Sunak’s most significant political legacy is that he has brought a form of climate denial politics firmly into the mainstream of British politics, to the point that “a bland statement about a ‘cost’ both parties are committed to” is being written up like this in the Times.
Sometimes does my head in that political ‘debate’ in UK is so brainless
Net Zero cost hundreds of billions. But COMPARED TO WHAT????
New fired power stations are currently subsidised, for example, and gas price crisis has cost UK hundreds of billions
www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/...
It’s the only thing where Sunak has successfully advanced his form of politics, unfortunately. Stuff that his government is nominally committed to, that was central to the manifesto they fought in 2019, being written up in the Times as if it is a new, alien idea.
One of the things I find hardest to wrap my (admittedly tiny) mind around is that given the inevitability of severe climate change and its impacts, and their likely *huge* salience in a few years’ time - we have this sort of politics/debate
It’s another manifestation of the there’s no money theme (or rather there’s negative money) so anything that has ‘cost’ associated with it is translated into who’s going to pay / higher taxes etc etc.
The thing is that tackling climate change is going to be costly and disruptive, just nowhere near as costly and disruptive as not tackling it. Politicians are doing themselves no favours by avoiding this obvious truth.
I’m sure that’s right. But when the costs of not doing anything become real, won’t they be much higher, and won’t people want to brandish pitchforks? And can’t our leaders foresee that already?
It's the Sunak Cost Fallacy, where you don't do a cost/benefit analysis, just moan about the costs. Admittedly a lot of Sunak’s spending was all cost and no public benefit, like eat out to help out or PPE corruption, but that doesn't generalise to all government spending.
Sunak was there when it happened, but the Fallacy Of Fully Costed, which is at the root of this, is one of the few truly bipartisan political trends of my life; John McDonnell was an enthusiastic early adopter.
thinking about a remake of "Independence Day" where nobody at all asks Will Smith whether he can do it, they just spend all the time on estimating the fiscal cost of his fighter jet.
It is such a features of US Politics now too, yes, but Sunak brings a specific "Hedge Fund Guy with a spreadsheet" mindset to it, with the HS2 cancellation being the most egregious example, but energy investment the other long term damage.
Hundreds of millions of pounds in investment over a two-decade period, reducing the cost of a more disruptive climate change and aging infrastructure? Okay, that sounds like a good deal. We say "if it was like a household budget---" but we do renovate homes.
I think in this instance it’s the other way around - for a long time, the rightwing press has wanted a champion for this (who wasn’t, you know, retired). Sunak is the major change in that he has provided it.
