Rachel Reeves at Davos was never going to be Jeremy Corbyn at Glastonbury, nor did anyone expect her to be. If the Labour Party of years gone by found its firmest footing in front of sweaty and swaying festival-goers, surrounded by Greenpeace banners rippling in the breeze, then new-New-Labour’s target audiences are somewhat more uptight. In a desperate bid to woo global investors and shed the anti-growth reputation, leading lights of today’s Party found themselves among the air-conditioning, in front of a wall of corporate sponsors, playing to the crowd in the Swiss Alps. Here, Glastonbury’s tin-canned water has been swapped for much more proper glass bottles, out of which some eminently dignified panellist will ever so politely pour their fellow speakers a modest amount. Gone are the days of rousing speeches interrupted by football-style chanting: Rachel Reeves has to gee up the audience with a different mode, and, without losing her train of thought, remember to say thank you to Klaus von Klausberg (Director for Ideas and Co-Director in Efficient Thinking at the Saxo-Glaxo-Wellbridge Institute for Rational Economic Partnerships) when he offers her a glass half full.

So much the better, maybe. From the Party’s perspective, government in Davos seems better than opposition in Glastonbury, even if the former requires a bit more grovelling. And we might even say that the compromises which come with this sort of scene change are a price worth paying. Reeves rowed back, for example, on the party’s promises to deal with non-dom tax loopholes. Even if the mealy-mouthed phrasing—“We have been listening to the concerns that have been raised by the non-dom community”—leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, the chances of any British government dealing with the iniquities of the global tax system were always, frankly, pretty slim. But there are also red lines which Labour really shouldn’t cross, even if doing so would secure the position of the red ties around the cabinet table. That’s a pretty obvious notion: parties get into government, presumably, to make things better. If the cost of getting in and staying there is giving up on all the plans you had to make things better (or, more pertinently, stop them from getting worse), then there’s no point to getting in at all. Climate policy is surely in this bracket.

The other concession Reeves made, then, is not something to be forgiven. At a Bloomberg panel, with the neat Helvetica brand name bearing down on her, she said: “When we say that growth is the number one mission of this government, we mean it. That means it trumps other things.” Given the opportunity later on to clarify to reporters her priorities between economic growth and net zero, she picked growth: “If it’s the number one mission, it’s obviously the most important thing.” No sooner than Reeves getting back from Davos did the long-feared death knell for Labour’s green credentials ring. They’re backing a third runway at Heathrow.

It doesn’t need explaining how bad this will be for the climate. But it’s also spectacularly bad politics. Facing an ascendant Reform from the Right, threatening to topple the just rebuilt Red Wall, the last thing Labour needs is a reenergised threat from the left. But NIMBY Lib Dems in West London and a Green Party provided with a central crutch to rally climate-conscious young progressives against means Labour faces a squeeze from both sides of the political spectrum. The case for a third runway leading to growth is that, according to Reeves, it would make UK “the world’s best-connected place to do business.” The expansion was announced alongside plans to reopen the Oxford to Cambridge trainline, but these changes follow on from a budget with massive cuts to the “Restoring your Railways” project, which would have upgraded train service across the country. You get the sense that only a very select part of the UK, and only a very select class of traveller, is included in the growth agenda. On top of all this, nobody buys it. Not even Michael O’Leary, CEO of Ryanair, is on their side. This is because the number of complications involved in completing the project—among other things, the M25 would need rerouting—means that planes will not be getting off the ground anytime soon. The general sense of scepticism got even worse when it came out that a report Reeves cited as evidence for her decision had been commissioned by Heathrow itself—a sort of self-congratulation one could only learn from Davos.

All these problems mean the plans have drawn a lot of ire, and will likely face substantial—if not fatal—opposition from Labour MPs. Keir Starmer would not be drawn at PMQs to announce his full support for expansion, so instead he offered the Commons something typically equivocal: “This government is committed to growth, to the aviation sector, and to our climate obligations.” Parodies abound. Imagine the teenager who tells their parents: “Yes, I’m committed to doing my homework, but you also have to understand I’m very committed to my video games.” Let’s be clear about what this is: Labour, and just about every other government across the Global North, are engaged in a new form of climate denial. Everybody knows net zero by 2050 is a pipe dream. Everybody knows net zero by 2050 would be too little too late anyway. The only way we can row back the climate crisis is by enacting serious change in production and consumption now, and the only way that is going to happen at a large scale is through government intervention. So the only explanation for global inaction is that our leaders have weighed up the options and decided climate crisis is the preferable one.

So what’s about to happen? Climate crisis causes mass migration to the Global North, which further stokes xenophobic sentiment in Europe and America. Far-right parties get into office, strip ecological protections further, and the whole thing loops. Environmental efforts turn decisively from prevention to mitigation, which some countries will do much better than others. A new normal of aggressive foreign policy caused by disputes over dwindling natural resources emerges. Everything gets worse.

In the face of all this, the politician’s choice is not to look. Notice how all the starry-eyed announcements that country X will become an AI superpower never once mention the massive energy costs that go into it. (Google and Microsoft, having been relatively strong on the environment for most of their existence, are now announcing massively increased emissions as a result of the energy-hungry data centres required to power AI tools.) Every election we decide something else is more important. It’s looking increasingly likely that Keir Starmer is going to approve Rosefield, a huge new oilfield. It’s true, the Labour government is not going to make a dent on anything with Trump in office and China on the AI offensive. But be honest then: we’ve all just given up.∎

Words by Joseph Rodgers. Image taken by Sandra Blaser at the World Economic Forum and used under copyright license CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.