Trucks, planes and a steak on the barbecue: a platform for conservatives

an opening salvo in an effective conservative agenda: backing the private car, promoting cheap air travel and supporting the meat industry. Now that’s a real agenda for a great government

The Conservatives, against all expectations, held Boris Johnson’s old seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip. The Labour constituency chair has resigned - from the party - saying it was all Keir Starmer’s fault and they’d be better off with Jeremy Corbyn at the helm. Saner voicers are pointing out that the Conservatives ran a very specific campaign baser almost entirely around the proposal from Sadiq Khan, the Labour mayor of London, to extend the Ultra-Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ) to encompass the whole of Greater London. And this campaign worked, every vox pop and focus group in the constituency raised the issue and the Labour candidate started off all for Khan’s proposal only to switch half way through the campaign when it turned out everyone hated the idea.

Cars are going to be a big political issue, just not in the way the great and good expected. At the beginning of July the Conservatives, despite their national woes, won a local by-election in Cambridge. And the reason was the council’s anti-car agenda:

“Taxi driver Mohamed Delowar Hossain stood on a platform of fighting the proposed congestion charge in Cambridge - and will be the only Conservative councillor at the city council after winning the King’s Hedges by-election last night.”

King’s Hedges isn’t grand university Cambridge but an altogether more workaday place. And it is these sort of people - tradesmen, taxi drivers, newly retired people eking out a modest pension - who are waking up to the concerted and extensive attack on cars and driving from public authorities. Forget the conspiracy theorists and cranks, the ordinary driver is about to get angry and annoyed with government. People who bought a second hand diesel Ford Transit are now expecting to fork out twice as much for a smaller electric van and the regular driver has peeked into the EV world only to run away at the sight of the prices they want for an ugly, inefficient vehicle. All while councils, urged on by Whitehall, are introducing onerous charging systems supposedly to reduce air pollution - all based on second-rate modelling that assumes kids are lying down by the side of the road for half the day breathing in fumes.

Over 80% of all journeys made in the UK take place in a car. In one respect the bike lobby are right when they call us a car-dependent society - the private car is bang at the heart of what most of us do, most days. And this isn't going to change any time soon however much the internet cyclists and trendy urbanists shout about it. Not should it change. The benefits of the masses having access to private motorised transport are absolutely huge, vastly outweighing the disbenefits. Plus, the alternatives - bikes, buses, trams - simply don’t get close to meeting people’s everyday needs. We cannot reconfigure the entirety of urban and suburban Britain just to suit the prejudice of a few cyclists and urban densification obsessives.

Up to now the attack on motoring has been concentrated in London and a handful of London-lite places like Oxford, Cambridge and Bath but we can expect to see more of these schemes - congestions charges, clean air zones, low-traffic networks, 15-minute cities - extended to towns and cities across the land. Their advocates will, of course, invoke the modern gods of climate change and will point to policy-based evidence making around air quality produced by activist academics at the request of urban bureaucracies. Meanwhile urbanist think-tanks will continue their advocacy of anti-family, urban densification purely on the grounds that it might (if we are very lucky) make public transport networks financially viable. Right now even in densely populated London, the comprehensive public transport network is only sustained through central government subsidy (from taxes paid by people who don’t use that network - our road spending is £13 billion less than the amount raised from fuel taxes while rail and mass transit, the public transport for the wealthy, receive a similar amount in subsidy).

What the by-election result in Uxbridge hints at is the first element of a successful strategy for a conservative manifesto - setting out to be a pro-car party supporting the tradesman and the ordinary worker’s desire to have affordable and reliable private transport. It isn’t just that nine out of ten journeys take place on a road but also that the net zero and urbanist agendas directly target the can and the van, treating them as uniquely bad. Conservatives should reject this agenda and set out a pro-car, pro-freedom position opposing the sort of unnecessary and excessive taxation we see from ULEZ, CAZ and congestion charge.

Since the millennium, low cost carriers have gone from about 5% of European passengers to a market share of over 30% today. These carriers, for all the dreadful Ryanair stories, have transformed air travel for the masses. Prior to their arrival travellers were at the mercy of package tour operators or high priced flag-carrying airlines. The same people who like ULEZ and hate cars, also don’t like the mass of the population having access to affordable air travel.

A couple of years ago all of Leeds’ Labour MPs got together to oppose the expansion of Leeds Bradford Airport. Their campaign was backed by councillors in Wakefield, Kirklees and Calderdale all egged on by a Green Party dominated anti-air travel campaign in West Yorkshire. The result of this campaign was that in 2022 the airport withdrew its planning application to improve the airport. I’m pretty sure that the millions of Yorkshire residents who take a foreign holiday have been let down by their MPs, councillors and a bunch of Wharfedale NIMBYs who don’t want a few more planes flying out of the county carrying ordinary workers to great holidays in sunny places.

When I was a director of Leeds Bradford Airport, the most common question I’d get from people was ‘when will you get a low cost carrier flying from the airport’. Now, with Jet2 we have one and a locally-based, locally-grown airline. Yet despite this success the region’s great and good got together to stop further expansion, all to appease those same climate change gods that they appease by attacking the private car. Airport investment in the UK has ground to a halt. It isn’t just that building a new runway at Heathrow has been subject to endless enquiries (plus being opposed by the same bunch of guilty rich NIMBYs we saw stopping growth in Leeds).

Conservatives, after promising drivers they are on their side, should make the same promise to ordinary families and groups of friends who fancy a week or two in the sunshine. A promise of cheap flights - let’s scrap Osborne’s stealth tax on flying - so people can have a stag in Prague or go camping in the Italian lakes without needing an extra mortgage or an elite job to be able to do so. Maybe conservatives should also encourage internal flights - more little planes flitting from Leeds or Hull to Penzance or Aberdeen. Let’s have skies that are open to the ordinary worker rather than just the greens, urbanists and guilty rich.

The Irish government is about to tell its livestock industry, one of that nation's signature businesses, that 200,000 cows need to die so as to save the planet. Just as we’ve seen in Holland, the EU’s rules - imposed and enforced by unelected judges and bureaucrats - mean that the dairy industry is under attack by the great green blob. At the same time the endless dribble of vegan and green propaganda has led to campaigns aimed at cutting meat out of our diets. Just as with cars and planes, the great and good want you to stop having steak, burger and sausages on your barbecue. They probably want to stop you having a barbecue.

There are a lot of home comforts the greens want to ban or make more expensive: decent heating, cooking with gas and the white goods that provide such benefits to our lives. But the most egregious of the attacks from the climate emergency cult is the assault on eating meat. According to the guilty rich, the urbanists and the greens, your juicy steak or luscious sausage sarnie is killing the planet. Conservatives need to call foul on this nonsense and defend your right to slap a nice piece of t-bone on your barbecue, enjoy a rich lamb casserole on a winter's evening and stave off the hangover with a sauce-laden bacon butty.

Not only is eating red meat part of our culture and history, it’s a glorious pleasure. Most of the supposed evidence pointing to the impact of livestock farming on climate change is, at best, creative and at worst simply vegan propaganda. Along with defending the car and the cheap holiday, a conservative manifesto would promise to back the livestock industry, to clamp down on the threat from animal rights extremists and to celebrate our traditional diet. Even better, we should promise to make meat cheaper and more available to all.

So there you have it - an opening salvo in an effective conservative agenda: backing the private car, promoting cheap air travel and supporting the meat industry. Trucks, planes and steak on the barbecue. Now that’s a real agenda for a great government.