The Altar of Net Zero

_________
The Cultural Location of fascism

By Rebekah Diski

On 8th April 2025, Nigel Farage and Richard Tice, leader and deputy of Reform UK, posed for a photo at the ailing steelworks in Scunthorpe, clad in hard hats and safety goggles and backlit by the red glow of a blast furnace. Tweeting the photo, Farage proclaimed, “Reform UK will nationalise British Steel and protect British workers. #SaveOurSteel.” Adopting the hashtag of the trade union campaign, Farage and colleagues held posters produced by the Community trade union bearing the same demand: “Save Our Steel.” Community, which calls itself “the steelworkers’ union,” was quick to distance itself from Reform and to reject the party’s newfound concern as opportunistic. A few weeks later, Paul Nowak, General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), warned voters that Farage was “cosplaying as a working-class champion.”1 After Reform’s spectacular success in the local elections in May, Gary Smith, head of the GMB union, challenged Farage’s voting record on workers’ rights and asked, “Why is it always the posh, private schoolboys who want to act like they’re working-class heroes?”2

Despite these admonitions, trade unions have themselves acknowledged the growing appeal of Reform among their members.3 In my research on how trade unions are responding to climate breakdown, union officials repeatedly expressed concern that the far-right appealed to members because “they are speaking to the kind of concerns people have,” even as they misdiagnose them. Reform, like the Conservative Party before it, has deliberately sought to sever the already frayed umbilical link between Labour and what is often called the traditional working class. Seizing on the dismay at the closure of Port Talbot’s coal-fired blast furnaces, Farage held a press conference in the town promising that a Reform government would not only revivify the steel industry but also bring back coal mining. Writing in The Daily Mail, Farage announced that his was “the party of working people.”4

Targeting areas deeply scarred by deindustrialisation, Reform has styled itself as the no-nonsense voice of the everyman, unafraid to say aloud what everyone else is surely thinking, whether on immigration, factory closures, or “net stupid zero.”5 But trade unions intervene in climate policy in the very same register, eliding the reality of contemporary class composition to focus on an idealised industrial worker, at risk – once again – of being left behind; the apparent victim of successive betrayals by cosmopolitan elites. Even as they emphasise the industrial identity of this composite worker, rather than its implicit whiteness or maleness, unions contribute to a wider discourse that foregrounds the latter and plays to the resentment of the so-called “white working class.”

On climate breakdown, as throughout Europe and North America, the Right has coalesced an anti-ecological politics against the supposed sacrifice of the working class on “the altar of net zero” – an image also embraced by unions representing energy and manufacturing workers. Those unions do not adhere to the outright climate denial currently emboldened in the US; rather, they accept the “science” of climate change and the need for some gradual transition through an expansion of green capital but reject the call for urgent decarbonisation as an unfeasible and unjust burden on “ordinary working people.” Although this framing serves the needs of dominant fractions of capital, it is not merely imposed from above; nor does its appeal lie only in the kernel of material truth – the association of deindustrialisation with localised decline. More than that, the Right’s anti-climate posturing speaks to and bolsters a “common sense,” which Gramsci defined as “a chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions, and one can find there anything that one likes.”6 On climate action, or its pale imitation in “net zero,” this common sense proffers the image of a proper industrial worker threatened by out of touch policy wonks and hippies; for a different audience, it conjures the bucolic English countryside invaded by unsightly solar and wind farms; alternately, it invokes the connection between home-grown fossil fuels and national security.

As Stuart Hall noted, the Right is often more effective at constructing a “politics that speaks to people’s experience,” and inserts itself into the common sense, but this process is solidified from both above and below.7 On net zero, the main industrial unions actively shore up a project that serves the “class strategies of the Right,” casting ruling class interests as somehow universal.8 GMB, which has significant membership in energy and manufacturing sectors, has been an especially enthusiastic participant in this project. While the union regularly declares that “climate change is real, the climate emergency is happening,” it also supports fracking and airport expansion, and opposes the phase-out of North Sea oil and gas on the basis of jobs and energy security.9 Gary Smith repeatedly bemoans “decarbonisation through industrialisation,” blaming climate policy for “hollowing out working-class communities.”10 Unite’s General Secretary, Sharon Graham, used similar language when opposing the Labour Party’s proposal to end North Sea oil and gas licences, warning that oil and gas workers would become the “coal miners of our generation”11 and insisting that “North Sea workers cannot be sacrificed on the altar of net zero.”12 The mining analogue was enshrined by the TUC in 2024, adopting a motion put forward by Unite and GMB that resolved to “do everything in its power to prevent oil and gas workers becoming the miners of net zero. We will not let them suffer the equivalent of the coal closures, which broke the back of mining towns across the UK.”13

