatility of the election.

We are seeing breakdowns in, in, you know, class, education, wealth in terms of where votes are going.

Those traditional ideas don't work anymore in terms of who who people will vote for.

And that's, you know, really interesting.

It makes it really difficult for big broad church parties like Labour and Conservatives to to communicate to the electorate because they're not a homogeneous bloc anymore.

You know, it is the age of individualization and you see that, but increasingly with the localization of politics.

I think the statistics on local candidates now are selected in, I think it's like 80% plus of seats that the candidate has to have a really strong local story.

That never used to be the case.

You think even, you know, Churchill kind of moved around seats and, you know, some of our biggest political names had absolutely 0 connection to the seat that they represented.

And that's because people want to, you know, affiliation.

They want to understand that the person that they're voting for understands them and understands that where they're from.

And that's, you know, that's a massive shift in, in politics and particularly in a, you know, first past the post system.

It's problematic because, you know, whilst people might vote on on mass, as we saw in 2024, largely probably because of the dissatisfaction with the previous government.

You know, maintaining that even huge majorities can be really hard and we'll see, you know, the increase in votes for party like the Greens.

We saw the Lib Dems get to 72 seats like and they, I was at Lib Dem conference in Bournemouth a few weeks ago and they're talking about going higher.

They were talking about getting into three figures.

So the mood there is bullish.

So it'll be really interesting to see if the Greens can capitalise on this early momentum over the next couple of years.

Then we could see a, you know, healthy Green representation in parliament as well.

And actually quite how that plays out on the ground is really difficult to tell in our in our system because you know, you might poll that's the Greens do sort of, you know, 1014% nationally, but that converts into four or five seats.

But what it does show is that, you know, people are not as tribal as they used to be.

People are motivated by much more local and individual issues.

And, you know, as with the rise in reform as well, people just are pissed off with the whole, the whole system.

And, you know, it's, it's hard to argue with that.

You look at, you know, the, everything from people's, you know, earnings over the last 20-30 years, people, people's lives are not getting better.

The people do not feel the country is moving forward.

And when you then, you know, to link it back to net zero, when you then get the government coming and telling you, oh, you've got to do this as well.

People are like, no, I don't want to.

And you know that we need to find a way not just to implement that zero and, and, and all the other things that the government needs to do, but for the future of democracy.

These are starting to become sort of slightly challenging times.

I think when you look at some polling of Gen.

Z and the idea of a benign autocracy is actually more popular than democracy now on some polls, which is slightly kind of terrifying in in some ways.

But in other ways, why not Like the system does not work for people at the moment.

So when we're, you know, we're asking them to make difficult decisions about, you know, installing a heat pump or, you know, replacing their windows when they don't think they need to.

They're not going to do that if they don't respect the system or the government.

Yeah.

And it it feels really.

Challenging the fact that we are, you know, obviously the fact that we've had a first past the post system has created challenges in the past, but it feels even more problematic at the moment because, you know, a lot of the trends that you're mentioning to me sound like positive changes.

You know, you want more localization of politics, both for people feeling represented, but also as we've talked about the kind of the politics of things like net zero are much easier if you can get local buy in.

And and it's great that there is more competition for votes, like sort of a bit of an open market where people do have to put put forward policies and argue against them, etcetera.

But then the challenge is that the electoral system that we have doesn't seem to match this changing situation on the ground.

And So what happens when we when we reach the next election and either you've got parties that have broad based support but are having to focus on one or two seats in order to get people in, or people just get even more disenfranchised because they feel I want to vote for this party, I like them, the local politician is great.

We're never going to have an impact nationally.

Yeah, I think, I think it's a problem when.

Because a lot of people will, you know, I live in East London and, and Labour have got a stinky majority and they can do what they want.

They'll win, they'll win the seat, you know, and people feel like that then turn out drops because their vote doesn't matter.

So how do you re engage people?

