The climate crisis isn’t a partisan issue. The left can be just as destructive as capitalist governments

The climate column: From media billionaires to activists, the movement has been hurt equally by either side. The sooner we stop framing it as a party political matter, the more change we’ll see

The climate emergency, like the Second World War, is beyond party politics. In the UK and elsewhere, through publishers like News Corp, there are attempts to frame the crisis as a destructive left-right partisan issue. We cannot allow those efforts to succeed. And we should not let far-left climate activists in the UK, such as those involved in last week’s vandalism on Friends of the Earth, the Green Party and Amnesty International’s offices, avoid scrutiny.

The group responsible for the aforementioned wreckage bizarrely claim liberalism "reeks of the death camps". It's exactly the sort of careless statement that to me, suggests they have no appreciation of how many liberals had also been murdered in the Nazi death camps.

To win our collective existential climate battle, we need a coalition from across the political spectrum demanding drastic changes in society as backed by our governments, banks, businesses and civil society.

In the 2008 presidential election, John McCain, the Republican Party’s then nominee, like other moderate Republicans, was in favour of business-based solutions to the climate threat.

However, within a few years, following an onslaught by the US’s right-wing media largely led by the Murdoch-owned Fox News and Wall Street Journal and US right-wing radio, oil-industry fostered climate-denialism had become the Republican Party’s orthodoxy.

It is now almost impossible for any Republican to stand for election in the US on a platform supporting action on the climate emergency.

This, in turn, led to the Trump-Republican presidency being a full-on climate-denialist presidency, with disastrous consequences for action both in the US and internationally, as Trump officially withdrew the US from the Paris Climate Accord and started bulldozing the climate protection measures installed by the Obama White House. He even went so far as to put a coal industry lobbyist in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency.

In the UK, while the Conservative Party’s manifesto policies on climate action were a much lighter version of all the opposition parties, they are still officially committed to tackling the climate emergency – just far too slowly.

They have thankfully not yet been bullied by the UK’s right-wing billionaire media to adopt full-scale climate-denialism.

James Murdoch in a keynote McTaggart speech to the 2009 Edinburgh Television Festival demanded huge cuts in the BBCs budget, to allow greater private competition. The speech reads like Murdoch family instructions on what the Tory manifesto for the 2010 general election should contain on the BBC’s future. Once elected, the Tories duly obliged. In 2015, as part of its charter agreement with the BBC, the government pushed the corporation to fund the licence fee for over-75s. This will cost the BBC £2.5bn in lost revenues over the coming decade, despite forcing many pensioners to start paying the fee.

As the BBC started cutting its radio services due to the loss in revenue, Murdoch has built up his investments in the station talkRADIO, which many of us consider to be right-wing, as well as recently launching new Radio 4 competitor, Times Radio.

It is crucial we understand how right-wing media billionaires shape our political discourse.

They seem to hire editors who share their world-view, editors who then generally appear to hire journalists and staff who do likewise. At least two of talkRADIO’s top talk-show hosts, i.e. Julia Hartley-Brewer and Dan Wootton, frequently criticise climate protectors like Friends of the Earth, Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion.

The right-wing media-billionaires thus buy the right to be the keepers of the Overton window, i.e. they determine what is deemed legitimate democratic “debate” on the climate and ecological emergencies in our society.

I experienced this first-hand last week, when Dan Wootton, who is also an executive editor at Murdoch’s newspaper, The Sun, kindly invited me onto his talkRADIO programme, along with a representative from the Countryside Alliance to discuss a tiny aspect of the climate emergency plan Enfield Council had just agreed following a consultation exercise with the public.

The plan had a plethora of proposals that not only would reduce the borough’s estimated annual 939,000 tonnes of carbon emissions but would also help protect dozens of local schools and hospitals from river flooding, provide cheaper energy bills for poorer residents in social housing and healthier kids and adults by ensuring access to safe cycling routes for everybody. The planting of 60,000 trees would also create a more beautiful borough to live in and foster a wider diversity of wildlife.

But the only thing Wootton and the Countryside Alliance representative wanted to talk about was a tiny one-line detail in the 40-page document, which said that in future, Enfield would provide vegetarian meals at council receptions.

From the faux outrage expressed by the other two in the interview, you would swear Enfield were sending in the meat police into every home in the borough, incarcerating anybody who dared to eat it.

The 1980’s “loony left council” epithets came fast and furious. They were simply not interested in any of the huge list of positive benefits the plans meant for residents in Enfield.

For 15 minutes live on air, all they were interested in was partisan point-scoring, no matter how often I pointed out the urgent need for action on the climate or how scores of Tory councils had likewise declared climate and ecological emergencies, following the protests and actions by the student climate-strikers, Extinction Rebellion and Green Party activists last year.

It is crucial that the many Tory, Labour and Lib Dem councils that have positively declared climate and ecological emergencies are not put off developing their implementation plans by the forces of the UK’s climate-action-opposing media billionaires.

But it is also crucial that we prevent far-left activists from splitting the climate movement by wrongly declaring that climate action is purely a left-right battle.

Going down that route guarantees climatic and ecological devastation. Socialist, communist and authoritarian governments are as climatically and ecologically destructive as largely capitalist governments.

Now is the existential moment for unity, not divisive tribal political ideological warfare.