This language implies a nostalgia for the mining jobs that were lost in Thatcher’s destruction of the British coal industry, while misrepresenting this process as a decarbonisation strategy rather than one primarily designed to crush the once-powerful National Union of Miners and representing the general long-term decline of Britain’s competitive advantage as an industrial base. That ongoing unravelling is increasingly attributed to the net zero agenda, rather than global economic stagnation, comparatively high energy rates for British industries, and a habitual state reluctance to invest. Almost every Unite and GMB official I interviewed invoked the disappearance of British coal as a harbinger of an unjust ecological transition, with today’s carbon-intensive workers cast as latter-day miners. Conversely, a National Education Union (NEU) member I interviewed described this framing as a cynical misappropriation of labour history for reactionary ends:

“I hate it because it’s not what that was all about… Thatcher and her ilk were closing it in order to push through neoliberal reforms which have allowed fossil fuel capitalism to expand… I notice in this language of… sacrifice on the altar of net zero… what emotive language on so many different levels to trigger, to trigger rightly the… best elements of the trade union movement… but to do it so duplicitously, in furthering harm to working-class people.”14

Meanwhile, in decrying the sacrifice net zero requires of “ordinary working people,” the right-wing media appropriates the end of coal, a totem of union and working-class power and its ultimate defeat at the hands of capital. Of course, this belies its own cheerleading role in that battle and its ongoing interest in finishing the fight. Erasing the content of the miners’ struggle itself – it’s enough to invoke the pit closures – this episode is presented as an injustice wrought by a wrong-headed environmentalism rather than the deliberate evisceration of working-class opposition to neoliberal reforms. Instead of challenging this revisionism, trade unions reinforce the notion that the decline of coal was ecologically motivated, insinuating that any modern transition must similarly forsake the working class. Once the image of the “altar of net zero” is well seeded in union discourse, the media then quote this language from the mouths of union officials as evidence of a broad consensus of right-minded opinion, rather than the particular interest of fossil capital, completing the co-construction of a common sense in which a diverse audience can find meaning. Here we can decipher the early stages of what Hall et al. identified as “the career of a label”, in which the passing back and forth of an image – in this case the “altar of net zero” – renders it publicly legible even before any such event (sacrifice) has occurred.15 The label attaches to a “composite image” with all the associations of the miners’ defeat and its aftermath: regional decline, deindustrialisation, poverty, communal breakdown, loss of dignity.16 This set of meanings is then ready and waiting to be applied to job losses, as it has to the shrinking of Port Talbot steelworks and the closure of Grangemouth oil refinery, despite these being driven more by financial imperatives than any decarbonisation strategy.

“Take back control”

Those advocating climate delay increasingly instrumentalise class to establish the fault lines of the debate. Following its successful mobilisation in the Brexit campaigns, class is neatly slotted into a patchwork common sense, converting and often conjoining issues as diverse as immigration and low-traffic neighbourhoods into a culture war that sets an authentic, patriotic, ordinary person against a remote, rootless, urban elite. Climate advocates are presented as caring more about working-class consumption than the gargantuan energy sinks of China and India, and the threat of these rising powers is used to justify a nationalistic privileging of the UK’s right to consume energy and produce emissions.

Tellingly, many of Brexit’s key architects have reoriented themselves against the decarbonisation agenda, including the pro-Brexit think tank Policy Exchange, which has received funding from ExxonMobil and provided the policy scaffolding for criminalising climate protest. In 2022, Farage and Tice launched a campaign for a referendum on net zero with the slogan “Vote Power, Not Poverty.”17 The campaign’s logo features a gas burner flame imprinted with the Union Jack, underlining the association of fossil fuels with national sovereignty. The website makes this explicit, replaying Brexit’s call to “take back control,” in this case “of our energy policies and prices” to preserve “British energy and British jobs.” The misnomer that home-drilled fossil fuels increase British energy security is long-rehearsed, even though oil and gas, once drilled, belong to private multinational companies, are sold on international markets to the highest bidder and therefore have no impact on British bills; North Sea oil and gas jobs, meanwhile, are in terminal decline. 

Contrary to its pretensions to energy sovereignty, Reform has no plan to nationalise the energy sector but merely mobilises the symbolic rootedness of oil and gas against the footloose character of renewables: fossil fuels are more obviously tied to a specific territory and therefore more readily amenable, in the logic of nationalism, to proprietary claims of the nation than solar and wind energy.18 While the Labour Party has not (yet) reacted to pressure from the Right by adopting its antipathy to climate policy – as it has on immigration – it has nonetheless embraced the terms of the debate, focusing on the security arguments for phasing out fossil fuels and anointing its renewable energy company Great British Energy. 