You've got to find a way to to connect what, what their politicians mean to, to knew their, their vote.

And we saw that, as I mentioned in carefully so in New York with Mandani, like when, when it matters, people will engage.

When they feel it matters will will make a difference to them, then they will turn out and they will engage.

The problem is that in most parts of the country, it doesn't matter.

You know, we, we, our system does not reward democratic participation in its current form.

And then you start to see people splintering off and, and doing other things like the the big challenge, I think is, is how do we re engage people?

And that's got to be about connecting it to their real their real lives.

You know, when, when things matter, people will will mobilize.

You know, that's why people care about potholes.

That's why people get upset when bin collections move from weekly to fortnightly because that's their experience of the state.

They're minor things, but they are, that's real life in terms of people's experience.

We need to find a way to connect the big picture that government wants to do about growth, about, you know, decarbonisation, all these things to people's real lives.

And it's quite a challenge to do because these are big kind of conceptual issues.

And you know, someone who's working 2 jobs to, to make ends meet doesn't care frankly.

And, and why should they?

Like this is a, a proper challenge.

Then It's not just in the UK, it's, you know, it's across across Western democracies and there's a, there's a real economic and environmental argument that we shouldn't pursue growth at all costs.

But you know, the system is built for growth.

And when we're not growing, then then there's a problem.

But this is going back to what I'm saying before I think net 0.

It could be an engine of growth.

It shouldn't be seen in this negative sense.

It could be the driver of our future economy.

It could be reindustrializing the northern heartlands.

It could be creating new jobs.

It could be, you know, future skills and future education system creating, you know, green tech engineers and innovation.

That should be the vision that we're aiming at, which then, you know, you set a big picture inspirational message about, you know, a clean economy as the, you know, driver of our future growth and maintaining Britain's position in the world.

I think people could see that kind of vision in a way that saying, oh, we've got to put a heat pump in or, you know, we're going to start doing Rd.

taxing or, or whatever, both of which have been in the papers today in the lead up to the budget.

It's a, you know, you need a positive story, people.

And Zach Lansky has done this explicitly said we need to put hope back in politics.

And it's hard not to disagree with them.

I think Mandani did that in New York.

If people feel inspired, then they'll connect.

If people feel the government is a blight or a nuisance or costing them money, then they will disconnect.

And for too long we've lived in that latter sphere, you know, going back to how some of.

These smaller parties then influenced the national discussion on policy.

Yeah.

How do you think this plays out in this new world?

You know, I'm thinking of someone like Reform that's got what, five O 6 seats CFO and yet have a massive impact on the way that policy is done on net zero and national level.

And similarly, could you see parties like the Lib Dems or SNP or Plaid, Camero with Greens that are able to exercise a kind of policy or political impact which is greater than their parliamentary footprint?

See, I I think the reality.

Is, is that reform and not exercising a policy impact at the moment?

They're they're exercising the media narrative impact, which is the danger is that that starts to drive the policy.

And we haven't quite seen that yet.

As we said, Ed Miliband is actually doing a decent job, although, you know, Labour are starting to pull back from some of their commitments.

You remember back pre election they were talking about 28 billion to invest in green technologies.

We've seen some pull back on, you know, potentially warm homes and retrofit stuff where you know, might see further stuff in the budget.

So I think it's starting to have an impact in a negative sense, but in the reality of policy making that these are conversations that are happening up here.

Policy happens in a granular, boring way.

And in parliament largely and in in government, you know, the danger is, is that we're letting a tiny party, you know, the tail wipe the dog effectively because everyone's scared, running scared of them because the opinion polls, you know what, what we should hope for is more political leadership and saying, yeah, they're saying that it's not true.

We're doing this because XY and Z.

And that's what's lacking at the moment.

It's everyone's running a little bit scared around, you know, the anti net 0 rhetoric.

But the reality is that Reform won the Holland East Yorkshire mayoralty last year and Luke Campbell, the mayor there is not a political figure particularly.

