Say what you will about Britain’s outgoing prime minister, Boris Johnson, but when he was making things up he didn’t go for half-measures.
Laura Dodsworth, writing in CapX:
In October 2021 Boris Johnson pledged that Britain could meet its ambitious net zero targets ‘without so much as a hair shirt in sight’ as the Government set out its plans to decarbonise the economy. ‘Green is good,’ he said, and not ‘inextricably bound up with a sense that we have to sacrifice the things we love’.
With Britain facing energy bills that give (only somewhat accidentally) a taste of what net zero will be like, Johnson can consider himself lucky that he will be out of office before winter comes.
Although he couldn’t reasonably have been expected to admit it, it is worth noting that for many climate fundamentalists, although not, to be fair, Johnson, the hair shirt is a big part of what attracts them. Pointless asceticism has been a feature of many creeds over the centuries, not least those, like climate fundamentalism, that have more than a hint of millenarian fervor about them. Among its benefits are the opportunities it offers for moral preening and, of course, the chance to police the behavior of others.
Dodsworth:
Lis Costa, managing director of the Behaviourial Insights Team – aka the Nudge Unit – has said her team is ‘considering the full remit of its policy toolbox” to reduce household demand. Along with subsidies for vulnerable households, she has proposed sending letters to households to let them know how their energy use compares with their neighbours.
The Behavioural Insights Team?
The Behavioural Insights Team, often known by our other name The Nudge Unit, is a unique company. We started life inside No 10 Downing Street as the world’s first government institution dedicated to the application of behavioural sciences.
We are now a world-leading consulting firm whose mission is to help organisations in the UK and overseas to apply behavioural insights in support of social purpose goals.
Since December 2021 BIT has been wholly owned by Nesta, the UK’s leading innovation charity.
BIT coined the term ‘behavioural insights’ in 2010 to help bring together ideas from a range of inter-related academic disciplines (behavioural economics, psychology, and social anthropology). These fields seek to understand how individuals take decisions in practice and how they are likely to respond to options. Their insights enable us to design policies or interventions that can encourage, support and enable people to make better choices for themselves and society.
“Better choices.”
There is nothing creepy about that, nothing at all.
When the UK coalition government was formed in May 2010, the new prime minister, David Cameron, translated his enthusiasm for the theory of behavioural insights or ‘nudge’ into reality. He helped set up the Behavioural Insights Team at the centre of government, and encouraged them to innovate and create policy initiatives based on their theories of influence and persuasion.
Yet another reminder that under Cameron, May, and Johnson, the Tories became another party of the big state and, while they were at it, nanny’s little helpers.
Dodsworth:
This is not the first time the Nudge Unit has proposed ‘energy leaderboards’. Back in 2011 they suggested emulating US firm Opower’s ‘success’ in a neighbourhood energy comparison scheme which resulted in a reduction of 2-3% in energy use . . .
Energy leaderboards are a classic nudge, but a distasteful tool, reminiscent of communist bloc policing. What next, dunce caps for the worst energy consumers? Corner time in the close for gas guzzlers? Remove the covers of our electricity and gas meters so neighbours can come and inspect our selfish energy consumption on a daily basis?
. . . ‘Social norms’ were deployed by the [Tory] Government and public heath bodies to encourage compliance with lockdown rules. Nudge Unit reports are littered with language that betrays a disdainful view of autonomy and agency. We have a ‘powerful tendency to conform’ according to one report which was published and then rapidly unpublished in the same week that Boris Johnson promised no hair shirts. And if the idea of an energy leaderboard letter chafes, be aware that, among myriad interventions, the same report proposed ‘stronger carbon taxes’ on meat and travel.
Ah, the wars against (checks list) meat, cars, and air travel. Of course.
Dodsworth:
Successive UK governments have put the emissions-reduction agenda before affordability and security of supply. Reducing energy is not like reducing food waste. It represents an immiserating race to the bottom. A modern, prosperous and contented society requires energy. We expect the Government to provide energy security, not exert subliminal pressure to change people’s behaviour, purely in order to cover up its own policy failures.
The Nudge Unit is manifestly and obnoxiously obsessed with climate change, and out of touch with the plight of millions of households this winter. They have produced various reports with climate nudge suggestions from influencing children in schools, to taxing meat, to changing the weather reports (evident in the last heatwave!) to product placement in dramas . . .
It is not up to . . . the Nudge Unit to say what household energy should be, or that subsidies should be the remedy for rising energy prices. It is the cross-party political consensus on climate/Net Zero that needs a nudge. Not us.
Of course, this sort of dystopian thinking could never take root over here.
Could it?