Ian Linden: Open Letter to Mr Sunak

Dear Mr Sunak,

Now you are taking a well-earned holiday in California I hope you will use the time and space to think about your legacy. Legacy thoughts normally come at the end of a Prime Minister's period in office but, to be realistic, the polls consistently point to your exit next year. The unfolding debacle since the BREXIT vote is unprecedented - much exacerbated by the pandemic and Putin's war - and most voters have suffered.

Less than a year after being elected as an MP you wrote in February 2016 to your Richmond, Yorkshire, constituents: "It has been by far the toughest decision I have had to make since becoming an MP, but on June 23 I will vote to leave the European Union". In the game of political snakes and ladders over the last seven plus years, it proved a good career decision. From Parliamentary Private Secretary in 2017 to junior minister in 2018, you began a rapid climb up the political ladder that led to 10 Downing Street. You were one step away in 2020 as Boris Johnson's Chancellor. And in 2022 you got there. But your BREXIT gamble no longer seems quite so rewarding.

The voices that preceded and promoted BREXIT, abandoning any attempt at truthful communication with the public about what really faced us on leaving, set the trend for politics. Now, with the greatest crisis ever facing the world, uncontrolled climate change, threatening human civilisation, neither Conservative nor Labour leader dares describe the gravity of the situation, its consequences, and tell us what must urgently be done.

The nub of the problem is the way our interconnected challenges are presented. The diverse channels of information, notably the right-wing Press and social media, and our complex demographic divisions, the unsaid 'well, we'll not be alive to see it' versus 'why are you sacrificing our future for electoral gain?' lie behind today's gas-lighting and irrationality. What better example than the 28 July Daily Mail editorial framing political conflict as "the concerns of ordinary people" versus "the virtue signalling obsessions and orthodoxies of the woke elite". According to Britain's most read newspaper this inglorious binary is the way we should interpret the dilemmas we face.

Are the forty or so backbench Tory extremist MPs, notably the anti-Net Zero group led by Craig Williams MP who breathe down your neck, 'ordinary'? OK, perhaps more 'ordinary' than you, a multi-millionaire - that of course is a vulnerability for you. Is worrying aloud by grandparents about the world they and governments are bequeathing to their children and grandchildren a 'virtue signalling obsession'? Or is it a rational and moral human response to an avoidable global catastrophe, an awareness that Government must wake up and act urgently?

'Woke' was originally African-American slang to describe waking up to the need to do something about racial prejudice and discrimination. It now extends to virtually any view that discomforts the comfortable. Combating climate change is very discomforting. The changes required to mitigate its consequences are even more discomforting. So, hey, how about politicising the whole thing and perhaps saving some Conservative seats.

A Labour Mayor is doing something effective about improving air quality? Time to speak out on behalf of polluting vehicle-owners. Or should that be 'ordinary' polluters? It worked in Uxbridge. The Labour Party is committed to a serious level of investment in solar, wind and wave renewable energy. So, let's sign off on a hundred or so licenses for coal and gas drilling in and around Britain, but not let on that we currently export 80% of our production. Tell the public it's about avoiding costly imports in the future, though keep quiet that wherever the source - and that includes the remaining North Sea oil and gas - the energy companies will be selling on international markets at an internationally determined price. And boosting their prodigious profits. Clear blue water between the Parties.

As the Tories in Uxbridge kept saying, the least well off will suffer the most from measures to protect the environment, not adding that only if such measures are accompanied by effective poverty alleviation will necessary changes in the way we live become acceptable to the 'ordinary' voter. The truth is that transition to net zero could be made far less painful if an unprecedented priority were given to renewables; we see this beginning to happen in the USA where significant state spending and focused scientific endeavour to stop global warming are supported by government. Your modest beginnings funding carbon capture have been applauded but they do not fit into a vision of necessary and beneficial economic change, rather a fantasy vision in which the need for radical change is eliminated.

When BBC News leads on Nigel Farage's Coutts bank account, with apocalyptic warnings from leading climate scientists and the UN secretary-general coming second, something has gone very wrong with our national priorities. We had intimations with Michael Gove's dismissing experts who foretold tears before bedtime if voters chose BREXIT: "I think the people in this country have had enough of experts from organisations with acronyms saying they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong". Then came the Covid anti-vaxxers peddling conspiracy theories about the medical profession. Now we have climate scientists dropped into the 'woke elite' bag.

Is it too difficult for you, Mr Sunak, to tell the public we face a global and therefore a national emergency, and then talk to the other Party leaders with the aim of agreeing a joint position on the way forward? Your legacy, as a Prime Minister without a personal electoral mandate, could be that of a man who read the signs of the times, rose to the occasion, and by acting decisively on climate change defeated the current national helplessness. Get rid of those advisors who, given their head, would turn you into Trump-lite. Or history will see you as the man who frittered away the vital, fast-vanishing time left to rescue the planet, leaving you a trivial footnote to thirteen deplorable years of Tory rule.

Ian Linden blogs at: www.ianlinden.com/blogs.html