WHAT DOES STEVE BAKER STAND FOR?
Climate Change Denial
Steve Baker has been our MP in Wycombe since 2010. The self-styled 'hard man of Brexit' is credited with seeing off Theresa May's softer Brexit. Even back then, he was out of line with his constituency, which voted narrowly to remain in Europe. He held a ministerial post, as a junior minister in the Department for Exiting the EU from June 2017 until he resigned in July 2018. Recently he was made Minister of State for Northern Ireland.
During COVID, Steve had a public spat with footballer Marcus Rashford claiming that paying for extra school meals for impoverished families could collapse the economy.
When he joined the Global Warming Policy Foundation in 2021 Steve’s views on climate change swerved into an extreme position which does not align with the Conservative government’s Carbon Net Zero plans developed since the Paris Agreement. He claims to care about poorer people, but his fierce championing of fracking which is both unpopular and more expensive than renewables, tells a different story.
When we held a vigil outside his offices and asked why he joined the GWPF he claimed it was because ‘Nigel Lawson asked him’. Nigel Lawson has a history of climate denial.
The Global Warming Policy Foundation first set about to confuse and deny the climate science around global heating and now most often concentrates on delaying or frustrating the policies needed to address it.
The GWPF recently rebranded as Net Zero Watch and they issue misleading, often contradictory, information about the energy crisis and the energy implications of the invasion of Ukraine.
His climate stance in more detail
In May 2021 Steve Baker laid out his climate philosophy in an article for The Critic entitled It’s alright for some. Here, he first claimed that the government’s Net Zero policy was a “ruinous economic experiment”. You can read his article here.
His views and the points he made were firmly rebutted by one of the UK’s most eminent scientific institutions, The Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. You can read the letter here.
Furthermore, our own Tom Hardy prepared a thoroughly researched paper pointing out all the misinformation and flawed economics in Mr Baker’s article. You can read the paper here
As we don’t have a system of Direct Democracy in the UK, when you vote for your MP you trust him to use his own judgement when making decisions on your behalf.
So it’s vital you can trust him and that he will do what is best for us all in High Wycombe and the country. If you would like to know exactly what Steve Baker has voted for and against, on your behalf relating to climate change, you can follow his voting here.
How does he actually vote in parliament?
Scientists have said that the cost of implementing plans for Net Zero ‘will pale in comparison to the cost of not mitigating climate change. Both in terms of economic damage but more importantly in terms of lives lost and livelihoods ruined.’
Steve Baker also has a habit of setting up parliamentary pressure groups. He was chair of the pro Brexit European Research group (ERG) and when Brexit was done, he created the Covid Recovery Group (CRG), which challenged the government on Covid restrictions and lockdowns.
His latest parliamentary group is the Net Zero Scrutiny group (NZSG), which was born in early 2022 to challenge the government’s plan to reach Net Zero by 2050. In January 2022 the group published a letter in the Sunday Telegraph laying out their manifesto and demands, including removing environmental and climate change levies from energy bills with the call to expand North Sea exploration and for shale gas extraction to be supported.
This letter was signed by just 19 MP’s and 1 peer.
In contrast the Conservative Environmental Network, which drives a green agenda at Westminster has 133 MP’s and 17 peers in its caucus.
Although small, the NZSG group has unrivalled access to the media particularly to the Telegraph, GB News and the Spectator, but also The Times, The Sun, The Express and The Daily Mail and are very vocal on Twitter, so their message is being amplified.