THE contrast could hardly be starker. In Britain, politicians of both major parties are looking to backpedal on their commitments to tackle climate change.
Yet in Greece thousands of holidaymakers, including many from Britain, are fleeing from the wildfires which are the latest clear sign of global warming.
The result of the Uxbridge by-election, a surprising hold for the Tories in Boris Johnson’s old constituency, when the party was losing much safer seats elsewhere, has been widely attributed to a backlash against London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s plan to extend the Ultra-Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ) up to the boundaries of Greater London.
This would impose a daily £12.50 tariff on those driving older cars. At a time of a cost-of-living crisis that can only hurt. There is a scrappage scheme to encourage drivers to trade in older vehicles for compliant ones, but this fund, to which central government has contributed not a penny, can only defray the considerable costs of a new car.
The mayor is pursuing this policy, which was initiated by Boris Johnson when the latter was at City Hall, as part of his mandate to improve London’s lamentable air quality. A ULEZ has been in operation in central London for some years, and has previously been extended to much of inner London.
These are, however, the areas of the capital relatively well-served by public transport, and the Tube network in particular. The further out you go in the capital, the more working people and their communities depend on the car.
That is not an argument against ULEZ. At the local level, hundreds of people, almost invariably among the poorest, die from illnesses related to air pollution.
And on the global plane, the soaring temperatures this summer from Italy to Arizona are the starkest sign that the planet is on a path towards becoming uninhabitable if climate change is not urgently addressed.
So the Uxbridge result cannot be the sounding of the retreat. Our political leaders think differently.
Yesterday Rishi Sunak was signalling that he is prepared to trim, pursuing net zero in a “proportional and pragmatic” way, easily decipherable code for moving from doing little to doing less.
And Keir Starmer did not even wait for the Uxbridge result to start diluting Labour’s Green New Deal policies, as part of his general strategy of not proposing to do anything about anything.
Where the ULEZ row must give pause for reflection, however, is that it establishes the dangers of trying to solve the climate crisis at the expense of working people.
This would be wrong at any time, and it is absolutely certain to provoke a backlash at a time when living standards are under unprecedented pressure.
Paying sixty-odd pounds a week to drive, on top of the existing costs, is crippling for those who may not have viable public transport alternatives. Many of those drivers will remember when government policy was to encourage the use of the diesel cars they are now told to ditch.
The burden of tackling pollution, in particular, should in the first place be borne by big business, which could have been levied to fund a far more generous scrappage scheme, or by the Treasury putting its hand in its pocket.
More generally, attempts to tackle climate change while preserving an economic regime based on endless capital accumulation will never succeed.
Labour’s failure in Uxbridge is due to its unwillingness to make the slightest break with the orthodoxies of free-market capitalism, or even impose burdens on the broadest shoulders. Given a choice between socialism or extinction, Starmer is making the wrong call.
