It feels like the starting gun on next year’s election campaign has already been fired, with this week’s Government announcement on Britain’s path to reach net zero and party conference season about to get underway. For many voters, after all the political turmoil in recent years, that may well be a depressing thought.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak delivers a speech on the plans for net-zero commitments in the briefing room at 10 Downing Street. PIC: Justin Tallis/PA Wireto reach net zero by 2050 looks set to be the first of a series of interventions setting out his vision for how Britain should change. He is responding to pressure from his own Parliamentary Party to be clearer on a long-term plan. But if his net zero speech is anything to go by, he and his party could be in for a rocky ride.
Because whilst the Prime Minister talked about a new politics, in practice, the politics deployed was very much in the vein of that we’ve seen in recent years - the politics of division. Sunak’s speech made political capital by breaking the cross-party consensus on tackling climate change. It was a highly political speech intended to use net zero and climate change as a ‘wedge issue’.
Sunak is listening to those voices in his party urging him to wage more culture wars and use identity politics to win the next election. But what if he’s picked the wrong identity, one that too few voters share? And if the new sort of politics he talked about is normalising half-truths, claiming to scrap policies that never existed in the first place , then it’s a step towards a US-style of politics that is sliding that country towards an ever deeper democratic crisis where voters trust no one.
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