He's an ex boxer.

But you know, that whole area is massive for offshore wind, for CCS, you know, there's huge opportunities there.

He's now in conflict between what he needs to do for his region and his local area in terms of jobs, in terms of the economy and what the National Party is saying.

And that's only going to increase.

It's the same as, you know, the rhetoric around cutting local government and then the reality that they're having to put council tax up in reform controlled areas because, you know, a lot of these policies that they're talking about don't, you know, don't actually don't work.

But no one's no one's pointing that out.

Everyone's sort of slightly scared to say, you know, saying we'll cut net zero or subsidies and it's going to reduce your bills.

You can't say that's not true in quite an effective way.

The problem being is that people want their bills cut and government doesn't have an answer to it at the moment.

The answer is probably, you know, delinking them from gas prices and actually saying electricity and gas are separate things.

And if we're going to electrify the economy and we're going to build data centres, we're going to do all this sort of great stuff.

We need cheap electricity.

We've got some of the highest electricity prices in in the world.

So, you know, it's no wonder people want them to come down.

Yeah, but you're right.

It's like a Goetz.

Wilder in Holland, who, you know, obviously I don't think we should actually do this, but I sometimes joke that the best counter to the far right sometimes is letting them run the country for a little bit.

And people realise that the things that are being promised are either impractical or factually incorrect.

And it's actually much harder when you're in power to have that change.

It's quite hard to govern, I think.

Particularly in in today's particularly in today's like economic climate, like maybe when the you know, the 97 coming in the economy is growing and you know cool Britannia and all that is probably my son, but today it's a bit of a grind, I think.

Yeah, and particularly as well actually the.

Building something is like, it's quite easy to sabotage things.

It's very hard to build something which has a positive impact on people's lives.

That's it.

But I mean.

What is politics for of it's not for doing that like we need that long term vision that sort of what would what we want to be as a country.

And you know, we might see that in in, you know, Wales is really interesting.

What's going on?

Obviously Labour have controlled the Welsh Assembly and Welsh government since devolution in in 97.

Actually, we're probably going to see applied government or certainly applied LED coalition.

And actually, what does that mean?

They've got quite positive energy policies, obviously prime primarily focused on devolution.

So setting up a kind of GB great British energy equivalent in Wales and some other policies around trying to, you know, own more of the estate big on community energy.

So you're going to see some quite interesting policies potentially in Wales.

And actually you can start to embed some, some positive noise around potential decarbonisation or you know, the district energy schemes or things like that and show it working in practice.

Then then we can start to like re win the narrative.

And there are good things happening in England as well.

You look at the sort of Bristol housing schemes on decarbonisation and energy management.

There's really positive stories, but no one knows about them and and they're not cutting through.

And you know, it's still, we're talking about things on a very individual level.

So the heat pump argument again, you know, it's going to cost someone 12 grand to put in a heat pump, then not going to do it, are they?

But if we talked about district heating, then, you know, or thinking about data centers, like how we can use excess heat from data centers to, to plug into heating or all that sort of stuff.

There's some interesting ideas that we could explore, but I need a little bit of leadership.

They're not going to happen organically.

Yeah, you're right.

And and I.

Think that, you know, as we've said, Ed Miliband has done a good job of resisting some of the pressure to bow to kind of the the noise that reforms making.

But we're seeing that elsewhere in cabinet.

It's maybe taking a little bit more kind of weight, but I think that the kind of general Labour Party runs the risks of trying to pander too much to potential reform voters and losing kind of support in Wales and Essence and in Scotland to local parties.

And people often forget that for most.

I think basically every election that Labour's ever won.

I don't know about the most recent one actually, that might be different.

If you take away the Scottish and Welsh support, then they lose.

Like England tends to vote on the Conservative side and it tends historically it's been kind of the Scottish Labour and Welsh Labour that have allowed them to kind of form a majority that yeah, that has historically.

