I love this from Rishi Sunak:
I appreciate that I might be slightly out of touch having been out of the country for the last two weeks, Jet Lag is playing havoc with my ability to construct coherent concrete mixer … er … sentences and I honestly can’t remember these ‘heavy-handed measures’ being announced in the first place. In fact, I usually keep a keen eye on politics and I don’t remember any of Sunak’s predecessors proposing any of the above headlines – you can hardly call them policies – during the last 13 years of Tory government, so is it safe to assume Sunak himself announced them while we were in Canada and has immediately junked them all? No, it’s simpler than that. Britain’s prime minister is gaslighting the nation.
It’s important to remember that Labour has not been in power since 2010 and has not, in office or in 13 subsequent years of opposition, announced anything that remotely resembles what Sunak is supposedly stopping. Even if there is some merit in the ‘heavy-handed measures’ – would Sunak prefer poorer people to have cheap insulation upgrades so billionaires like him can enjoy the more expensive ones? – the whole thing could carry more clout if it was true, but it isn’t. It’s a blatant, cynical political move by a desperate prime minister, as part of what he sees as a populist right wing cause which he hopes will bolster his ratings with the unhinged right of his party and those he perceives to be the hard of thinking in the general electorate.
Given that it has been this government which has rightly introduced more green measures, like banning the production of new diesel and petrol cars and introducing ULEZ zones in big cities, it is odd to see Sunak rubbishing different ways of stopping rubbish mounting up. But then, he doesn’t really mean of this stuff in the first place.
Sunak is the worst type of politician in that he doesn’t really believe in anything and he comes from a very long line of them since 2010. Smooth and smarmy David Cameron wanted to be PM because he thought he’d be good at it (he wasn’t), Theresa May presumably because she thought she wouldn’t be, Boris Johnson because his dream was always to be “world king” and now Sunak, the managerial tech guy. (Note that I missed Liz Truss from the original list because at least she believes in something, although in her 49 days in office she managed to crash the economy with her bonkers unfunded tax cuts to the richest people.) The current PM made his many millions in finance, married the billionaire daughter of a multibillionaire just to be on the safe side (he probably he loved her too, mind) and now fancies trying his hand at being PM for pin money. And it turns out his Big Idea is stopping things happening that weren’t going to happen anyway.
The simple fact is that we need to become greener. It’s literally a choice between saving the planet and allowing our children and their children to inhabit what will otherwise be a dying planet. And Sunak knows this but he has put his own political interests above those of the country in general and, let’s be clear about this, his own children in particular. There is no scientific debate on climate change, nor for who and what is causing it. People might not believe that humans are driving climate change but that doesn’t make it any less true. Not understanding the science, or pretending it’s not true, doesn’t change the facts.
But that’s the state of British politics, where a desperate and rightly unpopular prime minister, elected by no one, sees salvation by a populist tactic of promising to abolish policies literally no one has advocated.
Depressingly, we are now in the longest general election campaign in British history, lasting into early 2025, and Sunak has only just begun his campaign of lies and deceit. I predict it is a campaign that will fail disastrously on the simple grounds that voters aren’t as stupid as he assumes them to be. Rishi Sunak is a very bad man, not the competent manager he set himself up to resemble and there is less to him than meets the eye.
Now excuse me while I sort out the recycling, although first this dirty government will need to go to landfill. Some turds you just can’t polish.
