How past climate change policies have shaped Britain today

Blog series Living Knowledge

I love coming to the British Library because it feels incredibly welcoming. It's a beautiful building that’s inspiring to spend time in. I'm currently researching Britain’s climate and energy policies of the 1990s and 2000s. Previously, I’ve worked in politics, in environmental campaigning and as a television producer. It's been quite a varied career, and much of it has been spent in the Library.

In 2016, I wrote a book about the politics and mass culture of 1997. It’s about Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the Spice Girls, Brit Art, Brit Pop, the death of Princess Diana and the inspiring campaign for justice by the family of Stephen Lawrence. In the late 1990s, there was an enormous amount of progressive hope about the future of Britain. My book is about how a lot of those dreams ended in disappointment, and how a lot of the anger that we're seeing in the UK now is a consequence of that.

I’m looking at the impact of past climate policies on the country today

At the moment, I’m looking at the massive impact of that era’s climate policies on the country today – from why the cost of living has gone up to the present geopolitical situation. I’m investigating why, in some ways, UK governments have made a decent contribution to preventing climate change, while, in other ways, we're falling behind.

For example, I ask why British governments didn't intervene in the energy sector in the 1990s and early 2000s to increase domestic energy production, particularly with regards to clean and sustainable energy. The argument that’s generally made is that they were committed to free market ideas. But what my research is starting to identify is that actually, where energy was concerned, they were motivated by energy security and geopolitics to extend free markets and free trade.

I’m doing the first research on how politicians made these big decisions

My research helps us understand why the cost of living is so high right now, why the UK is starting to fall behind as a climate leader, and why we are in a vulnerable geopolitical position while the Russian government has a lot of leverage. Scholars, journalists and politicians have come up with explanations for our present circumstances, but some of those explanations seem to be contradicted by the evidence.

There has been a small amount of research done on these questions, but it focuses on the big, long-term structural causes of political events. I think I’m doing the first research on how individual politicians and civil servants, some of whom were household names, made big decisions which continue to affect our lives.

For those in power, the lesson seems to be that if you invest in domestic clean energy production, not only are you going to protect the planet for future generations, but you're also going to bring down bills and create good jobs in the industrial energy sector. That investment didn't happen 20 years ago. We should be doing it now, because, as we’ve seen, the longer you leave it, the longer it takes to get up to speed.

Historical newspaper archives are a click of a button away

The Library is really useful to me because it covers all the bases. Historical newspaper archives are a click of a button away and there's an expert in the building who can guide me through those sources. If I need to get a quick overview of some theoretical ideas or economic history, to understand the context of the subjects I'm writing about – by reading journals, for example – all the sources I need are on hand.

They say that journalism is the first draft of history – so when you're studying political history, you definitely want to go and read contemporary news reports. They tell you a lot about what people thought was going on at the time. When I’m deciding what I'm going to ask a politician about what they did in the 90s, I read what they said publically, and what their colleagues and adversaries said, in the Library’s newspaper archive. Newspaper reporting often includes gossip, and it's really useful to be able to put it to an interviewee and say, is that what happened? It gets them engaged, and they might end up telling me something more accurate.

Having access to online journals at the Library makes life so easy, as does being able to access Library content on my own computer. For some research that I did a few years ago, I used one of the Library computers to read diplomatic cables from the 1970s. It was extraordinary that they were available for me to look at. This is a recent phenomenon: ten years ago, it would have seemed astounding.

This is a building that belongs to everyone

I've been a journalist for many years, and interviewed lots of people, but I'm new to oral history research methods. The Library is one of the world centres for oral history archives, and there are some fantastic interviews in the collection: you can hear what oral history sounds like when it’s done well.

It's lovely to occasionally bump into somebody I know at the Library and feel like we share this incredible space designed for doing hard, interesting work. I also feel that way about all the people whom I sit alongside in the Reading Rooms: I know we're all here for the same reason. I love that there are teenagers revising for their A levels out in the cafe. This is a building that belongs to everyone: we're all using it in our different ways to improve our minds. It’s great to see parents with their buggies, and kids running around in the atrium and the Piazza. It feels like a true public space, and that's really rare these days.

As told to Lucy Peters

Richard Power-Sayeed's book '1997: The Future That Never Happened' was published in 2017.

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