Perhaps Chris Luxon has also been getting guidance from Crosby Textor:

https://insidestory.org.au/from-net-zero-to-rock-bottom/

From net zero to rock bottom

With an eye to the next election, the British government has
backtracked on climate initiatives to try to drive a wedge into Labour

What do you do if you are fifteen points behind in the opinion polls
and a general election is due within a year or so? This was the
question prime minister Rishi Sunak was wrestling with over the
British summer as he contemplated his post-holiday relaunch.

We learned his answer last week. You abandon and attack climate change
policy, invent unpopular measures you claim your opponents support,
and pledge you will never force such monstrous burdens on hard-working
voters.

To the dismay of many in his own Conservative Party but the joy of the right-wing press, Sunak has come out fighting on the territory his
predecessors had been careful to avoid. Climate change policy has been
the subject of consensus among all of Britain’s major political
parties for nearly two decades, giving the United Kingdom an enviable reputation as a global leader not just in emissions reduction but also
in making climate policy with public consent.

Sunak has decided to rip all that up. The government is still
committed to achieving its statutory target of net zero emissions by
2050, he said in his much-anticipated speech last week, but it isn’t
willing to impose “unacceptable costs” on ordinary households to
achieve it. It would therefore reverse three key policies introduced
by previous Conservative administrations. The ban on new petrol and
diesel cars would be pushed back from 2030 to 2035. The ban on new gas
boilers (to be replaced by heat pumps and biofuels) would be pushed
back to the same date and would no longer apply to poorer households.
And landlords would not be required to insulate tenants’ homes. Sunak
also took the opportunity to rule out four other policies: taxes on
meat, higher taxes on flying, the compulsory separation of household
waste into seven different recycling bins, and compulsory car sharing.

As intended, Sunak’s speech caused an immediate uproar.
Environmentally minded MPs in his own party condemned the decisions.
Green groups proclaimed themselves appalled. Business groups decried
the ad hoc changes to regulatory frameworks and warned that investment
would fall in sectors generating rising numbers of green jobs.

At the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Express, meanwhile, there were celebrations. Their collective view was
expressed in a triumphant Mail editorial congratulating Sunak for
finally “shatter[ing] the cosy consensus, which has let an
out-of-touch Westminster elite think it can bully a compliant public
into footing a mind-blowing climate bill… This motley assortment of eco-zealots, the liberal Left and posh Tory rebels — egged on, of
course, by the BBC — are invariably comfortably enough off to be able
to swallow such costs. But for hard-working and practical-minded
voters… Mr Sunak’s rethink will make life less tough, less cold and
less poor.”

Sunak’s election strategists didn’t write the Mail’s leader, but they
might as well have done. The prime minister’s purpose is transparent.
He wants to create a clear dividing line between his government and
the Labour Party, which has made strong climate policy a central plank
of its platform, and in doing so to present the opposition as an
out-of-touch elite and his own party as the defenders of ordinary
people. He has, in short, decided to drag climate change into a
culture-war battle and make that war the foundation of his election
strategy.

If this sounds somewhat Australian, it is. Sunak’s chief election
strategist is Isaac Levido, protégé of famed Liberal Party election
guru Lynton Crosby and architect of Scott Morrison’s 2019 election
victory. His strategy for Sunak comes straight from the Crosby
playbook: use culture-war framing to drive a wedge between your
opponents and their own supporters, forcing them to defend unpopular
policies on your favoured territory. And don’t worry too much if this
requires a measure of blatant dishonesty.

As many commentators observed — and as a BBC interview with Sunak
expertly highlighted — it was the dishonesty that most marked out the
prime minister’s speech. Every single policy Sunak claimed to have
overturned was falsely described.

Neither the ban on new petrol and diesel cars nor the prohibition on
gas boilers would have required consumers to fork out “£5000, £10,000,
£15,000” more on their alternatives, as Sunak claimed. Innovation in
battery technology has so rapidly reduced their cost that electric
cars are expected to be cheaper than their fossil fuel competitors as
soon as 2027. In practice, postponing the petrol and diesel ban will
have very little effect on consumers’ decisions. In any case, 80 per
cent of cars bought each year are second hand, to which the ban would
not apply.

