Britain is “going bust” in its pursuit of net zero and its zeal to tackle climate change without collective action from the rest of the world, the right-leaning media tycoon behind GB News has told the Financial Times.
Hedge fund boss Sir Paul Marshall is urging the UK government to repeal the Climate Change Act and exploit its oil and gas reserves, as he argues Europe is engaging in “unilateral economic disarmament” over the green transition.
It has been a mistake to allow Asia and the Middle East a far slower rate of transition, he believes, saying that Donald Trump’s move to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement has “accelerated” concerns about Europe’s “collective action problem” with climate measures.
“Either the world either agrees to do this together, or you can’t do it on your own,” he said.
The UK has the “most expensive industrial electricity costs on the planet”, he said. “So we are going bust as a country. People in markets understand that. But politics is behind markets.”
The Trump move to withdraw from the Paris agreement for the second time has not been followed by any other country, and comes despite scientific evidence showing the world is still warming as emissions rise. Last year was the hottest on record, with the global average temperature rising 1.5C above pre-industrial levels for the first time.
Marshall Wace, the hedge fund run by Marshall, lists investments in Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, Equinor and other fossil fuel companies among its portfolio.
Energy policy will form a key theme at the third annual Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (Arc) conference in London next week, which will host Trump’s new energy secretary Chris Wright as a keynote speaker alongside right-leaning figures including Vivek Ramaswamy, US Speaker Mike Johnson, American billionaire Peter Thiel and controversial Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, some of whom will join virtually.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and former Tory Cabinet minister Michael Gove — who now edits the Spectator magazine that Marshall bought last autumn — will also address the event.
The meeting of 4,000 people aims to shake up “stagnant” philosophies in the west, amid Marshall’s concern that dysfunction in Westminster and Washington has derived from politicians only “dimly” apprehending ideas.
Debates about the economic cost of net zero, the value of the family, declining birth rates, free trade, and the disruption caused by technology will take place during the three-day event, which has more than doubled its in-person audience since its inception in 2023.
Marshall said “there’s something in the air that Arc is capturing”, but insisted that this cultural shift was “upstream of politics”, rather than propelled by the tailwinds of the thriving Maga movement in the US. “The Trump election is entirely coincidental,” he added.
Marshall said he is “glad and astonished” by the UK government’s decision this week to side with the US in refusing to sign a joint communique at the AI Summit in Paris — approved by around 60 states, including France, Germany, India and China — that pledged to ensure “AI is open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure and trustworthy”.
The move was seen as an attempt by the UK, which hosted a previous AI safety summit, to foster better relations with Trump’s administration.
Marshall said the decision was “the first example of a proper decision to diverge from Europe on something important in technology”, other than the UK’s approach to vaccine procurement during the pandemic.
“We totally failed [to diverge from the EU] on Bitcoin and digital stablecoin . . . We’ve done nothing on biotech and agritech to deregulate,” he added. He also said the last Tory administration had focused too heavily on AI safety rather than innovation.
In wider society, the pendulum on “woke” culture is “shifting very fast” in the US and in the financial world, Marshall said, pointing to a growing backlash against the environmental, social and governance (ESG) agenda.
“That was happening well before Trump was elected,” he said, citing states such as Texas “blacklisting” the US investment giant BlackRock on account of their ESG policies. Republican states are becoming “much more activist about this”, he added.
Tory peer Baroness Philippa Stroud, co-founder and chief executive of Arc, said a cultural change was under way in the UK too, bolstered by a willingness in society to challenge the “intolerance” associated with some progressive ideas.
“More and more people are growing in confidence to express their opinions openly. They have opinions that they always held, they just went quiet,” she said.
Stroud said Arc was about crafting a positive, “hope-filled” vision of the future to combat western “narratives of declinism, perma-crisis, poly-crisis”. Critics, however, have labelled the conference the “anti-woke Davos” and attacked its talking points.
Although Marshall played down links to his wider media empire — insisting the conference is a “different project” — executives in the industry see Arc as an in-person embodiment of UnHerd, the opinion-heavy website that features many of the same people who will be at the conference such as Peterson.
Marshall has become the UK’s newest minted media baron in recent years, with a large stake in GB News — the TV channel that features Farage and former Tory politicians as presenters — as well as the acquisition of the conservative Spectator magazine last year for about £100mn.
These right of centre media outlets have given the hedge fund boss influence in Westminster; while he insisted that Arc is not a political project, he admitted that it is “trying to contribute to the public debate” in a similar manner to his wider media empire.
He described UnHerd as having “heterodox” viewpoints, arguing that “it is impossible to pinpoint politically where UnHerd is”.
The Spectator, he conceded, is more traditionally Conservative, but with a possible “turf war” over elements of “blue Labour” — a group of normally working class and culturally conservative voters who nonetheless currently align with the left- wing party.
The 65-year-old evangelical Christian played down the importance of faith in his political views, arguing that “faith and politics do not mix well . . . it’s a dangerous combination”, a position that sets him at odds with some on the rightwing of American politics who use their religion as a guide for social policies.
Marshall was embroiled in controversy last year after campaign group Hope not Hate revealed that he had liked and reposted content from far-right accounts on social media. This included posts on X suggesting that “native” Europeans were “losing patience with the fake refugee invaders”. His spokesperson said at the time that the selection of posts, which were deleted, did “not represent his views”.
Despite dominating much political debate, migration is not one of the five core themes of Arc this year, he said.
Marshall has been on a political journey: the former Lib Dem parliamentary candidate went on to become a major Brexit backer and Tory donor, and today is not a member of any party. But he insisted a consistent thread of his beliefs had been the importance of citizenship and balancing rights with responsibility.
