The British right’s hostility to climate action is deeply entrenched – and extremely dangerous | John Harris

With voters increasingly fearful about fires, floods and extreme temperatures, can the Tories find a way back towards reality?

On 8 November 1989, Margaret Thatcher gave a 4,000-word address to the United Nations general assembly in New York. It was an eloquent, urgent speech, book-ended with references to Charles Darwin and John Milton's Paradise Lost, and full of portents of looming climate disaster that we now know all too well: the melting of polar ice, the shrinking of the Amazon rainforest, and the prospect of more frequent hurricanes, floods and water shortages.

In response, squabbling over who is responsible or who should pay" was a self-evident path to catastrophe: what was needed, she told her audience, was a vast international, co-operative effort", with no refusers or deniers. Every country will be affected," she said, and no one can opt out."

John Harris is a Guardian columnist