Heat pump costs are also falling rapidly — driven by the government’s
phase-out plans. Consumers also get generous subsidies to install
them, making their actual costs to households far less than Sunak
claimed. And the requirement to insulate their homes was not on all
property owners, as Sunak implied. It was only on private landlords.
So, far from saving money for ordinary households, its abolition will
actually leave tenants facing higher energy bills.

As for the four other measures Sunak claimed to have scrapped — from
taxes on meat to compulsory car sharing — not one of them was
government policy, or had even been considered. Nor are any of them
Labour policy. They are all mythic inventions of the tabloid press
designed to whip up public anger at the general notion of stronger
climate policy. The claim to have got rid of them was pure
Crosby/Levido: imply that these “extremist” absurdities are supported
by your opponents and only you can save voters from them. Within
minutes of Sunak finishing his speech Tory central office had put out
social media messages highlighting these apparently abolished policies
and linking them to Labour’s green spending plans.

(Within another few minutes a whole series of memes had appeared
ridiculing Sunak’s remarks and listing a variety of other policies
Sunak had saved a grateful public from, including compulsory
badger-racing and limits on the number of invisible friends children
would be allowed.)

Rishi Sunak’s new strategy has finally revealed his political
character, and it is not what his supporters claimed it would be when Conservative MPs made him — without a contest or a vote — Britain’s
fifth prime minister in five years last November. He was intended to
represent a return to normality, a sensible hand on the tiller who
could steady the country’s rocking ship of state.

After David Cameron (who called an unnecessary referendum on Brexit
and lost it), Theresa May (who called an unnecessary general election,
lost her majority in the House of Commons and failed to get Brexit
through parliament), Boris Johnson (who illegally suspended
parliament, oversaw 180,000 Covid deaths, associated with Russian
spies, failed to disclose personal loans from party donors, promoted
corrupt government procurement, lied to parliament about lockdown
parties, tried to overturn rules on MPs’ standards of behaviour, and
promoted supporters accused of bullying and sexual harassment) and Liz
Truss (who introduced a budget that crashed the pound and sent
interest rates soaring, and was forced to resign by her own MPs after
only forty-nine days in the job), it was generally agreed that British
politics needed something a little more stable. Though he had only
been an MP since 2015, the smooth, very rich and apparently sensible
former hedge-fund manager Sunak seemed to fit the bill.

But he has struggled to keep the Tories’ heads above water. On the
five modest priorities he spelt out at the beginning of the year, he
has so far failed to make any progress. Economic growth has been
anaemic, with the economy teetering all year on the edge of recession. Inflation has fallen from 11 per cent to just under 7 per cent, but
only after fourteen straight rises in interest rates (from 0.1 to 5.25
per cent) which have led to huge increases in monthly mortgage costs
for householders. Sunak pledged to bring down National Health Service
waiting lists, but instead they have reached a record high, with more
than seven and a half million people now waiting for treatment in
England, over three million of them for more than eighteen weeks.

Sunak’s most high-profile pledge, to reduce the number of asylum
seekers crossing the English Channel in small boats, has also been his
most conspicuous failure. Not only have the numbers continued to
increase, but each of the measures aimed at tackling the problem (or,
to be more precise, aimed at appearing to tackle the problem) has hit
the rocks. The courts have prevented anyone at all from being deported
to Rwanda, as the government wanted, to seek asylum there. And the
hired-in barge moored off a south-coast port, intended to house 500
asylum seekers, had to be closed after a week when Legionella was
found in its water supply.

Meanwhile Britain’s privatised water companies have been discharging
raw sewage into the country’s rivers and seas, schools have been
forced to shut because they contain dangerously unsafe concrete, and
the country’s air-traffic control system was closed down by an error
in a single flight plan. Callers to radio phone-in programs and
newspaper columnists alike lament that nothing in Britain works
anymore and the country has gone to the dogs.