Farage has overtly declared net zero to be “the new Brexit.”19 This method takes a real issue – in place of the undemocratic bureaucracies of the EU we have the genuine threat to jobs of mishandled decarbonisation – and stretches it to accommodate all manner of resentments. Here again, some of the largest unions take up the thread: Gary Smith rehearses one of the key rhetorical tropes of the Brexit campaign when he describes the green agenda as involving “too many politicians, too many lobbyists, too many people from the City of London who mix in the same social circles.”20 This is opposed to the oil and gas industry about which Smith says, “we’ve got to stop seeing them as the enemy and… start seeing them as people we can work with.”21 Similarly, GMB supports techno-fixes like hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, and “sustainable” aviation fuels – the favoured approaches of fossil capital. While the interests of large employers and energy companies are thereby rhetorically aligned with ordinary people, Smith establishes an adversary in “the bourgeois environmental lobby.”22 The value of this phrase to a reactionary climate politics is evident in the decision of right-wing website Guido Fawkes to publish the line, “GMB Union Boss: Bourgeois Environmentalists should face reality and back fracking” as its quote of the day.23 The Spectator implicitly acknowledges the significance of a union leader making this claim when it begins an article by asking, “Who do you think said this?… A right-winger irritated by eco-loons?” and answers, with palpable satisfaction: “Nope. It was Gary Smith, General Secretary of the GMB trade union.”24 Platforming an official representative of the working class in this way confers legitimacy on a manifestly ruling-class organ, obscuring the vested interests underpinning its anti-climate policy position.

This idea of a deracinated metropolitan elite making decisions that affect working-class lives is potent because it plays on real power disparity, but in the context of Smith’s argument it belies the intimate relationship between finance, politics, and fossil fuels. The language of interests is crucial: as Hall, drawing on Gramsci, observed, interests are not innately given by class position, but must be “ideologically and politically constructed.”25 The Right, with the complicity of some unions, has effectively transmuted the interests of fossil capital and its various defenders in the realms of politics, finance, and media in securing future profits into the mass interests of holding on to jobs and, to a lesser extent, lowering energy bills. This discourse identifies the real risk of climate action disproportionately impacting those least well off, but instead of contextualising this as a feature of an inherently unequal system, it presents it as a uniquely anti-popular threat. The realities of economic insecurity, ongoing deindustrialisation and social and regional inequality are then refracted through the familiar and intersecting discourses of class, work, and nationalism that represent key nodes of the current common sense.

Like the Vote Leave campaign, the culture war against climate action taps into a pervasive sense of decline and hitches it to a perceived loss of sovereignty, substituting the Brexit bêtes-noires of EU bureaucrats and judges for London-based climate lobbyists, foreign renewable energy companies, and rising economies. Conversely, the trajectory proposed by GMB and Unite is presented as a way to reassert control over how we decarbonise, and particularly over what kinds of jobs we privilege in that process. At the same time, both unions have enthusiastically welcomed rearmament as a boon to their members in the arms and shipbuilding industries, even as high levels of automation and capital-intensity make these poor job multipliers.26 Unite’s only caveat is that the government must “buy British”27 as it becomes “battle-ready.”28 Here too, the interests of a particular industrial worker, disproportionately white and male, in keeping a well-paid job in the military industry are privileged over the wider interests of a more heterogeneous working class in de-escalating global conflict, let alone avoiding the catastrophic ecological impact of war.

Of course, there are pragmatic reasons some unions focus on workers in “traditional” industries: these are genuinely disintegrating, due more to a decades-long process of industrial change, labour dislocation and automation than any ecological imperative. Furthermore, energy and manufacturing are often densely unionised, and swathes of the union leadership and bureaucracy graduated from these sectors. But the centrality of these jobs is also underwritten by a nostalgic attachment to the nation and the misplaced hope that a restorative industrial project could revive the strength of organised labour and the post-war social order with which it coincided. Most workers, and even most union members, are today employed in service sectors. The largest group within Unite is in the health sector; GMB represents tens of thousands of care workers. As both unions acknowledge in other fora, these are disproportionately racialised, women and migrant workers. But they are almost invisible in union interventions on an ecological transition, and the transformation of the economy it surely requires.The Right has long been adept at exploiting the divisions within the working class while also suturing an amorphous idea of “the people” to the nation. The Left’s response has tended to declare the inherent, rather than potential, unity of the working class, as if the announcement itself makes it so. An eco-socialist politics must reckon with the dense matrices of stratification and find ways of overcoming the sectoral, gendered, racialised and nationalised divisions of labour. If unions are to play a role in such a project, they must contribute to an alternative common sense, rather than one that deepens difference and exclusion.

