DAN HODGES: There's no painless route to net zero

DAN HODGES: There’s no painless route to net zero but Rishi Sunak will only tell you fairy tales

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Rishi Sunak thinks the British people are idiots. That’s the only rational explanation for last week’s shambolic, short-sighted, self-serving, fraudulent grandstanding on net zero.

There was a moment on Wednesday, when the Prime Minister started speaking, that I thought he actually got it. ‘Too often, motivated by short-term thinking, politicians have taken the easy way out,’ he acknowledged. ‘Telling people the bits they want to hear and not necessarily always the bits they need to hear.’

And then he promptly bottled it, and took the easy way out.

First there was the ridiculous spectacle of him inventing, then abolishing, a series of increasingly bizarre environmental initiatives. A meat tax. A requirement to put out seven different bins. Mandatory car sharing.

When I queried where some of these ridiculous ideas were coming from, I was told by a No 10 official: ‘They’re in the Carbon Budget Delivery Plan.’ So I went and had a look.

Rishi Sunak thinks the British people are idiots. That’s the only rational explanation for last week’s shambolic, short-sighted, self-serving, fraudulent grandstanding on net zero

On page 87 it lists an idea for ‘increasing average vehicle road occupancy’. Then it says: ‘This proposal requires further development. We will consider measures that could reverse recent trends in declining average road vehicle occupancy, bringing the UK more in line with comparable countries and reducing overall vehicle miles travelled, should this be required to stay on track to meet carbon budget obligations.’

There is no mention of mandatory car sharing. Or anything about a meat tax. Or anything about putting out seven different bins.

Then I had a broader look at the Carbon Budget Delivery Plan. Was it, I wondered, some relic from the Cameron/Osborne era? A holdover from the dog-days of the May premiership? Another of Boris’s environmental flights of fancy? A mad-cap initiative that emerged from the mayhem that was the Truss administration?

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Nope. It was published in March.

So when Rishi Sunak declared ‘it cannot be right for Westminster to impose such significant costs on working people, especially those who are already struggling to make ends meet, and to interfere so much in people’s way of life without a properly informed national debate’, the person who had initially decided to impose those costs on struggling working people was Rishi Sunak.

The person who had opted to interfere so much in people’s lives was Rishi Sunak.

And the person who had decided to do all this without a properly informed national debate was Rishi Sunak.

When I asked No 10 officials precisely when it was that Rishi Sunak woke up and decided he had to save the people of Britain from Rishi Sunak’s crazed environmental messianism, I was told, ‘This is something he has always believed. He’s always thought we needed a balanced approach to net zero.’

Which is odd. Because there wasn’t any evidence of this pragmatism when he was Chancellor and underwriting Boris’s evangelical net zero strategy. Or during the leadership debates, when he proudly declared: ‘Recycling – and that is a thing that in our house we are obsessive about – I know it’s a pain, you need lots of bins, but it is something that’s very good for the environment.’

Or when he U-turned on his decision not to go to COP 27 and made the solemn pledge to ‘honour the promises we made in Glasgow’ at COP 26. Or three weeks ago, when he told an interviewer: ‘The 2030 target [for banning sales on new petrol and diesel cars] has been our policy for a long time and continues to be. We are not considering a delay to that date.’

The truth is that Rishi Sunak has been as willing as any other politician to genuflect before the alter of net zero. And his conversion on the cycle-route to Greta Thunberg’s Stockholm eco-apartment isn’t because he’s suddenly realised that the UK’s 2050 carbon commitments are set to crush the British people into the ground, it’s that he’s recognised the British people are going to crush him and his Government into the ground in 2024.

The Prime Minister tried to claim his speech was an attempt to ‘change the way our politics works’.

It wasn’t. It was simply a desperate and naked attempt to change the trajectory of the opinion polls, and with it his own political skin.

And it won’t work, because the voters know precisely what he’s up to. After 13 years of Tory government they are not going to thank a Tory Prime Minister for saving them from his own Tory policies, nor carry him shoulder-high through the streets of Britain for announcing ‘we won’t bankrupt you by forcing you to buy new electric cars and new boilers in 2030. We’re going to bankrupt you by forcing you to buy them in 2035 instead’.

The other reason it won’t work is because he’s not actually doing anything other than tinker with his net zero strategy. The 2050 commitment remains in place. And the commitment to reducing carbon emissions by 68 per cent by 2030 is still ‘locked in’, according to No 10.

After Sunak had finished speaking, I asked a Minister what they thought. ‘We had one effective line of attack left,’ he told me. ‘The Prime Minister is a serious guy, who sticks to his plan. Keir Starmer is just a flip-flopper who tells people what they want to hear

Look at his much-trumpeted announcement that ‘you’ll still be able to buy petrol and diesel cars and vans until 2035’. The reality is that under the old proposal, by 2030, 100 per cent of new cars sold would have to have been electric. Under the new plan, by 2030, 80 per cent of new cars sold will still have to be electric, with that figure gradually increasing to 100 per cent in 2035.

‘It should be you the consumer that makes that choice, not government forcing you to do it,’ the Prime Minister said. But when you examine the detail, the Government is still forcing you to do it. They’re just pointing a pistol at your head, rather than a machine gun.

And there is one other reason Rishi Sunak’s net zero sophistry will fail. It’s because Rishi Sunak is right.

Politicians really do have to level with the voters. And the truth about net zero is this: if we want to meet our 2050 commitment, that will only be done by bringing huge social and economic hardship to working Britain. The sort of societal transformation required will be on a scale not seen since the industrial revolution.

Some people may think that pain is necessary to save the planet. Others may think it represents an unsustainable, regressive burden. But that is the reality of the choice we face.

There is no painless route to net zero, and our political leaders have to be honest about that.

Rishi Sunak doesn’t want honesty. He wants to continue to peddle the fiction that net zero can be delivered cost-free. Or, at least, he wants to peddle it until the day after the next General Election.

I’ve been critical of the Prime Minister during his time in office. But I thought he was at least a serious man trying to take serious decisions on behalf of his country. And I thought he was essentially a man of integrity.

But last week, he embarrassed himself. Literally. When he delivered his addresses from No 10 during the Covid crisis he did so with confidence and authority. Wednesday’s speech was delivered with the slow, stilted delivery of a parent reading a fairy story to a toddler. And when he tried to convince the country he had just saved us all from a meat tax, you could see he didn’t believe it himself.

‘And now he’s completely thrown that away.’

He has. Rishi Sunak clearly thinks the British people are idiots. Come polling day, he’ll find out that they’re not.

He thinks the British people are idiots… on polling day, he’ll see they’re not.

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