PopCon group has links with climate science denial groups and those with links to the fossil fuel industry.

Yesterday saw disgraced former Prime Minister Liz Truss launch her new Popular Conservatism group, also known as PopCon, in a bid to push the Tory party further to the right.

Truss, whose premiership ended in disaster, has launched the group which describes itself as a “new movement aiming to restore democratic accountability to Britain and deliver popular conservative policies.” Its supporters include right wing Tory MPs such as Jacob Rees-Mogg and Lee Anderson.

Yesterday’s event saw the likes of Truss rail against the left, telling the conference that the left had “repurposed” themselves as environmentalists, LGBT+ rights advocates and anti-racism campaigners to avoid detection.

What she wasn’t very keen for people to find out however is that her PopCon group has links with climate science denial groups and those with links to the fossil fuel industry.

That might help explain why the group hosted politicians attacking net zero policies, while leaflets handed out at the event called for an end to ‘net zero zealotry’.

In attendance at the PopCon event was Lord Frost, who is a director of the climate science denial Global Warming Policy Foundation, as well as Conservative MP Lee Anderson and Reform party president Nigel Farage.

DeSmog reports on the links: “PopCon director Mark Littlewood is the outgoing managing director of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), an influential free market think tank that has talked up its access to government.

“The IEA received funding from oil company BP every year from 1967 to 2018, according to an Unearthed investigation confirmed by the IEA. Both IEA and BP have declined to say if this funding continues, when asked by DeSmog.”

Littlewood took aim at Net Zero targets at the conference, telling the audience “the Climate Change Committee, pronouncing on our progress to the eye-wateringly [sic] expensive and almost certainly unachievable aim of being carbon net zero”.

Lee Anderson told the audience: “If we became net zero tomorrow, this country… it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference to the earth’s atmosphere.”

We shouldn’t forget that Truss has close links with the IEA, which provided a number of ideas behind her disastrous mini-budget. In 2022, Truss’s campaign for Tory leader was run by Ruth Porter, a former communications director at the IEA.

The Guardian has previously reported on how the IEA has ‘published at least four books, as well as multiple articles and papers, over two decades suggesting manmade climate change may be uncertain or exaggerated.’

Also in attendance at the PopCon event was Nigel Farage, honorary president of right-wing party Reform UK, which campaigns to “scrap net zero”.

Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward

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