Rishi Sunak has found the perfect conservative wedge issue

UK PM Rishi Sunak.

What a difference one by-election makes. When the ruling Conservative party unexpectedly won the Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat vacated by Boris Johnson a few weeks ago, it did so despite lagging Labour by some 20 points in national UK opinion polls. Suburban voters made their anger clear against a new emissions tax on cars imposed by the Labour Mayor of London Sadiq Khan.

The implications were quickly felt on the wider stage. The result has upended the Tories’ election strategy, signaling a retreat from Net-Zero targets hammered into the Tory compact by Johnson. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak abruptly delayed a ban on sales of new diesel and petrol cars from 2030 to 2035. Ditto the target for phasing out domestic gas boilers for heat pumps.

Green taxes would seem to be the perfect Conservative wedge issue,
creating sharp differences where much economic and social policy has turned into cross-party mulch. After 13 years in power with little to show by way of economic growth, a strategy to remind voters of what they most dislike or distrust about the Labour party will be dismissed as cynical politics. But that is a risk Sunak is prepared to take.

Asked by the pollsters whether they support green causes and the net-zero policy, voters agree by a large majority. Responses would be similar to queries about the search for world peace or equality. But when the bills are due for electric vehicles, heat pumps and other charges related to a greener way of life, low- and middle-income earners have a change of heart: More than half of voters place a higher priority on the cost of living than net zero.

The British genuinely want to do the right thing by the planet, but they have to look after number one. Watching their leaders fly business class to the next international environmental conference in the Middle East or the UN general assembly last week doesn’t lighten their mood.

Sunak’s bold move last week caused an uproar — deservedly so, since he failed to brief industry chiefs before his policy turn and has shocked some donors. The risk is more party divisions. Yet the prime minister’s speech hardly came out of a carbon-free blue sky.

Across the continent, car-driving voters and households with gas boilers are bubbling with rage. The European Union was forced to put back its own parallel green targets weeks before Sunak. Even Labour leader Keir Starmer’s new best friend, Tony Blair, agrees with the prime minister that improving the supply of energy is a more immediate policy goal. The three-time Labour election winner puts the UK’s much vaunted “leadership” on net zero in context: “One year’s rise in China’s emissions would outscore the whole of Britain’s emissions for a year,” he told the New Statesman magazine recently.

This is meat and drink to Isaac Levido, the mastermind behind prime minister Rishi Sunak’s general election strategy, who knows all there is to know about applying wedge issues to electoral effect. After all, the Australian cut his teeth in fellow countryman Lynton Crosby’s political attack dog operation. The company’s strategy is to force center-left politicians in Australia and in the UK and US into defending the finer details of idealistic policies that come with a big price tag and actively enraging large sectors of the electorate.

It was Crosby who got the verbally incontinent Johnson elected as London’s mayor years ago — not once but twice by making him stick to four or five attack lines. Then Levido masterminded Johnson’s huge general election victory in 2019. He knows Sunak has only a slim chance of winning this time, but he is done with showcasing his boss as a technocratic Mr. Fix-it. It has limited appeal. The prime minister needs to present himself as the change candidate.

Labour has stuck to its green principles and 2030 targets, and the polls haven’t shifted. Sunak’s popularity is deep into negative territory. Yet the opposition’s leadership is clearly nervous. Not coincidentally, Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves has pushed back the implementation of her party’s £28 billion ($34.3 billion) a year green investment policy to the latter half of a Starmer administration. She plays whack-a-mole with every spending pledge made by her shadow cabinet colleagues. Out go proposals for a wealth tax and a rise in the top rate of income tax. Reeves knows how hard it is to change perceptions of political parties. Labour, fairly or unfairly, is associated with wasteful spending that leads to economic bust followed by higher taxes. Best stay shtum.

Even so, I expect the Tories will try to break down Labour’s delayed Green Deal into toxic arithmetic when the starting gun for a general election is fired. Tory strategy will be to move on to new attack lines, hoping that message discipline will break down in the enemy camp. Under Blair, fearsome communications chief Alastair Campbell terrorized Labour’s top brass into saying nothing without his prior approval. Starmer has brought key Blairites like Pat McFadden back as enforcers, but none has (so far) Campbell’s aura of menace.

“Message discipline” is the flank they most worry about. Starmer has to balance saying more about his plans to run Britain with not putting his foot in it. Buoyed by his party’s popularity, Labour’s leader has strayed into talking about the UK’s Brexit deal with Europe and cooperation with Brussels on migration. That’s quite a gamble. Both issues helped sink Labour in the 2019 election.

Centrists in the Tory party and liberal commentators dismiss Levido’s tactics as “core vote strategy” — one that fails to appeal to moderate voters who are supposed to decide elections. Yet if the “core vote” delivered the biggest Tory victory for 40 years in 2019, then what’s not for Sunak to like? Core vote apathy is the greater danger to the prime minister.

Now that Brexit is done, the last far-left-wing Labour leader has been put to the sword, and the Opposition have agreed to stick to Tory tax plans, how will the PM persuade his electoral base to leave home on polling day? First, Sunak will be tempted to appeal to older voters, his party’s most loyal supporters, by extending generous pension provisions or even making changes to inheritance tax. Second, he will remind people that Tories and Labour have differing priorities — such as on green policy. Levido will be urging his boss to hammer out clearer territory between center-left
progressives and millions of socially conservative voters. It won’t be pretty.

Martin Ivens is the editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.

Credit: Bloomberg