Lee Anderson raged against the “rich people, politicians and celebrity film stars” who fly to climate change conferences “in their private jets” and “get ordinary people to pay for their mistakes”.
The former Tory deputy chairman was one of the keynote speakers along with Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg at the launch of the New Popular Conservatism movement founded by ex-Prime Minister Liz Truss and former Institue of Economic Affairs Director Mark Littlewood.
The Ashfield MP’s attack on Net Zero policies was part of a wider call for a return to Conservative values and take on the unelected quango state which has detroyed individual liberty and created a nanny state in Britain.
Ms Truss told a packed Emmanuel Centre in Westminster that she believes Britain is “full of secret Conservatives” who need to be given a voice to take on the “woke elites” who are harming the country.
The phrase had echoes of Ronald Reagan’s appeal to “the silent majority” in the 1980s which propelled him to two terms as US President bringing enormous conservative reforms across the Atlantic.
Mr Anderson, who until last month was the Tory deputy chairman, accused the political class of failing to deal with the issues which ordinary people are really concerned about.
He said that while MPs and peers lie awake at night worrying about carbon emissions, normal members of the public do not. Instead he suggested that ordinary voters lie awake worrying about how they will pay their energy bills, which MPs and peers in Parliament do not.
He attacked the annual COP meetings as “gatherings of the rich and celebrities” who make his constituents in Ashfield furious.
Describing talks on politics in his local pub in his Ashfield constituency where he grew up, he said: “I ask them about COP28. They will say to me, that’s a lot of rich people, politicians, movie star celebrities flying into an exotic country, in private jets to tell the poor people, they’ve got to pay for the mistakes that they have made. And it’s that simple. And they absolutely detest it. And I can’t argue with that.”
Mr Anderson drew laughs when he told the audience that he was given “a two word response” when he had suggested that people should be given the option on their energy bills to pay the green levy worth hundreds of pounds or not.
He said: “I suspect just one out of 650 MPs in that place would pay and that’s the Green.”
Ms Truss said: “Britain is full of secret Conservatives, people who agree with us, but don’t want to admit it, because they think it’s not acceptable in their place of work or their school.
“People who are prepared to put their heads above the parapet and come out as Conservative candidates and make Conservative arguments that are vitally important.
“So, this organisation is not just about the members of parliament, is not just about the parliamentary candidates, it’s actually about all of you and supporting all of you to be prepared to get on make those arguments with your friends and colleagues.
“We need to provide each other with support because the left is tough. And if they tried to drown us out.”
She went on: “We need to communicate and share how people’s lives will be improved by these policies.
“Too much time is spent talking about personality issues in the Westminster bubble, but that’s not what people want to hear. What people want to hear is, how are we gonna help them make their lives better? How are we going to help make Britain more successful? How are we going to defend our country?
“Now this fight is not going to be easy. The left have been on the march. They’ve been on the march in our institutions. They’ve been on the march in our corporate world.”
Ms Truss claimed that “leftwing extremism” is now riddled in British public life and warned that her party had failed to take on “repurposed” Marxists who “called themselves other names “to hide their collective ideology.”
She warned: “They say they’re environmentalists. They say that they’re in favour of helping people across all communities. That they are in favour of supporting LGBT people or more groups of ethnic minorities. So, they no longer admit what their ideology is about.”
Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg used his speech to mock former Prime Minister “Sir Anthony Blair, knight of the Garter.”
But he warned that Blair had wrecked the British constitution by setting up laws and institutions like the Human Rights Act, Supreme Court and Equalities Act to “bind future parliaments”.
He argued that it made it almost impossible to push through Conservative policies because of the army of 500 quangos of unelected people wielding huge amounts of power.
Sir Jacob demanded that the UK should as a start leave the European Convention of Human Rights in an effort to restore individual liberty and national sovereignty.
He warned that “so many of our institutions are tied into the ECHR” with its court in Strasbourg and noted that the World Health Organisation (WHO) was taking on similar powers now, too.
He said that the “revolution” against the “unaccountable” bodies and powers was also being seen in the USA, Germany, Holland and France where French farmers have just besieged Paris.
He went on: “What we have seen Tony Blair, so cleverly do was construct the socialist state, where the rights of the individual are subject to the collective and the collective is taken out of the House of Commons, and put into the hands of ‘wise men’.
“This support for the collective has taken away our individual rights to choose, to be democratically accountable.”
He insisted that “popular Conservatism is the answer” to undo “the socialist state”.
