Are we seeing the real Rishi Sunak at last? Since telling the nation on 20 September that his government will be taking a more realistic approach to reducing carbon emissions, the Prime Minister has announced – or, more often, refused to deny – that he intends to introduce a whole bunch of policies that horrify bien pensants but go down rather well with the general public. Nine days ago, the Economist warned that ‘If Mr Sunak hopes attacking its green plans is a way to turn around the polling figures, then he is almost certainly wrong.’ Within days, Labour’s lead in the opinion polls had been slashed by eight points according to Deltapoll and by five points according to YouGov. His opponents have since been reduced to complaining that the Prime Minister is announcing policies to try to win votes, as if that wasn’t part of his job.
The worst missteps by the Conservative party in the last 13 years have happened when it tried to win votes from people who were never going to vote for it
This week Sunak has approved drilling a new oil field and it has been reported that he will set out a ‘plan for motorists’ that will prevent local authorities from introducing blanket 20 mph zones. This is in addition to scrapping an elaborate household recycling plan which the great minds on Twitter (now X) insisted was a figment of his imagination until local councils admitted that they had been spending ‘a phenomenal amount of money’ on just such a scheme.
I predict that all of this will be popular with people who might support Sunak’s party at the next election. It is certainly unpopular with those who would rather slaughter their first born than vote Conservative. You only need to see who has been whining about these policies to see that Sunak is on the right track. They include Chris Packham, Caroline Lucas, Friends of the Earth, Oxfam, Cycling UK, Living Streets and Sustrans. What more could you ask?
In their furious response to the ‘plan for motorists’ rumour, Sustrans – an anti-motoring charity that predictably receives tens of millions of pounds in government grants – more or less admitted that the whole point of 20 mph zones is to make driving so unbearable that riding a bicycle becomes vaguely appealing. And so it is. Driving at 20mph is virtually impossible on any normal road. There isn’t even an appropriate gear for it. A petition to get the Welsh government to ‘rescind and remove the disastrous 20 mph law’ has been signed by 450,000 people, which is more than voted for Labour in the last Welsh election. Admittedly, some of the people signing it are English, but that only shows how hated the idea is.
I have written elsewhere about Britain being a nation of motorists. When people are free to choose, they choose to drive. In 2018, only 9 per cent of Britons used a train more than 20 times, and 39 per cent never used one at all, and yet elite opinion is obsessed with railways. Perhaps this explains the gargantuan money pit of HS2, a grand folly that has hovered over five successive Conservative Prime Ministers, making a mockery of their claims to be financially prudent. Sunak is rumoured to be trimming it. Good.
The worst missteps by the Conservative party in the last 13 years have happened when it tried to win votes from people who were never going to vote for it. Like him or loathe him (and that is rather the point), Dominic Cummings understood that there was no point sucking up to the Guardian and accepted that if you want to get anything done in politics, a lot of people are going to hate you. Sunak seems to have learned this lesson and is now going with what we must hope is his gut instinct. He is not quite the finished article – he still entertains some weirdo ideas about banning smoking and forcing 18 year olds to study advanced mathematics – but he may now be on the right path.
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