PARTYGATE has come back to join the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse chasing the British government. But don’t get too distracted. It is the donkey in the pack.

Boris lied. Well, there’s a surprise. Brexit was a bigger lie. But the Tories won’t dump Boris until bigger stuff starts to hit the electoral fan. It won’t be long.

Another Covid variant will probably kick back in before the end of the year. Before then, the fall out from Putin’s war on Ukraine will have rocked the global economy. A country that used to be a mass exporter of grain has become one that exports people.

Coupled with spiralling energy costs that come with the war, we will see severe food shortages across the globe and insufficient incomes to chase after them. Expect food riots and civil unrest to become major international issues before the summer is out.

And if that wasn’t enough, Britain’s Conservative government hasn’t a clue about how to radically shift to a renewable-energy economy in time to slow down the climate roller-coaster threatening to derail everything.

On this, at least Boris has half a plan. His Chancellor has none. Together they look like partners in a three-legged race, with each determined to head in a different direction. Tragedy is only relieved by farce.

Clueless and contactless

There was something genuinely comedic about Rishi Sunak’s photoshoot cock-up at a Sainsbury’s filling station. First, someone spotted it wasn’t his car. Then, attempting to pay for the petrol, the Chancellor showed he hadn’t a clue about how to do contactless payments. The clip went viral. It was a brief moment of levity in an otherwise gloomy appraisal of his Spring Statement.

Sunak’s failure to give a single mention of Net Zero commitments fired a shot across the bows of any forthcoming UK energy statement. No wonder it has been delayed — again. When it emerges, the statement will over-promise, under-fund and push as much as possible into the pockets of corporate cartels.

The Chancellor doesn’t get the climate emergency. What he does grasp is the power of corporate lobbying. So for the moment “all hands to the petrol pump” is as far as Sunak gets.

However, with 1.3 million people sinking into absolute poverty and Britain facing its worst cost-of-living crisis in over 50 years, the Chancellor’s contactless problems run far, far deeper.

In Sunak’s playbook neither poverty nor the planet get a look in. No wonder Conservative MPs dismissed his Spring Statement as tinkering around the edges.

None of this should be considered accidental. Sunak is actually playing a different game; one in which he is far from contactless. With £500m of family shares in a company still trading in Moscow, Sunak has his roots in the politics of wealth and power. The trouble is that this politics will kill the planet as casually as his Russian trading partners are doing in Ukraine.

Filling up the coffers

Sunak’s decision to cut petrol prices is the place to start. It had nothing to do with an inclusive gesture in favour of the poor. Among the poorest third of British households, over two-thirds do not even own a car.

A more inclusive gesture would have made public transport free (as they do in Luxembourg and parts of France). Sunak’s price cut was to deflect attention from calls for windfall taxation on an oil and gas industry that has enjoyed bonanza profits throughout both the pandemic and the Ukraine crisis.

Sunak knows that serving the interests of the oil oligarchs is what butters his political bread. It is what the politics (and economics) of the last 200 years has largely come down to.

The Industrial Revolution delivered huge leaps in technological innovation. It gave the world year-on-year growth in output and (for some) prosperity. It also created an economics obsessed with production and consumption growth. Everything hinged around unlocking the vast subterranean stores of carbon.

By 1860 coal delivered power to an economy that would previously have required timber from forests four times larger than Britain itself. It fuelled economic growth for 50 years. But while coal proved critical to the establishment of collective, democratic rights, oil became the plaything of oligarchies and empire.

The rise of the oiligarchs

Long before climate breakdown hit the streets, maintaining oil and gas profits had embedded itself at the heart of governance. Fomenting social division, instability and autocratic control has been a constant part of the corporate playlist for maintaining extractive (and unaccountable) power. Nigel Farage, an out-to-lunch Chancellor and the Conservative’s Net Zero Watch are just its latest variants.

Nor did we have to wait for Putin to fan social divisions in the Brexit debate. The West had used the same strategies across the Middle East for almost a century.

Corporate America and colonial Britain negotiated contracts that would limit development within the oil states. Then, when technology and demand raced ahead, the key for the West was to retain control of the oil. Corporatism and colonialism found itself in the same bed, though not always harmoniously.

In Mexico, Britain’s domination of their oil industry faced challenges both from workers (demanding land reforms and democratic rights) and from Standard Oil. In the event, Standard Oil funded both the revolution that threw Britain out and the counter-revolution that handed the control of oil over to them.

In Persia, faced with similar demands for the redistribution of land, an eight-hour working day and democratic voting rights, Britain threw its support behind an army seizure of power. It established a model of autocratic control that came to define the region’s politics.

McJihad: the authoritarian answer

Long before Sunak squirmed into view, oil, finance and Western governments consistently undermined democratic movements that threatened corporate oil interests. Where support from the religious right was needed (to undermine the democratic left) the West readily obliged.

From Syria to Iraq, Palestine to Iran and through Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Libya and Morocco, Britain and the US) financed, promoted and supported religious, regressive, sectarian groups to undermine democratic movements wanting to own their own oil. In this consistent undermining of democracy, al-Qaida, the Taliban and whoever else only did what Farage and the MAGA movements now do in the West.

Timothy Mitchell’s book, Carbon Democracy painfully details the succession of McJihad policies the West pursued to maintain its control of oil: credit facilities to authoritarian regimes, arms sales to prop them up (and get the loan money back), support for extremist groups that Big Oil “could live with” and the continued Western ownership of oil.

Today, it is what plunges the Tory right back into the follies of fracking and Johnson into a Kharshoggi courtship of Saudi Arabia. Neither will admit that oil is the problem, not the answer.

Democracy not technology

The age of oil is coming to an end, but not quick enough to save us from extinction. We need another plan. In this, the Boris-Sunak spat is a dangerous distraction; for Labour as much as the planet. If we are looking for serious answers, democracy must come before technology.

Nuclear is as much of a distraction as fracking; not because of its timescale, unaffordable costs and disposal issues, but because it is another corporate fiefdom.

Genuinely renewable technologies face a diferent challenge — “who owns the wind” and “who owns the sun and tides” are the questions to start from.

For over 100 years, Britain’s industrial revolution was built around municipal energy companies, funded through municipal bonds. Profits went back into the provision of parks, museums, swimming pools, lighting and libraries. It delivered unparalleled improvements in social inclusion.

Today, the same challenge must be given to local systems of clean technologies, including those that save and store energy rather than consume it. To do so requires a different mindset.

Denmark offers a starting point, with an energy infrastructure shaped around co-ops and decentralised energy. Moreover, in law, its energy is redefined as a service, not a market. Do so and the collective displaces the corporate, inclusion replaces elitism and reparation replaces exploitation.

In planetary terms, fresh thinking cannot come soon enough. Nor can the leadership to deliver it.

Alan Simpson was Labour MP for Nottingham South from 1992 to 2010.