Labour’s oil and gas ban shows it’s ready to fight the next election on climate issues | Bill McGuire

While the Tories' dire record on green issues gets worse by the day, Keir Starmer's pledges show an impressive commitment

It's been a long time coming, but at last it seems that voters who give a damn about the climate emergency will have a real choice at the next general election. While the Tories have fiddled, Labour has been putting together a pretty impressive pro-climate portfolio.

The latest pledge to ban all new domestic oil and gas developments and cut off borrowing for fossil fuel-related projects sits in diametric opposition to Tory plans to suck as much oil and gas as possible out of the North Sea. And Labour's goody bag of climate measures contains plenty more that environmentally informed voters can cheer.

Bill McGuire is professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at UCL and author of Hothouse Earth: an Inhabitant's Guide