As Rishi Sunak transforms himself into the driver’s champion and rightwingers savage net zero targets as a fascist plot of the wokerati, get ready for the thing you thought impossible: a general election even stupider than the last. Essentially, it’s looking as if it will be a referendum on whether climate change exists. What better time for such a dumb question, than right when we can all see it?
It won’t always be expressed so simply. Sometimes it will be: “Who will stand up for the humble driver of diesel cars, already squeezed in so many directions, in ways that I, not even quite a billionaire, can totally understand?” Other times it will be: “What can we do about Just Stop Oil protesters, who pose an existential threat to society with their vile and undemocratic tactics?” Probably only at the Faragist fringes will people openly repudiate the goal of net zero, while the Conservative core picks more contestable battles on low-traffic neighbourhoods, oil and gas licences, heat pumps.
Policies hold very little interest for Conservatives, still less ideas: they want to set Britain’s the mood music. Tory arguments as they battle for votes will be so stupid as to make you despair, and some mornings you’ll wake up thinking humanity is a blight, and we should concentrate on preserving the planet for every species besides us. But that doesn’t mean they won’t work.
The case against environmentalism looks worse than unwinnable; it looks like electoral suicide, with 71% of the British public is in favour of the net zero target. Indeed, being a Conservative is beginning to look rather niche. Labour has pulled ahead of the Tories decisively, consistently leading by 20 points in the polls. Research commissioned by Channel 4 this week projected a landslide victory for Keir Starmer and the Conservatives reduced to 90 seats, with high-profile losses including Sunak himself and 17 cabinet ministers. In an election fought at any time between now and January 2025, on normal terms, one fully costed manifesto versus another, a suite of issues discussed in a sober fashion, there is no plausible route to victory for Sunak.
But that’s not how modern Tories work. Rather, they set out their stall in such a way as to destroy the unity of their opponents, torch any faith in evidence, facts and expertise, and spread a sense of hopelessness and frustration. They want voters walking into the ballot box in the spirit of “make it go away”. If this sounds tough to pull off, from such a weak party, disgraced in so many ways, running on intellectual fumes, consider how much it has already achieved.
Only three months ago, Labour’s policy was to block all new oil and gas projects in the North Sea. It wasn’t as radical as its original green new deal pledge – £28bn a year to tackle the climate crisis – and it didn’t hold the same promise of change as last year’s conference pledge to set up Great British Energy, publicly owned and green. Nevertheless, it was something a large number of people could unite behind. You can easily imagine a Conservative environmentalist and a leftwing Green both lending their vote to a party that promised to leave fossil fuels in the ground.
Then Sunak said he would issue 100 new oil and gas licences. It had nothing to do with bills or energy security or Putin or the cost of living; these projects wouldn’t even be operational for five to seven years at the earliest. From an energy perspective, the policy is nonsensical, since nobody in the oil and gas industries thinks for a second that Sunak will win the next election. From a geological perspective, it is impractical: the North Sea is a mature oil province, which means there are likely to be very few large oilfields left to discover. Any that are left will be small, and few companies will be interested. Indeed, even in the last two rounds of licences, interest was pretty meagre, with only about one-third of the blocks on offer attracting bids; the super-majors are selling up their North Sea assets, and the smaller companies buying them are not interested in long-term, capital-intensive exploration.
These licences had only one purpose, which was to back Starmer into a corner where he had to say whether or not he would revoke them – which sure enough, he wouldn’t, because respecting a contract is more important than the climate. So he marked himself out as a lukewarm technocrat without the passion or urgency that the battle for the planet needs, and then it got worse: criticised, perfectly legitimately, by Just Stop Oil, Starmer called them “contemptible” for beliefs that are indistinguishable from those of the UN secretary general.
It’s pointless hand-wringing about these obvious traps that Starmer obediently walks into, but this is the game we’re in now – one in which every Tory move, whether it’s camouflaged as policy or delivered in hate speech, is a bid to disrupt the unity of progressive voters. I do not think it will succeed. But I didn’t think it would succeed in 2019, either.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
