Imagine someone had said to King Charles: “Yes, you are going to end up top dog, but you won’t give your first address to parliament as king until a week before your 75th birthday. And, in it, you’ll have to walk the country through new annual oil and gas licences that represent a disregard for the future of the planet that you’ve spent your adult life worrying about.” Well, the poor guy would have been pretty dispirited. In fact, these energy plans look like a deliberate provocation – so much so that you have to wonder whether Rishi Sunak and the king have beef we don’t know about.
The oil and gas licences themselves are nonsense. Sunak knows that. None of the major industry players are rewriting their business strategies on the understanding that the Tories will be in power even this time next year, let alone on a rolling annual basis beyond that. The fields under offer are unlikely to produce enough oil and gas to meet our need for what Sunak calls “energy security”; Shell and BP have already sold some of their North Sea assets. In other words, this policy has no concrete practical application. It is pure vice-signalling.
This is not to say the Conservatives aren’t doing immeasurable damage to the net zero pledge – they are managing that sabotage in other ways. On fossil fuels, though, it’s just posturing. That future you say you care about? We don’t, because we’re not woke.
Priti Patel’s Rwanda policy for asylum seekers and Suella Braverman’s remarks on homelessness – that it’s a “lifestyle choice” popular among foreigners – fall into the same category. They have zero practical application. Patel must have been advised that Rwanda would be one long, exorbitant legal battle and do nothing to clear the asylum backlog. Braverman’s statement doesn’t even pretend to have a policy outcome.
Virtue-signalling was a concept some liberals fell upon with gleeful self-flagellation: aren’t we self-righteous, with our demonstrative care for others? Vice-signalling is sometimes portrayed as a mirror habit from the right, the playful confection of outrage. In fact, I think it represents the disintegration of ambition and civic responsibility from a terminally exhausted party – but there I go again, with the tedious virtues.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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