There are approximately 40.5 million adults in the UK. It stands to reason that 40.5 million people are never all going to agree. Luckily for us, we live in a democracy where we can vote for the party that best represents our interests – whether that be the Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats, the Greens or a myriad of others.
When a party is in government, our expectation remains, that policy and decision-making will, as the UK parliament website dictates, “work on our behalf [whatever our ideology or belief system] to decide how best to deliver public services such as the National Health Service [and] the UK’s energy supply in an open and transparent way.”
To deliver expert policy, ministers are advised by members of the civil service who work under the values of “integrity, honesty, objectivity andimpartiality.” Ministers also employ Special Advisors (SpAds) who are, according to the Code of Conduct for Special Advisers, “bound by the standards of integrity and honesty required of all civil servants as set out in the Civil Service Code.”
Moreover,“special advisers must not misuse their official position or information acquired in the course of their official duties to further their private interests or those of others and must ensure that no conflict arises between their official duties and their private interests.”
It is strange then, that the lead energy adviser to the current Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, Ed Miliband, is Tobias Garnett, the former legal strategist at Extinction Rebellion (XR), a global environmental movement that at one point, was listed as an “extremist group” by UK police.
Extinction Rebellion have, since 2023, been keen to distance themselves from the more aggressive civil disobedience that took place between 2018 and 2022, when Tobias was a key member of the group. During this time, according to data readily available on the Mayor of London’s London Assembly website, the full financial cost to the Met Police due to XR unrest was in excess of £79 million. There was also a total of 4,481 arrests which in turn led to 2,197 charges.
At the end of 2019, Tobias successfully led XR in a crucial High Court ruling that stated that the Metropolitan Police’s ban on the activists’ protests was unlawful after they shut down roads around Parliament, superglued themselves to a plane at London City Airport and sparked an outcry by jumping on Tube trains during rush hour. Tobias was also successful in getting public disorder charges against thousands of protesters dropped.
There can be no doubt around Tobias’s active involvement in XR as well the extreme ideology that he must have held to be at the centre of such a group. And yet, two months after this court case, Tobias was headhunted to become the Labour Party’s climate and energy political adviser and now works directlyas a senior special advisor for Ed Miliband. Interestingly, Tobias has dropped the mention of his role at Extinction Rebellion on his Linkedin page.
Now one of the most influential figures setting the government’s green agenda,Tobias’s ideology has clearly played a role in the recent budget where the government announced that it will increase the windfall tax on North Sea oil and gas producers from 35% to 38% bringing the headline tax on oil and gas activities to a whopping 78%. To put that number into perspective, Tesco’s has operated at a median effective tax rate of just 25.1% over the last 5 years (Finbox). The Tesco’s website reports that their expected profit for this financial year will be approximately £2.9 billion. At their half-year results in August 2024, Harbour Energy, the UK’s largest oil & gas producer reported an expected annual profit of £0.4 billion.
The new Government’s involvement with extremist groups doesn’t end there. Labour has also vowed to end new oil and gas licences in the North Sea. Unsurprisingly, one of Labour’s biggest financial supporters, Dale Vince, who has given more than £1.5 million to the party, also bankrolls the group JustStop Oil whose goal is to “establish a legally binding treaty to stop extracting and burning oil, gas and coal by 2030.” Dale Vince is also the founder of Ecotricity whose mission is to replace fossil fuels with green electricity.
Having such ideologies at the heart of our governing party, I would suggest, runs counter to our democratic concept that ministers will represent the interests of voters with objectivity and impartiality. Would the electorate feel comfortable if the main advisor to the Health Secretary had been deeply immersed professionally in a pharmaceutical conglomerate?
Mr Miliband is entitled to listen to the opinions of an extremist like Tobias Garnett, but would it not be sensible, and encouraged, to have additional advisors who may be able to put forward educated views on different parts of the energy value chain so that policy decisions are balanced and fully researched? Perhaps as a starting point, Mr Miliband could spend more time speaking to the oil & gas industry itself to understand the practicalities of his climate policies and to build constructive dialogue with a sector which will still play a crucial role in the coming decades in meeting our energy needs.
