Sunak's Climate Gamble Points Towards Electoral Strategy

The Prime Minister has weakened some key Net Zero climate policies; what's behind this move?

Rishi Sunak has weakened a group of net zero climate policies that his government had previously made a commitment to. These include:

• Ending the end the sale of new petrol and diesel vehicles by 2030 has been pushed back to 2035.

• The promise to ban the installation of new gas boilers from 2035 has been reduced to 80% of gas boilers, with no word on how that might be implemented in practice.

• A similar approach to off grid oil boilers, with the plan to end sales by 2026 reduced to 80% but also pushed back to 2035.

• A pledge to introduce no new energy efficiency requirements for homeowners and landlords and to scrap plans to fine private landlords whose properties don’t meet standards.

The PM framed his speech within a firm and ongoing commitment to Net Zero; he knows that, in aggregate, climate change is now an important issue for voters. So why, if there’s little to be gained electorally from pushing back on net zero, did he water down policies that were his government’s in the first place, the Committee on Climate Change says are key to achieving the UK’s climate goals and that risk a loss of confidence in UK policymaking. There are perhaps three reasons:

First, while irritating the increasingly prominent Chris Skidmore and members of the Conservative Environment Network, fiddling with policies the libertarian right hates will please the Net Zero Scrutiny Group and some of the cabinet. This is risky, but a gamble Sunak seems willing to take. It’s not one I can provide any insight into.

Second, the PM’s team will assume that while most people support action on climate change, they won’t really engage with what will seem to many minor differences in target dates or volumes. His rhetoric frames the changes as common sense, obvious and taking the pressure off households during a cost of living crisis, while remaining committed to fighting climate change.

Many will probably like the ‘we won’t save the climate by bankrupting UK households’ rhetoric, which George Osborne first championed a decade ago. In aggregate, this will probably not help the Tories in the polls, but the point is that it won’t hinder them or cause further damage.

Third (and most importantly, I think), tweaking these measures but not backing away from net zero opens up some space between Conservatives and Labour on how climate policy is going to be delivered. We can expect this to be costed up per household or in wider economic terms and targeted hard at 2019 conservative voters using social media amplification.

A lot of anti net zero campaigns will get caught up in this amplification and thrown at the same people down the same channels. These rely on wilful ambiguity and misinformation - such as suggesting that ALL petrol and diesel cars will be banned in 2030 rather than the sale of new ones, or that opposition parties will force you to rip out your old boiler and replace it with a heat pump.

A parallel is the way in which the ULEZ expansion in London has been toxified by a Conservative campaign and, alongside it, the creation of an ecosystem of bot accounts on Twitter to spread ULEZ misinformation and create the impression that more people oppose the policy than support it.

There’s no suggestion the Conservatives have been behind the fake Twitter accounts, but of course there are a lot of interest groups who oppose measures to curb the use of polluting vehicles and, more widely, net zero policies. Social media algorithms will drag all this content together for people who receive and open, read and like targeted Conservative messages.

So, perhaps Sunak’s intervention can be seen as the precursor to the sort of campaign the government wants to run, as well as a sop to the right of the Conservative Party and something that at the very least will do no harm to overall voting intentions. It’s step 1 in the strategy.

This points to a strategy that - inter alia - will see issues like net zero pushed into the social media machine one end and emerge as targeted messages about how opposition parties will cost your household more money than is necessary at the other, especially if you live in an electorally salient place.