The UK: Must change? Won’t change!
Backlashes against green taxes speak to a paralysed future
Greetings, this piece is free to read but please support my journalism by signing up as a paying subscriber (cost £1.15 a week) or as a free subscriber (cost, well, nothing). Best, Nick
All sane commentators expect the British Conservatives to lose the next general election. To reinforce their conviction, the government suffered staggering defeats in two by elections early this morning.
In the West Country constituency of Somerset and Frome the Liberal Democrats overturned a 19,000 Conservative majority to take the seat with 55 per cent of the vote. In Selby in Yorkshire an astonishing Labour victory showed that the Brexiteers “northern strategy” was dead. Boris Johnson was meant to have given the Conservatives new territory by smashing the “red wall” of previously safe Labour seats in the north of England. Such is the disillusion with the government, the party could not hold the previously safe Conservative seat of Selby and Ainsty.
Labour overturned a Conservative majority of 20,137 in a white, semi-rural constituency with a disproportionately elderly population.
An epic Tory defeat is surely coming at the next election.
It almost certainly is. And yet and yet. The result that will have the most effect on the future government of the United Kingdom will be the Conservatives clinging on against all expectations in the outer London suburb of Uxbridge. It speaks to a paralysed future.
This was Boris Johnson’s seat. No voters had more right to be angry at his lies and failures than the voters of Uxbridge.
But Labour could not capture it because the issue was no longer disillusion with Brexit, Johnson’s scandals, Liz Truss’s madness, the cost of living or national decline, but a Labour environmental tax.
Steve Tuckwell defies expectations in Uxbridge.
Steve Tuckwell, the winning Tory candidate, was certain that his victory had nothing to do with the merits or otherwise of Rishi Sunak’s government. Instead, he explained that, “Sadiq Khan has lost Labour this election, and we know that it was his damaging and costly ULEZ policy which lost them this election.”
Khan, the Labour mayor of London, is expanding London’s Ultra-Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) to cover Uxbridge and the rest of outer London. He explained his admirable motives when he said that he was seeking, “to address the triple challenges of toxic air pollution, the climate emergency and traffic congestion”. Owners of old, polluting vehicles would have to pay a charge of £12.50 a day if they insisted on keeping them. To encourage them to send their wheezing cars to the junkyard, Khan offered compensation in the form of a scrappage scheme. .
Not enough.
Across the West you can see a pattern. Record breaking heat waves in southern Europe and north America, and extreme hunger in east Africa ought to burn the need to tackle the climate crisis into the public’s consciousness. But the cost of dealing with it hits relatively poor people in rich countries the hardest.
Wealthy Londoners can afford modern vehicles. The self-employed working class, which relies on old diesel cars and battered white vans, struggles.
In Germany, the Green party has learned the hard way that people want to save the planet but are reluctant to pay the price. The Green leader in the governing coalition Robert Habeck may rage, but his party is suffering its worst results in provincial elections in 20 years because of the price of phasing out fossil fuel heating in private homes. Environmentally friendly heat pumps cost 13,000 Euros per installation. The charge is like a poll tax that hits those least able to pay hardest.
Meanwhile, the Farmer Citizen Movement has upended the politics of the Netherlands. The alliance of the righteously angry countrymen and women, infuriated by controls on nitrogen pollution, has come from nowhere to being a major player in the country’s politics.
And now we have the Uxbridge election result.
Come on, I hear you say how many constituencies are likely to revolt against the London mayor’s policies? Ten, maybe. Fifteen at most. It’s nothing.
But I fear the effect may be wider. The UK is in a desperate position. It needs radical reform to break out of years of national decline. But the message from Uxbridge the naturally cautious Keir Starmer will take is that any reform that raises opposition, as all reforms do, is too risky to contemplate.
Contrary to the rhetoric of his critics on the left, Labour is proposing one sweeping policy: a rewriting of the UK’s Byzantine planning system. Everyone knows planning needs to be tackled to make it easier and cheaper to build new homes, infrastructure and workplaces.
Then, everyone knows that climate change must be tackled. It’s the tackling of it that is the problem.
I wonder how Labour’s promise to simplify the planning system will survive in an election campaign. The Conservatives will inflame the residents of suburban and semi-rural England’s perfectly reasonable dislike of development.
The one radical plan Labour could offer is immediate steps to rejoin the European single market. Economically there is no cost, only benefits. Most people now realise that Johnson and Farage sold them a false bill of goods. And yet, the minority who still support Brexit is concentrated in marginal seats Labour needs to win. The party has duly made it clear that it will ask the EU for little beyond minor changes to a dreadful settlement.
The average Briton has not had a real pay rise since 2007. The public services are visibly crumbling. The national debt is 100 percent of GDP. Sweeping change is necessary if the UK is not to sink further into the mire.
Yet the lesson I am sure the Labour leadership will draw from the one disappointment in an otherwise triumphant night is that it pays to do nothing or next to nothing because, however angry voters are, they are not angry enough to embrace change.
Why Subscribe?
The main reason is paying subscribers allow me to write!
They also receive access to all articles, podcasts and archives and can join the debate in the comments section.
You can sign up with a free trial below.