Been true and I think, you know, we were in an OK place a few years ago because the Conservatives were in the same place on net zero as we said, like, you know, the Theresa May Climate Change Act amendment to legislate for net 0 by 2050 was, you know, world leading and really ambitious and and you know, it's real statement of intent to go from there to where we are now in in six years is, you know, in some ways shocking and definitely depressing.

And that, you know, is, is a real challenge, I think going forward in energy policy and and conversations because, you know, people who are worried about their cost of living or are worried about change, you know, who don't like wind, onshore wind, like they have a very natural home there in, in a major party, which, you know, came back to what I said.

We need, we need some political leadership being like, yeah, can understand that you don't want a farm, you know, you're taken over by a solar farm.

But actually, this is what we need to do.

And This is why it's good for you.

And Ed Miliband was exploring some of this stuff about whether you could offer discounts to people locally for, you know, who have wind farms or something near them or pylons.

And, you know, we do probably need to find a way to incentivise people because, you know, I can understand some objection to it.

Personally, I, I, I think wind farms are, or wind turbines are quite beautiful.

If you drive, you're like in France, there's like huge swathes of them and they look stunning on the, on the landscape.

But, you know, we live in a very windy country and we spent 15 years basically not building any wind turbines.

It's absolutely madness from a, you know, not only a energy security perspective, but from a cost of energy perspective and from a decarbonisation perspective, it made absolutely no sense.

But it was a politically driven decision which, you know, is still only just starting to be reversed.

So, you know, politics needs to rise above some of these things sometimes.

And and unfortunately, you know, when we've got an insurgent party on the right and everyone reacting to that, it's, it's hard to see at the moment where that leadership is coming from.

As I said, you know, Starm is a cop, so maybe he'll do something with that, but he hasn't taken any media with him, so we're not going to hear much about it.

He like, you know, if you're going to do it, make a song and dance about it and and tell people why he's gone off quietly and maybe he'll do some good deals there and stuff like that.

But that's all invisible to people.

It's not going to help us rewind this argument.

Yeah, it doesn't.

You don't want it to seem.

Like, it's this quiet thing that we're doing in the background.

It's, it needs to be something that politicians are able to shout.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And.

We did used to have that.

We did and it's it's gone sadly and.

Do you think that in the kind of future elections you could see more coalition governments etcetera going forward again, which yeah, with I'm thinking about, you know, changes in Wales, changes in Scotland, also some of Lib Dems and Greens making grains gains places.

Yeah, yeah, quite.

Possibly, I think the, the, obviously the reform lead in the opinion polls is, is generating a lot of, you know, newspaper copy.

But the reality is it's going to be very hard for them to translate that into an actual government in even 3-4 years.

The likelihood is we'll we'll probably see a Labour majority coalition, I think if if polls don't change massively.

And as I said, that's broadly positive in the energy because there is a progressive consensus around net 0.

They're just not talking about it very loudly.

Where it concern me slightly is on issues such as nuclear, because actually Lib Dems, SNP and Plaid are all anti nuclear.

You've seen the problems we've had in getting new nuclear built in Hinckley's Sizewell, you know, applied.

Obviously one of the sites is in Wilfer in Wales, which people have been talking about redeveloping for my entire career, I think.

And still nothing's happening there.

Although the government did acquire the site of Hitachi last year, I think then said what we want to do nuclear here, you know, quite what I don't think any of those parties have been as explicitly against SMRS.

But you know, the reality is if we're going to continue to decarbonize the energy sector and, and create new capacity for, you know, AI explosion and electrification of everything from cars to to heating, we're going to need, we don't just need one thing here or one thing there.

We need Everything Everywhere all at once.

So if we start to get that, you know, hesitancy building into particular nuclear, but you know, you can build into other things, you know, such as such as onshore wind or etcetera, that could be problematic because the grid is already under strain.

