The answer to an anti-green backlash is to be redder

Labour must not follow the Tories downwards, Paul Mason writes, as they grasp at electoral straws.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/the-answer-to-an-anti-green-backlash-is-to-be-redder


The Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, did not rally to the defence of his party’s demonised London mayor, Sadiq Khan (JessicaGirvan/shutterstock.com)

By dawn on Friday July 21st, Britain’s ruling Conservative Party had been routed in parliamentary by-elections in two of its rural English strongholds. In Somerton and Frome in the south-west, where a military-helicopter base sits alongside picturesque villages, the Liberal Democrats overturned a 19,000 majority. In Selby and Ainsty, which covers farmland between Leeds and York in the north, Labour destroyed a 20,000 majority, establishing a 4,000-vote advantage of its own. On any other night this would have registered as a political earthquake. But the headlines were set by a third by-election, in the London suburb of Uxbridge—former seat of the disgraced prime minister Boris Johnson. Here, against the odds, the Tories narrowly won.

Clean-air scheme

Uxbridge stayed Tory because its voters turned out to protest against a London-wide clean-air scheme, the Ultra-Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), imposed by the city’s Labour (and first Muslim) mayor, Sadiq Khan. ULEZ requires cars to comply with strict rules on emissions of nitrous oxide, which causes 4,000 premature deaths a year in the city, according to research. Cars that breach the criteria have to pay a punitive £12.50 per day to enter the zone. ULEZ is already in force in central London, where pollution levels are the equivalent of each adult involuntarily smoking 150 cigarettes a year. But Khan plans to extended the scheme to outer London, whose suburban populations are heavily reliant on car transport and whose workforce includes many embodiments of ‘white van man’—skilled manual workers and delivery drivers whose jobs depend on their ability to drive. Despite only 10 per cent of cars needing to be scrapped under the scheme, according to the mayor, the Tories succeeded in making ULEZ a cause célèbre. They pitted the gritty suburbs against the high-rise city-centre dwellers, Tory local councils against the overweening London state, ‘ordinary Joes’ against the ‘woke’ eco-warriors. Removing their party logo from posters, the Tories turned the by-election into a single-issue referendum on ULEZ—and narrowly won.

‘Green crap’

Though ULEZ is not, technically, a climate-related measure, the lessons were immediately generalised, and indeed catastrophised, on both sides of politics. Suddenly, if only it could get rid of all the ‘green crap’—as the last Conservative prime minister but three, David Cameron, once determined—the flailing government of Rishi Sunak could see a route away from general-election disaster next year. Lord Frost, architect of Johnson’s ‘hard Brexit’ strategy, urged Sunak to abandon the commitment to phasing out petrol and diesel cars by 2030. Most Brits, he argued, would benefit from climate change, as cold killed more people than extreme heat.

Labour, meanwhile, entered self-flagellation mode. Its entire electoral focus—in the context of the United Kingdom’s unreformed, first-past-the-post system, centring on outcomes in a few marginal constituencies—has been on winning in conservative, small-town or suburban working-class communities such as Uxbridge. It allowed its local candidate to oppose the ULEZ extension, while the party leader, Sir Keir Starmer, adopted a neutral position. In the aftermath of defeat, numerous voices—from the energy unions to the former Labour prime minister Tony Blair—suggested the party should avoid asking voters to shoulder the ‘huge burden’ of climate-mitigation measures. For climate campaigners, the fear is that—as with the proverbial butterfly in chaos theory—the votes of 490 people in Uxbridge could tip Britain’s two main parties into practical abandonment of the UK’s legally-binding 2050 net-zero target. Labour has committed to achieving a carbon-free electricity supply by 2030 and to spending £28 billion a year on decarbonising the economy. But it has already pared back that sum on grounds of fiscal risks and, if Sunak makes a bonfire of green commitments, will be under pressure to do likewise.

Extremely committed..................

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