Miatta Fahnbulleh, who has just become the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero – and has been very involved with helping Burnham’s strategy over the past few months – is so far the most successful MP from the Labour party’s 2024 intake. She has risen from the backbenches to a full senior cabinet position within two short years, a very rare achievement made even more impressive by the fact that Labour won a landslide majority in 2024 after a dismal performance in 2019, meaning there are many new, sharp-elbowed MPs also trying to make their way up.
Part of the explanation for her meteoric rise may be her experience in Westminster, both in the Cabinet Office and think tanks. Fahnbulleh was director of policy and research at the Institute for Public Policy Research, arguably the most important centre-left think tank in Britain, followed by heading up the New Economics Foundation (NEF) for six years.
The NEF has an interesting claim to fame which may give you some idea of its institutional outlook on climate issues. It can claim to be the origin of the phrase ‘Green New Deal’, which was the title of a report that it published in July 2008. That report’s co-authors included Caroline Lucas of the Green party, Larry Elliott of the Guardian and Richard Murphy, best known for his advocacy of Modern Monetary Theory (printing money for the government to spend) and his influence on the Corbyn-era Labour party.
Fahnbulleh was in charge of the NEF in a period when calls for radical action on climate change were at their peak, between 2017 and 2023. Her statements about climate change at the time show that she was no wilting flower on the issue. In one article from 2019, she says that the aim should be net-zero carbon within the next ten to fifteen years. Elsewhere she described environmental change as the most profound crisis, that ‘avoiding climate breakdown and reversing the decline of species is the fight of our lives’.
Burnham is, if the briefings are believed, planning to press ahead with drilling for North Sea oil and gas. When Fahnbulleh was still chief executive of the NEF, the think tank released a blog saying that exploiting oil in the North Sea would make the cost-of-living crisis worse for families, by ‘impeding progress towards a secure, cheap and renewable source of domestic energy’. So if the country does press ahead with drilling under Fahnbulleh we will, by the logic of her own think tank, be making ourselves poorer.
When Ed Miliband was energy secretary, he was consistently able to defy Keir Starmer and Morgan McSweeney and block oil and gas licenses. He was able to do this partly because of his own political constituency, his popularity with the PLP, the Labour membership and his experience as party leader. It is possible that Fahnbulleh has found herself as energy secretary precisely because she is from the 2024 intake, an unknown quantity whose hand can be forced. This may also be the reasoning behind making John Healey, rather than someone more senior, chancellor. It gives No. 10 less resistance and therefore more power.
Whatever the political logic, it looks likely that Fahnbulleh will have to put her name to a set of policies that she evidently does not agree with. It’s a dirty game.
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