UK

Opinion
Can Sunak’s rightwing war on ‘woke’, migrants and the environment save the Tories


John Redwood, Tom Jones, Faiza Shaheen, Mark Pack and Natalie Bennett

THE GUARDIAN
Mon, 14 August 2023 


In the face of Labour poll leads, Rishi Sunak and his government appear to be increasingly focused on rightwing campaigns related to the culture wars, migration and opposition to environmental initiatives and targets. Do you think this is, or could be, a credible strategy?

John Redwood: Stop the swearing and stick to the pledges

People expect clear, family-friendly language from politicians in their published comments. They want messages that reflect reality and tell us something we need to know about the actions and plans of the government and opposition.

The recent use of swear words and loose language by some on both sides of the migration debate creates much heat but little light on a sensitive subject. Left and right agree that the people smugglers are evil, exploiting some vulnerable asylum seekers and some economic migrants who are persuaded to try to cheat the system. All agree we need to stop the dangerous small boats. None of us want to see people drowning.

The government’s best strategy to win back lost support ahead of the next election is to stick with the prime minister’s five pledges. Tougher language is not going to be the answer. The government is best advised to say less than it can deliver, to provide a pleasant surprise over the next year as we run up to an election.

There are ways to get prices down quicker and get growth a bit faster, if the government adopts more supportive measures for the self-employed, small business and investment. As a country we need to grow more of our own food, produce more of our own energy and make more of our own goods. There are ways to stop dangerous boats and ways to bring waiting lists down. Bring them on.

John Redwood is the Conservative MP for Wokingham

Tom Jones: Voters expect action, not toothless gestures

Looking at the polls, it is easy to conclude that Abraham Lincoln had a brighter future when he picked up his tickets at the box office than the Conservatives do at the next election. Rishi Sunak’s strategy to reverse this is to win back the 2019 electorate by using cultural issues as a “wedge” to demonstrate how Labour is still out of step with the values of Workington Man.

But the fact is, after delivering an 80-seat majority, those who lent their vote in 2019 have a right to ask for higher interest than ministers waging a culture war. That’s the crux of the credibility issue: after 13 years in power, voters expect action, not politically toothless gestures against cultural left-liberalism. Credibility can only be earned by doing what Conservative governments are elected to do; that is to govern conservatively, rather than complain about their inability to do so.

But there is also a huge danger: it is all too easy for cultural grievances to descend into incoherent messaging based on individual issues. That is a dangerous game to play in politics, as it makes it more difficult to develop a narrative, which voters thrive on.

As the psychologist Robert Cialdini said: “People don’t counter-argue stories … if you want to be successful in a post-fact world, you do it by presenting accounts, narratives, stories and images and metaphors.” When the average person spends so little time thinking about politics, stories are a convenient way of transferring complex concepts into a simply understood, concise narrative. Without that, we’re sunk.

Tom Jones is a Conservative councillor in North Yorkshire and author of the Potemkin Village Idiot substack

Faiza Shaheen: This is a desperate effort to distract us with lies and hate

Faiza Shaheen

Seeing the success of the anti-Ulez approach in Uxbridge, Sunak has added a new line to his divide-and-rule playbook: “pro-motorist” v “anti-motorist”. The more desperate the prime minister and his fellow Tories are to hide the disaster they have created across our economy and public services, the more they aim to distract us with lies and hate.

In Chingford and Woodford Green, where I am the Labour parliamentary candidate, it is not our first Ulez rodeo. In 2018, local Tories made a big push to scare people, but by 2019 when the policy had been put in place, public resistance largely dissipated because most realised it didn’t affect them. Until the Uxbridge and South Ruislip byelection last month, the expansion of Ulez had not really come up on the doorstep, but with a new effort from local Tories it is beginning to reemerge.

One diehard Tory voter told me last weekend, “Labour is making everyone buy an electric car!” I expect a lot of this misinformation will be shown up for exactly what it is when the policy comes into place later this month. There is, however, a big lesson here on the need to consider the distributional effects from the beginning of any scheme, or risk an understandable public backlash.

While I can’t yet see a sizeable shift on the doorstep, and polling data shows that we are not as polarised on climate policies as other countries, we cannot afford to be complacent. The Tories saying the same thing repeatedly on TV, online and in print will mean some of the lies and hate will sink in – especially while many working- and middle-class people feel economically insecure. The only way to counter this is to call it out, focus on the real issues facing people’s everyday lives and propose solutions that will address them.

Faiza Shaheen is a visiting professor in practice at the London School of Economics and the Labour party parliamentary candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green. She is the author of Know your place: How society sets us up to fail and what we can do about it

Mark Pack: Voters don’t want a government that punches down

Mediocre fiction is full of caricatured villains whose selfishness means they don’t care about people who aren’t like them and whose myopia mean they are happy to damn the future. They are great plot fodder for middlebrow fiction, but sadly Sunak seems to think they should also be a role model for being prime minister.

Talking up culture wars, claiming to be tough on immigration and finding excuses for pollution is unlikely to work for him, however, as it misunderstands why the Conservatives are polling at the levels of support Labour sunk to under Michael Foot in 1983.

It is, after all, the Liberal Democrats – not the rightwing populists of Reform – who have taken four seats off the government with record-breaking swings in byelections this parliament. The message from voters to Lib-Dem canvassers in those contests was very consistent. It was about the NHS and the cost of living, about sewage and failing public services. It was about being fed up with the Conservatives, their lockdown parties and their failures on the mainstream issues.

That’s borne out by pollsters too. The cost of living and the NHS are consistently the top-rated issues. Even Conservative voters want the most polluting vehicles to pay higher taxes and Conservatives are more supportive of the 2050 net zero target than voters in general.

A government punching down on vulnerable people or trashing green policies isn’t what voters in those four byelection wins were looking for. That is a political route to failure.

Mark Pack is president of the Liberal Democrats and author of Polling Unpacked: The History, Uses and Abuses of Political Opinion Polls

Natalie Bennett: A Tory slump isn’t enough. Labour needs to show courage

Samuel Johnson’s maxim clearly has to be updated. The “last refuge of a political scoundrel” is now culture war. Our prime minister is following the Trumpian lead of attacking the principled, the innovative and the honest in the hope of energising voters who value noise over substance, aggression over compassion.

Sunak is no William Pitt the Elder, for this is clearly the desperate last stand of a discredited government out of ideas. It is clearly detached from the reality of the world now in the climate crisis, as people from fire-devastated Maui to winter-baked Santiago can testify. Sunak won’t acknowledge that treating refugees decently is absolutely a British value, as demonstrated by compassion league tables that regularly put the UK at the top.

This should be a strategy that sees the Tories slump to under 100 seats. But the danger for the UK lies in a failure from the largest opposition party to do its job and oppose: to present the positive alternatives of climate action, welcome for refugees and respect for the rule of law.

Many voters have already concluded that “politicians are all the same”, and turned their back on the depressing Westminster theatre, potentially leaving the field to a noisy minority who are convinced by three-word slogans.

Keir Starmer would do well to ponder another Johnson quote: “Courage is the greatest of all virtues, because if you haven’t courage, you may not have an opportunity to use any of the others.”

Natalie Bennett is a former leader of the Green party