Joe Manchin’s Green Energy Sanity Has Its Day—in Britain

What would happen to the Democratic Party if anyone actually listened to Joe Manchin on energy policy? Britain’s Labour Party is set on finding out.

The latest news from the U.K. is that Labour is scaling back large portions of a climate agenda that used to be taken as an article of faith among many of its politicians and donors, as well as a chunk of its voters. The party has dialed back its promise to spend £28 billion a year on accelerating a transition to net-zero carbon emissions. It’s making its peace with continued oil and gas exploration in the North Sea. Labour leaders appear to be in the process of sidelining one of the politicians most associated with the party’s green agenda. And that’s only what they’ve done in June.

Labour’s modulation on Britain’s oil and gas industry is the most significant. The North Sea’s resources should be the foundation of the U.K.’s national energy-security strategy. Yet Labour leader Keir Starmer in January pledged to shut it down, arguing the solution to Britain’s energy woes was “not new investment, not new fields” for oil and gas in the region.

Labor unions quickly launched a rear-guard action against the policy on the not-unreasonable grounds that the oil and gas industry is a big creator of well-paid, unionized jobs. Opinion polling suggested Mr. Starmer’s hostility to North Sea production would cost Labour votes in Scotland, where most of the industry is based and where Labour needs to win back voters from a local separatist party to remain competitive nationally.

Cue the reversal. Oil and gas “will play a crucial part in our energy mix for decades to come,” Mr. Starmer admitted in mid-June. The plan he has rolled out is rather different in effect from the one he seemed to promise six months ago. Labour would block new oil and gas licenses, but it would allow continued exploration and production under existing licenses. And wouldn’t you know, most North Sea reserves are accessible under existing licenses.

Elsewhere, Labour’s proposed green investment fund is on ice. Critics had lambasted the idea, set to be funded by new debt, as fiscally irresponsible given that debt service already is starting to weigh on the budget. Rachel Reeves, Mr. Starmer’s deputy in charge of formulating economic policies, now says the spending would ramp up gradually over a five-year parliamentary term if Labour wins the next election, rather than the original plan to start immediately.

Then there’s the reported sidelining of Ed Miliband. He’s the U.K. version of John Kerry —an awkward, oddly haired urban leftist and former party leader with a losing record who has shifted into climate activism. He was the architect of many of the ideas Mr. Starmer is ditching, and party officials are leaking to the media that Mr. Miliband’s policy-making role will be scaled back in a leadership reshuffle in July. The point would be to keep him from scaring voters with outlandish climate plans.

Back in West Virginia, Mr. Manchin must be wondering what he has to do to induce a similar transformation in the Democratic Party. He’s been trying for years to warn his colleagues that the climate agenda is a loser among blue-collar voters. Those voters understand that the war on carbon is jacking up energy costs and robbing them of good jobs in energy production and energy-intensive industries.

Mr. Manchin has seen the political consequences up close, as energy-rich West Virginia has grown redder and redder. Yet Democratic leaders keep acting as if it doesn’t matter believing they’ll make up the difference in blue cities and suburbs.

The Labour Party doesn’t have the luxury of writing off parts of the electorate. It got crushed in the last national election, in December 2019, when blue-collar voters concluded that Labour under radical left-wing leader Jeremy Corbyn was an economic, cultural and moral menace. The main story of that election was the crumbling of the so-called Red Wall, a string of parliamentary districts across the former industrial heartland of the north of England that had reliably voted Labour (the “red” party) for decades before turning against Mr. Corbyn.

This is part of why Labour has been quicker than the Democrats to pivot. It perhaps helps that Britain has no Donald Trump to lend the left-wing party an era of sanity-by-default and no Russia-collusion hoax to excuse or obscure Labour’s electoral shortcomings. There’s also no far-left blue-state donor base to encourage the delusion that climate can be a winning issue with working-class voters. Labour has realized it will win back its traditional base or it will lose.

Whatever the reason, it’s clear Labour is betting there’s more political merit in persuading its urban-left contingent to accept scaled-back green schemes than there is in browbeating blue-collar voters for being insufficiently climate-minded. American Democrats appear hell-bent on doing the opposite. Place your bets on which will win more races.