Put down that loaded sausage and raise your hands in the air. Climate fanatic Ed Miliband, who already plans to cover an area the size of Bedfordshire with solar panels, may soon be after our meat and dairy addiction.
The Energy Secretary this week accepted the eco targets of a powerful unelected quango called the Climate Change Committee.
The committee claims these targets cannot be met without big changes to the nation’s diet in the next 14 years. It wants the British public to eat 25 per cent less meat than it does at present.
Nor is it just our chipolatas, kebabs and roast beef they’re after. The amount of butter, cheese and milk we consume also needs to drop, allegedly, by a fifth. Can you bull-ieve it? Lardy be.
On hearing this news, one’s immediate suspicion was that oddball Ed, like the deluded geek Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, was exacting revenge on an unkind world.
Eleven years ago Mr Miliband’s dreams of becoming prime minister were dented by an unfortunate photograph of him grappling with a bacon sandwich.
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband this week accepted the eco targets of a powerful unelected quango called the Climate Change Committee
Eleven years ago Mr Miliband’s dreams of becoming prime minister were dented by an unfortunate photograph of him grappling with a bacon sandwich, writes Quentin Letts
If the Climate Change Committee’s ‘pathway’ to lower emissions is the next thing to be accepted by Whitehall, bacon sandwiches may become as rare as nesting ospreys.
At which point Mr Miliband could waggle a bony forefinger at his 2015 tormentors and say ‘vengeance is mine’.
Climate campaigners insist that cutbacks on meat and dairy are necessary because, to put this as delicately as possible, grazing animals create hot air. Ermintrude the cow parps away while digesting her grass and that produces methane, a greenhouse gas.
They therefore want us all to lay off the meat and to eat more vegetables. More lentils and beans. Er, might that not have its own trombone-ish consequences?
This is not the only complication. As another public body, the Agricultural and Horticulture Development Board, has pointed out, ‘many plant-based meat and dairy alternatives undergo extensive processing, requiring significant energy input and long supply chains, all of which contribute to their environmental footprint’.
At the supermarket, you may have spotted shimmeringly pink stuff that looks weirdly like streaky bacon but is in fact entirely meat-free.
Such substances do not grow in kitchen gardens. They are invented in laboratories and are glued together in vast, steaming factory vats, sometimes on the other side of the world, which are powered by electricity or gas or even coal.
These ‘green’ products must then be placed in the holds of oil-fuelled ships. So how accurate are these claims that a vegetarian diet will be more eco-friendly than home-reared meat? At my local butcher in Fownhope, Herefordshire, I can buy superb free-range beef, lamb and pork and take it home in nothing more than a sheet of greaseproof paper.
Those veggie alternatives that the Climate Change Committee would have us eat instead of meat – the fake bacon, bogus burgers and make-believe meatballs – are sold in thick plastic and have ingredient lists to make even an experienced chemist boggle. Forget about ozone layers. What are they doing to our innards?
At the supermarket, you may have spotted shimmeringly pink stuff that looks weirdly like streaky bacon but is in fact entirely meat-free
The committee also talks opaquely of households being encouraged to explore not just legumes and plant-based options but also ‘more novel alternative proteins’. This seems to be a coy reference to insects such as mealworms and locusts. Forget pork crackling. Have a nice crunchy cricket instead. Offer such a choice on the doorsteps of the Makerfield by-election and see what the locals say.
Not that democratic politics much comes into this matter.
The nanny-ish Climate Change Committee was created in 2008, when Gordon Brown was prime minister. It is not parliamentary. It is not elected. Its members are appointed by Whitehall and they have, over the years, swanned through life with remarkably little public scrutiny.
The committee’s function is to offer ministers politically independent advice on how to make us a low-carbon country, as required by the Climate Change Act of that same year.
The committee comes up with targets which ministers can accept or ignore.
They tend to be accepted without demur. The committee also devises proposals on how its ambitious targets can be achieved. This is what is called ‘the pathway’. Mr Miliband insists that he might yet reject the latest pathway but we will believe that when it happens. Previous ministers who did not comply with enough of a pathway found themselves facing legal action.
That is what happened to the Sunak government, which in 2024 was taken to the High Court by eco pressure groups, including Friends Of The Earth, and lost.
It is, of course, unlikely that Ed Miliband would fall out with environmental activists in such a fashion. He is the eco lobby’s fossil fuel-blocking dream.
As a long-standing proselytiser for Net Zero he waves his arms like a windmill and rubbishes the growing chorus, even from some of his own backbenchers and from his former boss Sir Tony Blair, that the Government’s environmental policies are impoverishing us. He is equally dismissive of any suggestion that, given Britain’s tiny contribution to global warming, our sacrifices are almost pointless.
Mr Miliband scoffs that his critics are ‘climate deniers’. He lifts his chin to the Moon and howls his pride that we are setting an example to the rest of the world, even while the rest of the world thinks we are nuts.
As happens with zealots, the more he is questioned, the more he throbs with self-certitude.
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It must be conceded that he does this with rhetorical skill. Of all Sir Keir Starmer’s Cabinet ministers, Ed Miliband is the most oratorical and, in parliamentary terms, the most watchable.
Labour activists love him and would quite possibly jump at him as their next leader, were Andy Burnham accidentally to whizz off the carousel.
Even if Mr Miliband never makes it to 10 Downing Street, could he become chancellor in a Burnham government? Don’t rule it out.
He may have been rejected by the electorate in 2015 and may often resemble a spluttering lunatic but he wields considerable influence inside the Labour movement. This was evident when Sir Keir tried to move him to a different department last autumn. Mr Miliband refused to budge.
But has he peaked? Sir Tony’s recent attack did some damage and the success of Reform in last month’s council elections has reminded Labour MPs that you can only impose unpopular policies on the public for so long.
The Treasury is also fed up with the damage Net Zero is doing to our economy.
Not that such political considerations worry the purists of the eco lobby. Nor do they trouble the diet-dictating Climate Change Committee – which, incidentally, includes a Dr Fries and is chaired by a chap called Topping. Is his nickname ‘Dream’?
Topping, Fries & Co are climate boffins, not political experts. How deeply have they pondered the electoral practicalities of their anti-meat and dairy pathway? Have they ‘war-gamed’ the difficulties of persuading the British to forego the pleasures of a juicy rib of beef? Have they worked out how to get Muslim voters to eat less lamb? How could Labour seek re-election on a manifesto opposed to hot buttered crumpets and clotted cream?
A Labour source told the Daily Mail this week that the emissions targets were ‘a fight we’re happy to have – public polling remains strong on climate action’.
Well, good luck with that.
Vote Miliband and have locusts for your tea. I’m not convinced it’s a winner.
