Kent’s Climate Rollback Isn’t Debate: It’s the Right-Wing Playbook, Laid Bare

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/sep/11/reform-council-motions-to-rescind-climate-emergency-declaration?utm_source=

Kent County Council is moving to rescind its 2019 climate emergency declaration. The motion, driven by Reform UK, claims the declaration is “stifling debate” and proposes replacing the county’s net zero 2030 target with an “energy efficiency plan focused on financial returns.” At a time when Kent faces severe water stress, rising sea levels, and record-breaking heatwaves, this rollback is more than reckless, it’s a blueprint for how the rising right manipulates language and policy to dismantle climate action.

This is where environmental advocacy, public relations strategy, and behavioural change intersect with politics. Because politics is not abstract, it is the arena where accountability is either enforced or eroded, where language becomes a weapon, and where narratives are shaped to protect vested interests.

They call it “stifling debate.” Translation: accountability makes us uncomfortable, so we’ll remove the obligation entirely. Replace a net-zero target with a plan “focused on financial returns” and “additional revenue streams”, and you have a motion that reads like a manifesto to prioritise profit over people. Kent is already water-stressed, facing summer heatwaves, threatened by sea-level rise and emerging diseases. This is not speculative. It is immediate. Yet the response is ideological retreat.

If you want to understand how this happens, learn the Overton technique. First you seed doubt. You amplify a marginal voice. You create controversy that the media licks up because controversy feeds clicks. You do not care if the coverage is positive or negative, you only care that the story exists and that people argue about it. The goal isn’t persuasion; it’s normalisation. Over time, what was once outrageous becomes acceptable. That is how huge shifts in policy happen without open consent: by fatigue, by distraction, by spectacle.

Look at the pattern. Councils across the country, bodies that once acknowledged the need for urgent action, are now being encouraged to back-pedal on commitments. Durham, West Northamptonshire, now Kent. It’s not accidental. It is coordinated cultural repositioning. The tactic is to frame climate action as theatre or virtue signalling, something expensive, something for elites, rather than what it actually is: preparation, protection, and basic governance.

And why does this land? Because media is not a neutral arbiter. The idea that news exists to inform the public with civic duty at its core is a myth. Newsrooms operate inside a commodified system that rewards engagement, outrage and repeat views. Algorithms pick what’s polarising and feed it back with clinical efficiency. Outrage funds the industry. The more people argue, the more ad impressions and data get harvested. So when Reform UK loudly declares rescinding a climate emergency as a triumph of “debate,” the attention machine greets it like a gift.

Worse: the media frequently frames these moments as two-sided dramas, giving equal time to a movement that is actively trying to dismantle scientific and civic consensus. That false balance is not accidental. It’s convenient. It keeps eyeballs, it keeps the narrative alive, and, crucially, it gives the perpetrators cover to say “we were simply opening a conversation.” No. You manufactured the conversation to win by attrition.

And who pays the price for that attrition? The already vulnerable. When councils make climate optional, it is women, low-income families, the elderly, and marginalised communities who shoulder the costs. When infrastructure fails, when flood defences are downgraded, when heatwaves kill because homes weren’t adapted, those are not abstract policy outcomes. They are deaths, illness, ruined livelihoods. Women bear disproportionate burden in every step: care responsibilities, insecure housing, less access to resources. A rollback in climate commitment is not just a policy failure, it’s a gendered harm.

This is not theoretical armchair activism. This is the consequence of a system designed by men for men, one that begins in conquest and extraction and still runs on those rails. Colonial extraction built the networks and wealth that let institutions like ours debate in comfort. Now those same systems are being defended by arguments that declare any intervention “too costly.” The hypocrisy is obscene: we sit in safety and say “we can’t afford the measures” while the wealth that could fund them flows through corporate machines that extract profit and wash it off as “investment.”

So what do you do? Stop playing by their rules.

1. Don’t feed the spectacle. The instinct to tweet, to argue in the comments, is exactly what the machine wants. Engagement equals oxygen. If you must engage, do so strategically: amplify affected voices, demand evidence, and call for cost risk transparency, not opinion pieces dressed as policy.

2. Force the accounting to be honest. When a council claims “financial returns” as reason to scrap climate duty, demand the full ledger: not only the immediate savings but the long-term costs to health, housing, local business resilience and human lives. Show them the math they don’t want to show.

3. Centre those who bear harm. Women, the elderly, low-income households: put them in the room when decisions are made. Make adaptation and justice the metrics of success, not shareholder dividends.

4. Hold corporations to their operational responsibilities. If your local economy benefits from extraction, tourism, or industry, then those profits should directly underwrite resilience, not siphon overseas. Corporate social responsibility cannot be a PR appendix. It must be operational and compulsory.

5. Demand media reform. Accountability is not a buzzword; it is structural. We should insist that public interest journalism is rewarded, not outrage. We should fund and protect outlets that prioritise evidence, not clicks.

This moment is a test. It reveals how fragile our democratic norms are when economic language is weaponised to erase responsibility. It exposes how easily our public conversation can be transformed into a theatre of distraction. But it also shows where power actually sits: in the hands of institutions, corporations, and organs of attention. That means the solutions are operational. They are logistical. They are PR-savvy, which is where I live.

If you are an organiser, a campaigner, anyone with a platform, use it to refuse complacency. If you are a citizen, be tactical in how you engage. If you are a corporate actor, remember: extracting profit without investing in the communities and ecosystems that make that profit possible is not sustainable. It’s theft.

Kent’s motion is not debate. It is an effort to disinfect culpability with language. Call it what it is: a retreat by those who fear responsibility. And then corner them, publicly, relentlessly, until accountability becomes the only option left.

Late-stage capitalism does not get to rebrand itself into legitimacy while the rest of us pay the bill. Not today. Not ever.

Kent’s Climate Rollback Isn’t Debate: It’s the Right-Wing Playbook, Laid Bare - By Jack Jardine