All of which has duly been reflected in Sunak’s polling numbers.
Labour has been fifteen to twenty points ahead of the Conservatives in
national polling for a year now, sufficient to return it to government
with a comfortable majority. Sunak’s approval ratings have fallen to
minus 30 per cent, with Labour leader Keir Starmer ahead on almost
every leadership quality listed by pollsters. Voters now say they
trust Labour over the Conservatives on every major issue.

A general election doesn’t have to be called until January 2025, but
May or October next year are seen as the likeliest dates. That gives
Sunak a year or less to turn his dire fortunes around. After this
week’s relaunch and with Levido in charge, we know how he will seek to
do it. Reinforced by relentless tabloid attacks on Labour in general
and Starmer in particular, the culture-war framing will be used to try
to separate the opposition from its traditional working-class base.

This was how the Brexit referendum was won, and it was how Boris
Johnson increased the Conservatives’ majority in the general election
of 2019. Labour’s heartland voters in towns and cities across the
Midlands and North of England were told that the party they and their
families had always supported had become detached from their concerns:
pro-EU, insufficiently patriotic, too supportive of immigration, soft
on crime, uninterested in the armed services, and too London-centric
(read, culturally liberal).

With Labour having governed while the post-2000 globalisation was
creating an economic boom in London and the affluent southeast, but
largely leaving old industrial areas behind, and having then presided
over the great financial crash, many of these voters proved ripe to
change their allegiance. Johnson’s stunning election victory in 2019
included a whole swathe of former Labour seats thought to be
unwinnable by the Tories. That was why, despite everything, Johnson
was tolerated for so long by Tory MPs and members: he had won in areas
of the country that had not for years, if ever, returned a Tory MP.

It is these “red wall” seats that Sunak must retain in order to have
any chance of winning the next election — and equally that Labour must
win back if it is to do so. Both parties are focused laser-like on
this task. From now until he calls the election we can confidently
expect Sunak to attack Labour for its profligate tax and spending
plans and economic recklessness, for wanting to rejoin the EU single
market, for trying to reduce prison numbers while the Tories want to
lock more criminals up, for wanting higher immigration and less
defence spending, and — because the party has been taken over by the
woke trans-rights brigade — for being unable to define a woman. This
week’s climate row-back was just the start.

Will Labour take the bait? On all but one of those issues, it won’t.
Over the past year Keir Starmer — also explicitly influenced by the
Australian example — has adopted a classic small-target strategy. If
you’re this far ahead in the polls, his reasoning goes, and the Tories
keep spectacularly demonstrating their own incompetence, don’t blow it
by giving your opponents easy wins.

Like a Roman phalanx curling itself into a tight circle with its
shields on the outside, Labour has been busy closing off any available
lines of attack from the Tories and their media spear-bearers.

On fiscal policy, Labour’s shadow chancellor of the exchequer Rachel
Reeves has insisted that Labour will cut government borrowing and only
increase spending if it can identify a way of paying for it. And she
has since ruled out almost any tax rise, including higher-rate income
taxes, the capital gains tax and a wealth tax, that Labour supporters
had hoped might allow some spending commitments to be made.

On defence policy, on crime, on immigration and asylum seekers, Labour
has attacked the Tory record but has not committed to any significant
changes to government policy. On trans rights, Labour has ruled out
gender self-identification without a medical diagnosis.

All eyes were therefore on Starmer for his reaction to Sunak’s
anti-climate policy speech. Would he take the same approach he had on
all the other wedges the Tories had been trying to hammer between him
and his voter base? Would he again cleave close to Tory policy and
refuse to allow a gap to open up through which he could be attacked?

Signs suggested he might. Reeves had already watered down Labour’s
“climate investment plan” to spend £28 billion a year on green
infrastructure and innovation: facing rising borrowing costs, she
announced that a Labour government would now only get spending to £28
billion by the end of the parliament.

When the party then lost a by-election in London it had been expected
to win, amid widespread voter opposition to the (Labour) mayor’s plans
to extend a charge on polluting cars, Starmer had a very public
wobble, openly questioning the policy. The Tories took their
by-election victory as evidence that green policies imposing costs on
voters are unpopular and ripe for attack, and Starmer seemed to be
drawing the same conclusion. The environmental movement — inside and
beyond the party — was alarmed.

