Fossil Fuels: Lobbying

Hywel Williams Excerpts

Tuesday 30th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Lucas]

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention and his kind comments. It is always a great pleasure to work with him, and I agree entirely: when it comes to spending on elections, we seem to have an arms race that is out of control, which of course drives the obsession with getting more money to line the war chests that enable parties to fight those elections. A cap on that funding is urgently required, which brings me to the next point I wanted to make.

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

To take the points that my hon. Friend the Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards) made about elections a bit further, does the hon. Lady have any confidence that things might change following the next election, given that the Labour party has said that it will stand by any licences granted between now and then?

[Caroline Lucas]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. It is incredibly disappointing that Labour has, in a sense, not followed its own logic; it is happy to say that it will not accept any new licences, but if Labour were to make the clear statement right now that once it got into power—if it did—it would revoke those licences, that could have a chilling effect on all the licences that are going ahead. They are going ahead at a huge rate, and the Government want to see them go ahead even faster. When an official Opposition has it in its power to stop that process and chooses not to, “disappointing” is too polite a term, frankly.

I was coming to the issue of dirty money in politics. I want to see an end to it, because it comes with strings attached that are tying up in knots our chances of a liveable future. There can be no conceivable justification for allowing the fossil fuel lobby to directly or indirectly buy favours from politicians, so there should be no donating to MPs or to political parties, and no donations in kind, whether that is to all-party groups or via football tickets, event sponsorship or trips overseas. At the same time, the rules on conflicts of interest need redesigning to shut out vested fossil fuel interests, not simply have them declared on the record. It is time to close the revolving door. No side jobs or cosy secondments; no blind trusts, putting things in the name of one’s spouse, or raking in money from shares or second jobs; and of course, much tougher sanctions for breaches of the rules—including suspension, for example.

Thirdly and lastly, the preferential treatment meted out to the fossil fuel industry must come to an end—most immediately, the handing over of public subsidies and other incentives for fossil fuels must end. Most notably, that comes in the form of favourable tax regimes, which in the past have resulted in oil companies paying less than $2 in tax per barrel of oil pumped from the North sea, compared with the $15 per barrel that companies pay if they are operating in Norway.