The Tories’ green wheeze won’t win them the next election

Conservative ministers are going through a green fit in an attempt to appeal to voters they lost at the last election. They want to show the world they’re doing good. ‘You know what some people call us – the plastic bag party,’ seems to be the political re-branding calculation. As the former No.10 spin doctor Katie Perrior remarked in the Times last week, the Prime Minister’s enthusiasm for protecting the environment may not be insincere, but it is certainly new.

In reality, the May government’s greenwashing is classic displacement activity. Productivity numbers released by the Office for National Statistics earlier this month should be front and centre of every government policy. Normally productivity growth falls in a recession but then bounces back to the previous trend, the ONS says. This time it didn’t. If productivity had returned to its pre-downturn trend, output per hour would have been very nearly 19.8 per cent higher.