Only 16% of voters want to prioritise Net Zero – Rishi Sunak needs to ditch Ulez zones if he wants to win election
IF Rishi Sunak is to have any chance of winning the next General Election, then he should be doing a lot more to tap into people’s growing sense of exasperation with the spiralling costs of Net Zero.
That’s the message from my latest polling on what ordinary people who took a punt on Boris Johnson in 2019 really think about the expansion of green policies such as the Ultra-Low Emission Zone in London, where the owners of non-compliant vehicles must pay £12.50 each time they drive.
Were you to listen only to the expert class, to London Mayor Sadiq Khan or the new elite who dominate the institutions, then you might be forgiven for thinking that these kinds of policies are incredibly popular among the public.
But the reality, as my polling shows, is quite different.
Much like globalisation in the 1990s, or the rise of mass immigration in the 2000s and the 2010s, many people today are becoming sceptical, if not outright opposed, to the spiralling costs of this agenda.
Out-of-touch elite
Only one in three voters — 32 per cent — supports the Ulez scheme while a larger number, 42 per cent, oppose it.
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And only one in four say they would like to see a Ulez-type scheme operating in their own local area. The vast majority would not.
But it’s the coalition of voters from across the political spectrum who backed Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party in 2019 — many of whom are the same people who backed Brexit — who are especially opposed to footing the bills for things such as Ulez and the creeping influence of Net Zero.
These voters, remember, are absolutely critical for Sunak’s chances next year.
Having irritated and alienated them by failing to stop the small boats crossing the Channel, presiding over record levels of legal immigration and struggling to curb inflation, Sunak is currently only holding on to half of Johnson’s 2019 voters.
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The key point in all this is that while most people want to live in a country with a clean and protected environment, and are generally onside with the need to tackle climate change, they are simply much less willing to have to personally absorb the spiralling costs of what increasingly feels like a pet project among an out-of-touch, morally righteous and self-serving elite.
Ask people whether they want their leaders in Westminster to prioritise Net Zero even if this increases people’s bills or prioritise lowering their bills even if this undermines the quest to achieve Net Zero and the vast majority strongly favour the latter.
Only 16 per cent want to prioritise Net Zero.
Ask Conservative voters from 2019 — the very people who will determine whether or not Sunak remains in power — and just seven per cent want their leaders to prioritise Net Zero while nearly three-quarters (72 per cent) want them to prioritise slashing the cost of living.
And I’m not the only pollster to find this. Only this week, Lord Ashcroft similarly found that just one in five Tory Leavers, who were critical to Boris Johnson’s success at the last election, want to increase government spending on major environmental projects.
While the Labour Party and expert class desperately want to push the pedal down on Net Zero spending, most of these voters want spending slashed or at least kept where it is.
As I’ve told people in and around Ten Downing Street, there is a clear message here for Team Sunak.
While Net Zero is certainly not as important to voters as fixing our weak economy, our collapsing NHS and out-of-control immigration, if he was able to link this issue to the wider cost-of-living crisis then the PM would find a receptive audience among the very people he needs to win back.
Clearly, he’d also need to show he is delivering on stopping the small boats, curbing immigration, getting tough on crime and fixing the NHS.
But the potential for this issue to cut through in a meaningful way is clearly visible.
In fact, I’d go even further.
Much like senior Republicans in the US, Sunak should declare war on the cost-of-living crisis by targeting not just unpopular schemes like Ulez but also the billions of pounds we waste each year on utterly pointless “diversity, equality and inclusion” initiatives in public institutions such as the civil service, the NHS and even the military, and pass on the savings to the taxpayer.
It is utterly bonkers that we are spending billions of pounds on this stuff when ordinary people are simultaneously struggling to make ends meet.
Draconian surveillance
And it’s not hard to see how the strong backlash against Ulez might soon spiral into something much bigger.
If voters are unhappy about Ulez charges being imposed on motorists from above, as many of them are, then what’s going to happen when future left-wing Labour governments and councils impose even more green taxes, subsidies and regulations on ordinary households?
What’s going to happen when voters encounter even more “low traffic neighbourhoods” and restrictions on their freedom of movement?
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Or when local councils push ahead with concepts like the “15-minute city” — where everything we need, such as restaurants, offices, parks and hospitals, can be reached by foot or bike within a quarter of an hour — then double down on draconian surveillance to enforce these green measures?
Sunak, in short, would do well to get on the right side of this divide by speaking loudly on behalf of increasingly weary and frustrated voters and against a ruling class which looks hideously detached and disconnected from the everyday experiences and financial reality of the average voter.