There is nothing as good as winning. It’s been a long time since Labor enjoyed a victory as emphatic as the one it won this week in Selby and Ainsty, a once solidly Tory patch of rural Yorkshire, and Keir Starmer deserves to savor the moment. In just over three years, he has transformed a defeated and desperate party into a government-in-waiting. There have been deeply painful compromises along the way, but you can finally argue that they’re starting to pay off.
Ed Davey is equally entitled to be pleased to win back Somerton and Frome for the Lib Dems, confirming that his party is indeed back from the desert. The scale of tactical voting in both contests suggests an iron determination is building among anti-Tory voters to do what it takes. Where they can run as insurgents against an unpopular government, progressives rise to the occasion. But what happened in Uxbridge and South Ruislip suggests limits to this approach.
After Boris Johnson escaped in disgrace, many assumed his former seat was Labour’s. Instead, the Tories retreated by turning what could have been a referendum on their handling of the economy into a referendum on another headline: London Mayor Sadiq Khan and his decision to extend the capital’s ultra-low emissions zone to outlying boroughs from August, forcing owners of older, more polluting vehicles to pay a daily charge of £50 or £12. Labor struggled to get its message across on the punishing cost of living with voters blaming their mayor for helping to drive it up.
Starmer’s suggestion that Khan should “reflect” on Ulez’s unpopularity, essentially a public rebuke, reveals deep frustration within the shadow cabinet at having lost by just a few hundred votes. But some take a deeper lesson from this ultimately highly localized skirmish. The Uxbridge result has reopened heated arguments within the two main parties over how far green policies should be pushed amid a cost-of-living crisis.
The case for reducing carbon emissions has never been more evident in this summer of freak heatwaves around the world. In the US state of Arizona, hospitals are treating patients suffering from severe burns from contact with cooking floors. Forest fires are raging in Greece and Antarctic sea ice levels have fallen to record lows in July. We are awfully close to the tipping point that scientists have warned about for so long, and the frustration is that we know very well what to do about it. There is no alternative to transition as quickly as humanly possible from fossil fuels to renewables, gas central heating to heat pumps and solar panels, and petrol or diesel cars to electric. (While Ulez and other clean air zones around the country are strictly public health policies, designed to reduce air pollution rather than carbon, they make motorists rethink their dependence on cars.) But some households simply can’t afford the high upfront costs of replacing cars and boilers, no matter how much they want to. Politicians who ignore this harsh reality will face a backlash.
The climate emergency cries out for a non-partisan approach, with political parties uniting in the national interest as they have done with Ukraine. Instead, green politics runs the risk of being weaponized for political gain. Now, right wing voices urge Rishi Sunak to treat Uxbridge as the model for a Tory fightback: ditch the planned ban on new petrol and diesel car sales from 2030, restart the wake war, brand Labor as “the political wing of Just Stop Oil”, as Cabinet Minister for Net Zero Grant Shapps puts it. It’s less a strategy to win than to limit the Tories’ losses, while making the job of an incoming Labor government infinitely more difficult.
In Uxbridge, the Conservatives portrayed Ulez as a highly imposed big-city solution to a very different world.
Because the risk of putting the climate on its feet, as successive conservative administrations have done, is that the intervention must be more drastic to have the necessary effect. Changes that could have eased gently over the past 13 years may have to come more abruptly. But if anything, Uxbridge may make Starmer even more wary of some of the more radical instincts of his shadow climate change secretary, Ed Miliband.
The tensions between the ultra-greens and their more conservative colleagues in the shadow cabinet are difficult to resolve because both sides are right. The Milibandites are right that the climate emergency cannot be avoided and that the setback could open up the left flank of the party to the Greens (which increase your vote share in all three by-elections, potentially at the expense of Labor in Uxbridge). But the pragmatists are right that middle England is easily frightened by threats to their wallets or lifestyles. In Uxbridge, Conservatives portrayed Ulez as a highly imposed big-city solution to a very different world; it’s fine for Tesla drivers or urban youth near a subway stop, but less so for suburban families running to school and the struggling working classes. It wasn’t just about the cost, it was about the feeling that the City Council didn’t understand.
Reading too much into any by-election is always dangerous, and the lesson here for Labor is absolutely not to retreat to zero. But it is to get the economy right – which means more financial help for households that replace cars or boilers – and, above all, the tone. Sanctimoniousness is deadly, when people are really struggling.
Rishi Sunak should reflect on the legacy he wants to leave behind, just as Theresa May did when she used her final weeks in office to enshrine net zero targets into law. Our fragile planet must not be treated like a political football.
