Although the Tories lost two out of three parliamentary by-elections held yesterday, the first in Selby and Ainsty and the second in Somerton and Frome where there were huge swings against the Conservatives in hitherto safe seats, the Tories had been predicted to lose all three of them. In the event, they held on in Boris Johnson’s old constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip.
This surprise win, in the face of general agreement that the Conservative vote is in near-total meltdown across the country, is being credited to the Tory campaign in Uxbridge focusing on opposing the expansion of London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s ultra-low emissions zone policy (Ulez).
This policy, under which roads and side streets have been systematically closed to through traffic in order to reduce carbon emissions, has caused people major inconvenience, destroyed the quality of life for elderly, disabled and house-bound people, and damaged businesses and livelihoods. It has produced untold public fury. Yet Khan insists on expanding it still further.
Ulez is of course a consequence of the Net Zero obsession. Although this has been disastrously skewing government policy for years, with the resulting fuel rises contributing massively to the ruinous cost of living and causing people on low incomes to choose between “heating and eating”, Rishi Sunak’s government has remained committed to it.
Yet the Uxbridge result provides further evidence of what has been blindingly obvious for years — that Net Zero is a major vote loser, and the “climate change” agenda is yet another obsession of the “chattering classes” that isn’t shared by the majority of less rarified voters. (The fact that it’s also barking mad is another issue, one explored in my writing over the past three decades).
Rishi Sunak is in the unenviable position of the person playing “pass the parcel” who is left holding the damn thing when the music stops. The parlous state of the Conservative party isn’t his doing. It’s the outcome of a decades-long demoralisation and degradation of conservative thinking in Britain and the west.
However, Rishi is the UK’s current prime minister and leader of the Conservative party, and as things stand he is set to preside over a crushing Conservative defeat at the next general election. Although voters approve of his diligence, mastery of detail and modest behaviour, they aren’t getting from him any overarching story about the nation, no vision of the future with which they can identify. So they are looking instead at Labour.
But all is far from lost for the Tories. The Labour party leader, Sir Keir Starmer, is unpopular. People don’t trust him. They can see that he repeatedly shifts his position for short-term political advantage. They can also see that he speaks with forked tongue over respecting Brexit, that he “took the knee” to Black Lives Matter and believes that one per cent of women possess male genitalia.
British “deplorables” (aka decent, sensible, feet-on-the-ground people), who will decide the election result, don’t like any of that at all. They may reluctantly vote for Starmer in despair and fury at the Conservative party. But that Labour vote is soft. If Rishi can tell them a convincing and inspiring national story, show them a direction of travel of which they approve — and that indeed there is such a direction— he can win.
In Spain, where a general election is being held on Sunday, opinion polls suggest that voters will ditch the governing centre-left Socialist Workers’ Party led by prime minister Pedro Sanchez in favour of the centre-right Popular Party, led by Alberto Nunez Feijoo. While there is no exact read-across to the UK from the issues important to Spanish voters, there is a key lesson to be learned here.
The Popular Party is offering a combination of moderate pro-growth economic policies and policies to hold back the most extreme tide of the culture wars.
As the Wall Street Journal observes:
The Popular Party is sticking to fronts in the “culture war” where it thinks broad coalitions exist. That includes an emphasis on national unity in contrast to regional separatism, and rolling back some of Mr. Sanchez’s radical policies on transgender issues while ignoring carping from the right about gay marriage and other issues the public views as settled.
It’s a lesson for conservatives elsewhere. Mr. Feijoo is not drifting leftward on economic or cultural issues as Britain’s Tories or Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats in Germany have done. Nor is he swinging too far in the other direction with a total culture war as many so-called national conservatives advocate, which would alienate centrist voters.
If the Popular Party wins, it will be because it erected a big tent that can hold free-market centrists and some of the national-unity conservatives who drifted to the more conservative Vox party in previous elections. Mr. Feijoo may still need to form a coalition government with Vox, but with a strong plurality he could do so from a position of strength.
The key to victory is to present policies which accord with the deepest wishes of the public and which so many western electorates now have in common — to reaffirm the integrity of the nation and tackle the various kinds of extremism and lunacy that are causing social and cultural chaos and individual harm. The sweet spot is surely a set of issues where all these things come together on the true centre ground.
Rishi should accordingly set out three policy goals: to stop the Channel boats and bring down all immigration, to end the transgender cult and the coercion of approved views, and to challenge the “climate change” myth as damaging, exaggerated and untrue. Even more crucially, he must show how he will achieve this: by withdrawing the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights, tearing up equality laws and ending Net Zero. In short, he’d have to defy conventional wisdom — and explain why.
He’d have to face down the deafening howls of outrage from the media, members of his own party and the massed legions on Planet Intelligentsia. He’d have to find in himself the means to argue with passion for a vision he’s never expressed. He’d have to hold his nerve. It would be unpleasant, deeply stressful and the most terrific gamble. But he’d win.
What’s to lose?
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