John Major has issued the perfect rebuttal to those who want to scrap net zero and kick the climate can down the road.
In recent years, the former Tory PM has become one of the more prominent voices of reason in British politics.
Whether it’s calling out the ‘folly of Brexit,’ the scandal of Boris Johnson or the failure of the Tories, Major speaks a lot of sense on a lot of issues, for voices on both the left and right.
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The latest issue Major has weighed in on is climate policy and in particular voices from the right who believe action to tackle the climate crisis should be scrapped for short-term gain.
Speaking to Newsnight, Major called out “those people who say ‘let’s push it back a bit, let’s not do anything, let’s just wait so we can spend the money on something else.”
He continued: “All they’re doing is saying to my children and your children and their grandchildren, ‘tough luck chaps, we’re not only leaving you a difficult economy and too many old people that you can’t afford to care for, we’re going to leave you with climate change that we should have put right for you and didn’t.'”
Major argued the issue spoke more broadly to the role and meaning of government, which he said was to “leave something better for the next generation than your generation inherited – and this is not done now.”
“The youngsters of today are inheriting a more difficult world and a less favourable world for them than my generation,” he said. “And their successors may be in the exact same position unless now we begin to take seriously those very long term problems.”
“We send representatives to parliament to make sure our lives are better, and if you ignore and deny those issues, our lives will not get better and those parliaments will have failed.”