Labour has once again exposed the insincerity of its green agenda, which sees Britons bossed around and stripped of hard-earned cash while their leaders are flown around the world in luxury to conferences.
Prime minister Keir Starmer’s 470-person strong delegation to the COP29 talks in Azerbaijan—whose host kicked off the conference by hailing oil and gas as a “gift of God”—is bigger than those sent by France, Germany, Italy, and the U.S., and will reportedly accumulate 2.3 million air miles worth of return trips. This will amount to a carbon footprint of “at least” 338 tons of CO2, according to The Mail on Sunday.
Delegates include Starmer’s “content designer and videographer,” as well as the “head of creative” at the foreign office—a fairly clear indication that Britain’s attempt at climate “leadership” following Donald Trump’s blow to the net zero agenda is much more rooted in image than action.
Some of these officials stayed at the luxury Qafqaz Baku City Hotel, where executive suites cost almost £800 (€960) per night, prompting Reform’s Lee Anderson to complain that the government is “taking us for fools.”
Tory MP Ben Obese-Jecty also said there “is no real justification” for sending so many officials to the climate talks, although his own party was acting in much the same manner when it was in government just a matter of months ago.
Even some Labour figures have criticised the size of the delegation, including MP and former minister Graham Stringer, who told the Mail:
There are more private jets and large jets going to Baku than anywhere else at the moment. It’s a complete waste of money.
Stringer also blasted the delegation’s carbon footprint as “symbolic of the hypocrisy of the net zero policy.”
It is perhaps even more shocking that net zero secretary Ed Miliband has himself racked up 23,000 air miles since Labour was elected fewer than 150 days ago.
But however hard Starmer and his cronies try to keep the net zero dream alive, a growing list of countries are refusing to continue buying into it. Argentina withdrew its delegation from COP29 after just three days, and the world is now waiting for U.S. president-elect Trump to pull out of the Paris agreement, again.
Whereas air travel is measured in nautical miles, the Daily Mail’s ‘air miles’ calculation uses the former name of a popular airline loyalty programme (now called Avios). The data on each passenger’s ‘carbon footprint’ used in the article also resembles that collected by airlines in putting together carbon offsetting schemes. A similar process is used by the UK government to collect Air Passenger Duty, a tax which is not spent on environmental projects but is claimed to ‘nudge’ air passengers into ‘green’ behaviour.
