In a somewhat awkward, rambling and weird speech on Tuesday, Foreign Secretary David Lammy set out his vision of “restoring our international credibility”, by putting the “climate and nature crisis” at the heart of foreign policy. “This issue has been on the agenda for nearly every meeting that I’ve had with another minister in my early weeks,” he explained in his opening remarks. And what green weeks they have been, with his colleagues throwing Britain’s pensioners under the bus, energy price caps rising, the Grangemouth refinery and Port Talbot steelworks closing, shedding thousands of jobs. Lammy spoke of a “reset”, but even that word now seems like a boring cliché. He is no exception to the tin-eared, dead from the neck-up politicians, whose agendas are expressed in cascades of woke-green piety, wrapped in banal slogans. That was all his talk was.
The speech was superficially an announcement of three new ambitions of the new Government. First, a “Global Clean Power Alliance” will be created, which Britain shall lead by becoming “the first major economy to deliver clean power by 2030”. Second, at the COP29 climate meeting in November, “an ambitious new climate finance goal focused on developing countries” will be unveiled. Third, our heroic Government shall “reverse the decline in global biodiversity”.
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