Boris’s eco-optimism will get the better of him

Vote blue for green jobs in the red wall. That’s the message we’re supposed to take from Boris Johnson’s ten point plan for reaching zero carbon emissions. The launch follows some shallow Westminster chatter about how this stuff relates to the departure of Dominic Cummings, chatter which somehow overlooks the fact that said departure has made precisely no difference to what’s being announced.

Do the Tories new voters in red wall seats care about eliminating carbon emissions? My think tank, the Social Market Foundation, has been investigating this question. For what it’s worth, our polling and focus groups don’t find much regional variation in attitudes here: broadly speaking, voters are quite positive about a greener economy, though their level of knowledge about what that means is fairly low.

The big variations in attitude are found in income: unsurprisingly, the more money people have, the more relaxed they are about the costs of net zero. And there will be costs, though you wouldn’t learn that from the PM’s op-ed in the FT today.