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  1. Pippa Crerar, “Nigel Farage Is a Political Fraud ‘Cosplaying’ as Working-Class Champion, TUC Chief Says,” The Guardian, April 27, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/apr/27/paul-nowak-tuc-reform-nigel-farage-workers ↩︎
  2. GMB Union, “GMB chief slams reform ‘chancers and bankers’,” June 6, 2025, https://www.gmb.org.uk/news/gmb-chief-slams-reform-chancers-and-bankers ↩︎
  3. Jennifer Williams, Jim Pickard and Anna Gross, “How Nigel Farage has gained ground with trade union members,” Financial Times, May 5, 2025, https://www.ft.com/content/99f22666-c2f0-4485-aa86-317b7fd9575c ↩︎
  4. Nigel Farage, “Our victory was seismic and the Reform era is just starting. Here’s everything my government would do – from ditching Net Zero to finally tackling immigration,” The Daily Mail, May 10, 2025, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14696587/NIGEL-FARAGE-victory-Reform-era-government-Net-Zero-immigration.html ↩︎
  5. BBC, “Reform would scrap ‘net stupid zero’ policies – Tice,” March 6, 2025, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c62k75qp1edo ↩︎
  6. Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks: Selections, ed. Quintin Hoare, trans. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1998 [1971]) p.422 ↩︎
  7. Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London: Verso, 2008 [1988]) p.167 ↩︎
  8. Ibid. p.22 ↩︎
  9. GMB Union, “Political and Industrial Failures Will Fuel Climate and Employment Crises,” June 6, 2021, https://www.gmb.org.uk/news/political-and-industrial-failures-will-fuel-climate-and-employment-crises ↩︎
  10. Ian Watson, “Labour’s net zero quest will cost jobs, unions fear,” BBC, 11 September, 2024, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgq2xpxx81lo ↩︎
  11. Heather Stewart, “Union Urges Labour Not to Ban New North Sea Licences Without Plan for Jobs,” The Guardian, May 17, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/may/17/union-urges-labour-not-to-ban-new-north-sea-licences-without-plan-for-jobs ↩︎
  12. Unite the Union, “Unite launches major new campaign in defence of North Sea workers,” May 17, 2024, https://unitelive.org/no-ban-without-plan-campaign-north-sea-workers/ ↩︎
  13. TUC, “Motion 14: A workers’ transition for the North Sea,” 2024, https://congress.tuc.org.uk/motion-14-a-workers-transition-for-the-north-sea/ ↩︎
  14. Interview conducted by author, May 31, 2024. ↩︎
  15. Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Bloomsbury, 2013 [1978]) p.22 ↩︎
  16. Ibid., p.26 ↩︎
  17. https://votepowernotpoverty.uk/ ↩︎
  18. Andreas Malm and Zetkin Collective, White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism (London: Verso Books, 2021) ↩︎
  19. Michael Deacon, “Nigel Farage Is Right – Net Zero Is the New Brexit,” The Telegraph, April 22, 2025, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/04/22/nigel-farage-is-right-net-zero-is-the-new-brexit/ ↩︎
  20. Kate Andrews, “We’ve Cut Carbon Emissions by Decimating Working-Class Communities: The Leader of the GMB Union on the Folly of Net Zero,” The Spectator, September 16, 2023. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/weve-cut-carbon-emissions-by-decimating-working-class-communities-the-leader-of-the-gmb-union-on-the-folly-of-net-zero/ ↩︎
  21. Ibid. ↩︎
  22. Rachel Wearmouth, “Labour Must ‘Face Reality’ on the Energy Crisis and Back Fracking, Says GMB Boss,” New Statesman, September 22, 2022, https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/labour/2022/09/labour-fracking-energy-crisis-gmb-union ↩︎
  23. “GMB Union Boss: Bourgeois Environmentalists Should Face Reality and Back Fracking,” Guido Fawkes, September 22, 2022, https://order-order.com/quote/gmb-union-boss-bourgeois-environmentalists-should-face-reality-and-back-fracking/ ↩︎
  24. Brendan O’Neill, “The Trouble with ‘Bourgeois’ Environmentalism,” The Spectator, September 23, 2022, https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-trouble-with-bourgeois-environmentalism/ ↩︎
  25. Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal ↩︎
  26. Greenpeace, “Arming Europe: Military Spending in the EU and Its Impact on Employment and Economy,” November 2023, https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-italy-stateless/2023/11/d4d111bc-arming-europe.pdf ↩︎
  27. Unite the Union, “Defence Spending: Unite Calls on Commitment to Buy British,” November 2024, https://www.unitetheunion.org/news-events/news/2024/november/defence-spending-unite-calls-on-commitment-to-buy-british/ ↩︎
  28. Kiran Stacey, Dan Sabbagh, and Peter Walker, “Keir Starmer Vows to Make Britain ‘Battle-Ready’ as He Unveils Defence Spending Plans,” The Guardian, June 2, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jun/02/keir-starmer-refuses-date-uk-spend-3-gdp-defence ↩︎

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