And that's before we start to think about decommissioning some of the legacy gas power stations and everything that we're going to have to do over the next decade.

Yeah, yeah.

And we should say you.

Mentioned them the the polls as well.

And we should say that, you know, I'm people often ask me now how do you think reform we're going to win the next election?

And obviously you never know.

But I even when you look at those same polls, actually when it comes down to a head to head between Nigel Farage and Keir Starmer is very unpopular at the moment.

Keir Starmer still wins.

And and I do think people undervalue the kind of tactical voting that we see happen as races like France etcetera when they're and we saw in carefully in Wales you.

Know reform were in the lead were quite bullish and actually the stop reform vote probably pushed plight over the edge and I think you'll see that play out nationally you know and there's there's still a long way to go to elections.

Obviously things could change, but you know, the, the issue, I think is not it, it, you know, three years to wait for a change of government.

We, we don't have that time, frankly, either from a economic growth perspective or from, you know, getting the seeds in the ground to, for future decarbonisation for all that sort of stuff that we need to do.

So we need this government to, to, you know, stand up and shout about things a bit louder.

And whilst I agree Ed Miliband is doing and doing a good job, it needs to be the Prime Minister and he needs to be doing it loudly and it needs to run through the government.

We need, you know, we don't want to see the Treasury trying to save a couple 100 million here in a few weeks.

We should be prioritizing this stuff.

It should be a national, you know, strategic priority, which it was according to the Labour's mission.

So it was, you know, clean energy superpower was the was the original mission, but under that SAT like, you know, domestic heating and all the stuff that we need to do, we need we need that leadership back at the heart of government.

It does feel like it's become more islanded.

As in as we've got group of people that aren't really motivated but then they're kind of trying to do their thing, while the rest of government is more, I wouldn't say against, but just a little bit more ambivalent.

I think ambivalence is the word.

And you know, I hold my hands up as someone who's pro kind of net zero and decarbonisation like all of us, I think we took off kind of eye off the ball.

I think we thought we'd won the argument and actually we hadn't.

And you know, you can see that creeping in, that doubt creeping in.

And actually we need to nip this in the bud and say, look, we know it's going to be tough.

There's some difficult decisions to make.

But it's for the good of the planet, it's for the good of the country, and it's for, you know, the good of you as an individual, whether that be in terms of jobs, bills, you know, skills, all the things we've talked about.

That's the argument that I'd like to see the government shouting from the rooftops being like, we know it's hard, but This is why we're doing it.

And, you know, the government is here to do the hard things.

That's a great call to to.

Be bold and, you know, not be too worried about some of the noise, etcetera.

And stick to the the general consensus that most people agree that this is the right thing to do.

Exactly.

Most people agree that's.

The the key thing in that you don't always pick up when you read the media, it's like most people agree that climate change is real and that we should do something about it and that Britain should be doing, you know, pursuing net zero.

They that's a consensus like nationally.

And if you look at even reform voters, when you poll reform voters, 6% of reform voters are voting for reform because they like their net, they're anti net 0 stance.

It's not an issue that's driving people below.

It's not a vote winner.

So.

Why not seize it and be like, you know, we are going to lead the world in, you know, clean tech and future industries?

That's an exciting, bold thing to do.

And it, you know, to go back to our search for economic growth, it could be an engine for that.

It's driving an innovation economy that we don't have at the moment.

Well, that's a wonderful note.

Of optimism to end on it.

They just need to do it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you know, obviously it's a it's a challenging time politically at the moment.

But also, as you say, there, there are lots of reasons to be hopeful, lots of reasons for optimism.

And, you know, it just, it needs some of that, that drive, that leadership, that boldness from, you know, politicians, but also people in in the sector that to to just shout proudly about renewables and make that case strongly.

Absolutely.

Yeah, wonderful.

Well, thank you very much.

For coming in today, Harry enjoyed it and thank you for listening at home.

Thank you.

So much for listening to the.

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