COP26 is crucial, so let’s put a sceptic in charge! – Alison Johnstone

Last week brought the post-Brexit UK Government reshuffle. I think it’s safe to say that former Work and Pensions ­Secretary Esther McVey, removed from her post as Housing Minister, won’t be widely missed.

She was notorious for her lack of concern for some of the poorest people in society and unwillingness to engage with the evidence on the terrible impact her welfare reforms had, and continues to have, on them.

She once claimed that sanctioning helps people to ‘get into work’, when the evidence we have is that it often does the opposite.

Researchers from Heriot-Watt University ran a five year-study into benefit sanctions and found that they “instilled fear into participants”, caused them material hardship and provoked anxiety and depression

In 2018, at a meeting of the Scottish Parliament’s Social Security Committee, I asked whether she was comfortable with the idea that a woman has to prove non-consensual conception to access child tax credits if she had more than two children.

She caused outrage by saying that asking women who have been raped to fill in a form to get the payments mean that they receive ‘double support’.

Forcing someone to potentially relive being the victim of such a horrendous crime is not, in any way, supporting them. It is a scandal that such a policy was ever even considered, let alone implemented, with more than 50 Scots women having had to go through this shocking process.

Several weeks after she was sacked, the reshuffle finally gave us an answer as to who will replace Claire Perry as president of COP 26, the annual UN conference on climate change that will take place in ­Glasgow in November.

The new Business Secretary, Alok Sharma, is being asked to take on the job, as well as being a Cabinet minister and an MP at the same time.

Mr Sharma’s past record is not promising. They Work For You, a website which tracks the voting records of MPs, notes that he has “generally voted against measures to prevent climate change”. 

In 2016 he voted against the energy industry being required to put in place a strategy for carbon capture and storage and also against setting a decarbonisation target for the UK.

He has also been an outspoken supporter of a third runway for ­Heathrow airport.

In a 2013 Conservative Home article, that made not one single reference to the climate impact of air travel, Sharma bemoaned the fact that the UK was falling behind China in the global race to concrete over the countryside with runways.

The COP 26 president has a crucial role in getting a serious agreement this time around, one which acts upon the International Panel on Climate Change’s warning to keep global heating within 1.5 C by 2030 or face climate disaster.

With so many major polluters, not least the USA, now backsliding on previous agreements, this is an even more challenging task.

On Friday, Valentine’s Day, I met young climate activists outside the Parliament at their Love Our Earth event. Speaking to them really brings home how much we are failing the future generation.

Young Edinburgh teenagers growing up now will be in their 40s in 2050, the year by which the UK is planning to be carbon neutral.

Will they be living in an Edinburgh with parts of Leith under water, as projected by some? Some Edinburgh streets have the most polluted air in Scotland. How many more won’t have air fit to breathe by then?

It is vital that COP 26 in Glasgow later this year is a success, but at present it looks like the leadership it needs is sorely lacking.

Alison Johnstone is a Green MSP for Lothian.