They need not have worried. Starmer’s response to Sunak’s anti-green
speech was subtle. Refusing to fall into the trap of a debate about
the costs of climate policy to ordinary households, he made no public
comment at all on the speech apart from a couple of tweets emphasising
that Labour’s renewable energy strategy would create jobs, reduce
bills and improve energy security. He left it to his shadow climate
minister, former party leader Ed Miliband, to castigate Sunak for “not
giving a damn” about climate change, describing the PM as “rattled,
chaotic and out of his depth.”

Labour would retain the petrol and diesel ban by 2030 and the
responsibility of landlords to insulate their tenants’ homes, Miliband
said, both of which would cut ordinary households’ costs. (He notably
didn’t promise to restore the ban on gas boilers.) As for the four
fictional policies Sunak said he was scrapping, Miliband was scathing.
Not only had the Labour Party never proposed a tax on meat, he said,
but it was not even the policy of the Vegan Society.

Miliband is well known as strongly committed to climate action. Yet it
was not he but shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves who was the decisive
figure in Labour’s choice to pick up the climate gauntlet Sunak had
thrown down. Reeves, who has been assiduously wooing business leaders
over the past year, has been struck not merely by how fed up with Tory incompetence they have become, but also by how green they are.

With US president Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act driving record
investment into environmental technologies and sectors in the United
States, and the European Union’s Green Deal following suit, Labour has
made “green prosperity” the centrepiece of its economic and industrial strategies. It will have been delighted at the furious reaction of
business leaders to Sunak’s speech. Why get Starmer to attack Sunak
when the UK head of Ford will do it for you?

For party members and activists, Labour’s response will have come as a
relief. The leadership’s small-target positioning has been deeply
frustrating for those who believe the party needs radical policies to
tackle the legacy of thirteen years of Tory rule. Starmer’s bland
persona and extreme policy caution have left both members and many
political commentators despairing that Labour was not offering the
public a positive reason to vote for it but rather merely relying on
the Tories to mess up. With the NHS, social care, schools, policing
and local government all in crisis, but Labour not promising to spend significant money on any of them, they fear the party will succeed in
the general election but fail in government.

In this context Miliband’s climate policy platform has offered a ray
of hope. He has managed to persuade Starmer and Reeves to support a
bold plan to achieve 100 per cent renewable power by 2030, create a
new publicly owned energy company, and insulate nineteen million homes
over ten years, generating a claimed 200,000 new jobs across the
country. Most radically of all, Labour has pledged to end new oil and
gas exploration in the North Sea fields, which would make Britain the
first major economy to do so.

Labour hasn’t committed to these policies in the hope that the public
supports them. It knows the public does: it is one of the consequences
of the eighteen-year cross-party consensus on climate policy. Climate
change is now ranked third when voters are asked about the biggest
issues facing Britain, behind only the economy and inflation. Over
half of voters want to see the government take stronger action, with a
quarter happy with current policies and fewer than 20 per cent
believing the government is moving too fast. These numbers vary little
across Labour and Tory supporters and different parts of the country.
Red wall voters are as green as people in the rest of Britain.

Tory strategists think these numbers are soft. They point out that the majorities in favour of tougher climate policy fall when voters are
reminded that this might involve them, not just other people, paying
more. Levido is convinced that continuous campaigning on the cost of
achieving net zero for ordinary households will reduce public support
even further. If this means making fictitious claims about those
costs, or about Labour policy, so be it. He believes the Tories can
peel enough voters away from Labour to make the election competitive.

He may be right. And this is what dismays moderate Tories the most
about Sunak’s new stance. They know that their own voters care about
climate change, and that strong policies will attract business
investment and jobs in the new global green economy. But they also
know, from Australia, the United States and elsewhere, that mendacious
culture wars can be remarkably effective means of undermining voter
confidence in political parties and policies of all kinds.

Britain has been spared this kind of social and political division up
to now. But it is about to find out what happens when concerns about
the future of the planet are sacrificed on the altar of election
strategy.

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