
Despite holding wages down, Rishi Sunak has a new found concern for living standards. It's not fair, he explained, to force people to buy electric cars and rip out old boilers for heat pumps. The state, he argued, should not be making consumer choices by putting taxes on meat and increasing levies on flights. And it is far too much to expect hard-pressed land lords to take responsibility for the energy efficiency of the homes they let out. Sunak is hoping that by posing as Mr Money Saver while warding off the nannying tendencies of an overweening state will score him some political points. He asserted that these were "hard choices", and taken in the round they don't mean the government are abandoning net zero by 2050. Rather, as a world leader in emissions reduction (forgetting, on purpose, that Britain exported its emissions to China and the Pacific Rim when it outsourced manufacturing there decades ago) we can afford to ease up a little.
It's all a load of rubbish, isn't it? There was never any plan to tax meat. The state was never going to limit the number of lone car journeys. Households ere not going to have seven bins. It's all a lie. While the announcement that extra grants will be available for boiler replacement, the rest of Sunak's speech is twaddle. So egregious, so bad it was that even Labour were forced to do an opposition and say it would keep the old targets. That's as good as saying to Ford et al not to bother changing their plans, because they know too that Starmer in Number 10 is a dead cert. Why then has Sunak decided to rip up years of planning and make Britain, once again, the laughing stock of economic policy wonks and a "how not to" case study for global business coverage?
It comes back to the politics, at the end of it. The Tories' links with and funding by fossil fuel capital is long-standing, and remains the case. In 2022-23, the party received donations of £3.5m from this quarter. And those are the publicly declared ones. How much cash went through the dining clubs? Delaying the steps toward net zero protects the domestic fuel market for them a little while longer, but this is not the primary consideration. As forecast, the Tories' narrow win at the Uxbridge by-election offered a glimmer of hope. Perhaps if they and their media allies can drive a wedge between the "green crap" and Britain's hard-pressed motorists, the punters might overlook the horrors of the last 13 years and vote to keep petrol costs down and their communities ultra-low emission zone-free. I suppose it's a strategy. With the polls offering no hope and Sunak's personal ratings approaching those enjoyed by his predecessor, where else to go? Though to repackage Liz Truss's "ideas" 48 hours after her ridiculous speech and underlining the point that the Tories are running on vapours so quickly was a bit of a surprise.
Any serious green modernisation project has to be state-led. It cannot be left to hoping that consumers will make the right choice, which is how Sunak is choosing to cover his inaction. But putting the politics first and gambling that this is going to win over new supporters is wishful thinking. When Sunak trailed his anti-Green pitch in July, it excited no one but the Tory editorials. There is no public desire to go slower on green measures, and the main take away for anyone looking at this askance is the government, yet again, is not taking climate change and environmental crisis seriously. It appears Sunak and most senior Tories cannot grasp that car owners are also people with other interests and concerns, and one of them happens to be not burning the planet to a crisp. Sunak has more or less opened the gate and invited the Greens in to take away as many former Tory voters they can carry. He's reinforced his impressive out-of-touch scores, and told the public - particularly younger people - that the main threat to their way of life counts for nothing. Have we reached the floor of Tory support? We're about to find out.
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