Daily Mail columnists discard journalism for propaganda about Labour Government’s climate and energy policies – part 2
Bob Ward and Pallavi Sethi continue their critique of grossly misleading articles on UK climate and energy policy published in the Daily Mail in summer 2024.
In Part 1 of this commentary, we described the continued assault by the right-wing press on Labour’s climate change and energy policies since the party won the General Election in Britain on 4 July – and took apart the falsehoods published in an article by Andrew Neil in the Daily Mail on 29 June. Here in Part 2 we examine the further untruths that appeared in another of Neil’s articles for the same paper, published last month.
Andrew Neil’s article of 20 July 2024
Slurs on Ed Miliband and Lord Deben
On 20 July 2024, the Daily Mail published an article by Neil in its print edition and online under the headline ‘One day Starmer will wonder aloud why he ever gave this one-man wrecking ball the job’.
The article by Neil included a bitter personal attack on the current Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, Ed Miliband, stating: “The policies he is pursuing will hinder growth, discourage investment, destroy jobs and increase fuel bills.” The writer offered absolutely no evidence to support this claim, unsurprisingly given that it is demonstrably false. Numerous studies, including the Independent Review of Net Zero, which was published in January 2023, have shown that the implementation of policies to achieve net zero emissions will have multiple economic benefits.
Neil’s article also personally attacked Lord Deben, the former chair of the statutory Climate Change Committee and a former Conservative Secretary of State for the Environment. It stated: “He reinvented himself as Lord Deben, eco-crusader, who took Big Green’s shilling, and became chairman of the influential but hopelessly biased official Climate Change Committee.”
These allegations about Lord Deben and the Climate Change Committee are also demonstrably untrue. The Climate Change Committee is a statutory body that reports to Parliament. It is not a profit-making “Big Green” company. The Committee is composed of 12 independent experts drawn from academia and industry. They cannot reasonably be described as “hopelessly biased”, and Neil offered no evidence to substantiate this slur.
Neil’s article also wrongly claimed that Mr Miliband has intervened to stop current development of oil and gas in the North Sea. It stated:
“Miliband is enthusiastically implementing Labour’s pledge to ban any new oil and gas licences in the North Sea. He might even have banned some licences that were already in the pipeline but whose approval process was not quite complete when Labour came to power. But that’s not clear, such is the confusion in his department.”
This is the promotion of a falsehood that first appeared in an article in The Daily Telegraph on 12 July, and online on 11 July, but which has been comprehensively debunked. Tim Eggar, the Chair of the North Sea Transition Authority, which is responsible for the licensing process, wrote a letter rebutting the newspaper’s false claim, describing the Telegraph article as “a complete fabrication”.
Misinformation about fossil fuel policy and supply
This was not the only misrepresentation of the Labour Government’s policies. Neil’s article also stated:
“Just refusing any new licences effectively kills off North Sea oil and gas anyway. Miliband claims his policy ‘will ensure the UK no longer remains at the mercy of petrostates and dictators who control fossil fuel markets’. As is often the case in Mili-World, the opposite is true.”
This is false. The Labour Government’s policy is to end the UK’s dependence on energy generated from imports of fossil fuels by replacing it with electricity that is generated from domestic renewables and nuclear power.
Neil also misrepresented the likely impact on emissions of the Labour Government’s policy of stopping new licences for further development of oil and gas fields in the North Sea. The article stated:
“It goes from baffling to bizarre when it’s realised that none of this will make a blind bit of difference to hitting any Net Zero targets for CO2 emissions. More than 75 per cent of our energy needs come from oil and gas. It will remain over 50 per cent for many years to come.”
Limits on future supplies of oil and gas may not affect the level of demand for fossil fuels in the UK, and hence the emissions of carbon dioxide. However, such limits will contribute to pressure on other fossil fuel producers to limit their supplies as well, which would accelerate the transition to alternative sources of energy globally, and reduce emissions.
In addition, Neil’s article misrepresented the work of the Climate Change Committee, stating:
“Even the Climate Change Committee admits fossil fuels will still supply 25 per cent of our energy by 2050, when we’re legally meant to hit Net Zero. We’ll still be using the stuff, just importing it, which will generate more emissions than domestic production.”
In fact, the Climate Change Committee has never claimed that fossil fuels will still supply 25 per cent of the UK’s energy by 2050. And the suggestion that imports of fossil fuels will automatically mean higher emissions overall is also wrong. In a letter dated 24 February 2022 to Kwasi Kwarteng, the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Lord Deben, as Chair of the Climate Change Committee, wrote:
“We have not been able to establish the net impact on global emissions of new UK oil and gas extraction. UK extraction has a relatively low carbon footprint (more clearly for gas than for oil) and the UK will continue to be a net importer of fossil fuels for the foreseeable future, implying there may be emissions advantages to UK production replacing imports. However, the extra gas and oil extracted will support a larger global market overall. Whereas the evidence against any new consents for coal exploration or production is overwhelming, the evidence on new UK oil and gas production is therefore not clear-cut.”
False claims about solar energy farms
On the impacts of solar energy farms, Neil’s article falsely stated:
“Many more such developments will be rolled out. Not only do they lay waste to the countryside, they undermine our food security. We already import too much food. By covering good farmland in solar panels, we will soon be importing more. Food prices will be even more vulnerable to volatile world markets.”
There is no evidence that solar farms are a threat to the UK’s food security. The British Energy Security Strategy published in 2020 by Boris Johnson’s Government set a target of expanding solar capacity, both rooftop and ground-mounted solar farms, from 14 gigawatts to 70 gigawatts by 2035. Labour pledged ahead of the 2024 General Election that it would increase solar capacity to 50 gigawatts by 2030.
