Basit Mahmood
PopCon group has links with climate science denial groups and those with links to the fossil fuel industry.
Yesterday saw disgraced former Prime Minister Liz Truss launch her new Popular Conservatism group, also known as PopCon, in a bid to push the Tory party further to the right.
Truss, whose premiership ended in disaster, has launched the group which describes itself as a “new movement aiming to restore democratic accountability to Britain and deliver popular conservative policies.” Its supporters include right wing Tory MPs such as Jacob Rees-Mogg and Lee Anderson.
Yesterday’s event saw the likes of Truss rail against the left, telling the conference that the left had “repurposed” themselves as environmentalists, LGBT+ rights advocates and anti-racism campaigners to avoid detection.
What she wasn’t very keen for people to find out however is that her PopCon group has links with climate science denial groups and those with links to the fossil fuel industry.
That might help explain why the group hosted politicians attacking net zero policies, while leaflets handed out at the event called for an end to ‘net zero zealotry’.
In attendance at the PopCon event was Lord Frost, who is a director of the climate science denial Global Warming Policy Foundation, as well as Conservative MP Lee Anderson and Reform party president Nigel Farage.
DeSmog reports: “PopCon director Mark Littlewood is the outgoing managing director of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), an influential free market think tank that has talked up its access to government.
“The IEA received funding from oil company BP every year from 1967 to 2018, according to an Unearthed investigation confirmed by the IEA. Both IEA and BP have declined to say if this funding continues, when asked by DeSmog.”
Littlewood took aim at Net Zero targets at the conference, telling the audience “the Climate Change Committee, pronouncing on our progress to the eye-wateringly [sic] expensive and almost certainly unachievable aim of being carbon net zero”.
Lee Anderson told the audience: “If we became net zero tomorrow, this country… it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference to the earth’s atmosphere.”
We shouldn’t forget that Truss has close links with the IEA, which provided a number of ideas behind her disastrous mini-budget. In 2022, Truss’s campaign for Tory leader was run by Ruth Porter, a former communications director at the IEA.
The Guardian has previously reported on how the IEA has ‘published at least four books, as well as multiple articles and papers, over two decades suggesting manmade climate change may be uncertain or exaggerated.’
Also in attendance at the PopCon event was Nigel Farage, honorary president of right-wing party Reform UK, which campaigns to “scrap net zero”.
Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot ForwardLiz Truss’s dangerous agenda
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Truss is promoting an agenda that explicitly permits the powerful with a grudge to abuse anyone they wish with impunity.
I should be grateful to GB News. They appear to be the only news organisation that was willing to carry verbatim extracts from Liz Truss’s speech to the so-called Popular Conservatives yesterday.
They report her as saying:
I believe the fundamental issue is that for years and years and years- and I think it goes back two decades – Conservatives have not taken on the left-wing extremists.
These people have repurposed themselves. They don’t admit they’re socialists or communists anymore, they say they’re ‘environmentalists’. They say that they’re in favour of helping people across all communities. They are in favour of supporting LGBT people or groups of ethnic minorities.
They also noted her saying:
They no longer admit that they are collectivists – but that is what their ideology is about. It’s all about taking power away from people and families and handing power to the state or unaccountable bodies.
And the problem is, the Conservatives have tried to appease these people. They’ve tried to triangulate.
[A]nd we’ve had pandering to the anti-capitalists as well, in terms of regulating business, regulating landlords, regulating small enterprises.
Our shortest-serving ever Prime Minister has spoken. It is fair to say that the words she had to offer delivered an ugly and offensive message. Most will think them deranged. I think they are dangerous.
Truss is really saying three things.
First, she wants a white, male-privileged society that is focused on the supposed Christian values of the family, which is defined to exclude any LGBT people, and with the values and principles of any minority group being treated as aberrant and offensive and so to be subject to permitted prejudice.
Second, she wants to define all forms of collective concern, including for the environment and for society itself, as a threat to the right of the individual to exploit the planet and others.
Third, she wishes to end business regulation so it can exploit the consumer, the planet, places, tenants, and others without showing any apparent awareness that markets cannot function in the absence of regulation.
This is, then, an agenda that explicitly permits the powerful with a grudge to abuse anyone they wish with impunity. And anything that gets in the way, like democratic government and the rule of law, must be vilified or abolished.
This is beyond being called far-right ideology. This is fascism. It should be described as such because no other word in the political lexicon fits it.
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