But solar farms are not built on prime agricultural land. The national planning guidance for renewables notes: “Solar is a highly flexible technology and as such can be deployed on a wide variety of land types”. It further states:
“While land type should not be a predominating factor in determining the suitability of the site location applicants should, where possible, utilise suitable previously developed land, brownfield land, contaminated land and industrial land. Where the proposed use of any agricultural land has been shown to be necessary, poorer quality land should be preferred to higher quality land avoiding the use of ‘Best and Most Versatile’ agricultural land where possible.”
The guidance also states: “Along with associated infrastructure, a solar farm requires between 2 to 4 acres for each MW of output. A typical 50MW solar farm will consist of around 100,000 to 150,000 panels and cover between 125 to 200 acres.” This means that if Labour’s target of 50 gigawatts of solar capacity by 2030 were met entirely through solar farms, and no rooftop, it would occupy up to 200,000 acres. The utilised agricultural area of the UK is about 42 million acres and thus 50 gigawatts of solar farm capacity provided through solar farms alone would occupy an area equivalent to less than 0.5 per cent of the country’s agricultural land. Clearly this would be no threat to food security.
Misleading on jobs and bills
Neil misrepresented the likely consequences for employment of the further deployment of renewables. He wrote: “There will be precious few new jobs to compensate — nearly all the solar panels will come from China and only one in ten turbines will be built in Britain (if we’re lucky).”
In fact, the renewables industry estimates that further deployment will create significant numbers of new jobs. For instance, according to the Offshore Wind Industry Council, the UK offshore wind industry supported 32,257 jobs in 2023, with an increase to 104,401 expected by 2030 if capacity grows to 50 gigawatts, as Labour’s manifesto pledged.
Neil’s article made false claims as well about the impact of renewables on consumers’ energy bills, stating: “It is one of the Big Lies of the Green Blob that renewable power is cheaper and will cut our fuel bills. Don’t believe it.” Neil, of course, offered no evidence to support this falsehood either. A range of official sources have pointed out that more renewable energy will reduce electricity prices, including a ‘Review of Electricity Market Arrangements’ published by the UK Government in July 2022.
Obscuring the competitiveness of renewables
Neil’s article failed to tell the truth about the impact of renewables in other countries. He wrote: “Half of Denmark’s electricity is generated by wind and is the most costly in Europe.” In fact, official statistics from Eurostat show that the average electricity price in Denmark is cheaper than in Belgium, Germany and Ireland.
Neil falsely asserted that subsidies for wind power in the UK are increasing: “If it were true that renewables were cheaper, wind power companies would not be demanding ever bigger subsidies – in the form of long-term price guarantees linked forever to inflation – to build more renewable capacity. But they are.”
This is completely untrue. Contracts for Difference auctions show that the cost of offshore wind power has decreased significantly. The second round of auctions in 2017 allocated contracts for offshore wind at prices of £57.50 and £74.75 per megawatt-hour (in 2012 prices). The fourth round of auctions in 2022 allocated contracts at a price of £37.35 per megawatt-hour (in 2012 prices).
Misrepresenting support for climate policies and Britain’s international obligations
Neil apparently believes that repeating false claims about the impact of climate policies would make them true. He wrote, again with no supporting evidence: “Growth undermined. Jobs destroyed. Investment curtailed. Living standards hit. What’s left of our heavy industry, already dealt a body blow by previous green policies, shuttered or fleeing abroad.”
Neil went on to make inaccurate claims about the support for climate policies, stating: “Miliband’s path to Net Zero is the road to nowhere. In pursuit of an ideological obsession which most of the country does not share and from which the rest of the world is turning away he will impoverish the country.”
First, the target of achieving net zero emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050 is not “an ideological obsession” but a statutory commitment that was passed by Parliament on the basis of expert advice, including from the Climate Change Committee. Second, a survey by More In Common earlier this year found that 69 per cent of the public support the statutory target of achieving net zero emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050.
Furthermore, the world is not turning away from the target of reaching net zero emissions. Countries accounting for 87 per cent of global gross domestic product have now committed to the achievement of net zero domestic emissions.
Elsewhere in Neil’s error-filled article, he wrongly stated:
“It is all the more unfathomable because it will make no difference to global emissions, for which we already account for under 1 per cent. A sensible climate policy would simply pledge that our emissions would always remain below 1 per cent — and wait for the big emitters (India, China, America) to do their bit too. But sense is the last thing to expect with Miliband in charge.”
These statements fail to take account of the UK’s obligations under the international Paris Agreement. Although the annual emissions of greenhouse gases produced in the UK are currently less than one per cent of global emissions, the UK’s domestic targets are part of its contribution to the Paris Agreement to halt further climate change by reaching net zero global emissions. If the UK does not achieve net zero emissions, it would undermine the Paris Agreement and reduce pressure on other countries to pursue net zero emissions. Hence it would not be at all sensible for the UK to do as Neil suggests and default on its net zero target.
Conclusions – propaganda, not journalism
It is not surprising that the Daily Mail, a right-wing newspaper, automatically opposes the policies of the new Labour Government. This is part of a recent trend of right-wing newspapers promoting misinformation about climate change policies, particularly within their editorial and opinion sections. Indeed, the Daily Mail has a track record of fabricating negative stories about action to tackle climate change, such as the transition to electric vehicles.
British newspapers are governed by a feeble and ineffective system of self-regulation that does not include impartiality. However, the articles by Stephen Glover and Andrew Neil that we have examined in these two commentaries contain multiple statements that are inaccurate and misleading, which is in clear breach of self-regulation codes. As such, they are examples of propaganda, not journalism.