“What I want is to get done what the people desire to have done, and the question for me is how to find that out exactly.” —Abraham Lincoln
Recently on our podcast, Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg and I discussed energy policy and why he and Boris didn’t reverse Net Zero. The awful truth is that the polling showed Net Zero to be what the public wanted.
Politicians prefer winning elections, that’s why they try to give the public what they want. But what do electors really want? And must politicians adopt daft policies to win? And is there any point being annoyed when politicians follow the public? What can you do instead?
Find our discussion in the clip above.
I tended always to decide what I thought to be right and then argue for that. It is not as a rule what proper politicians do.
Proper politicians and party staff sample their inboxes and social media (which is of course not representative) and conduct polling informed by focus groups to try to find out what people, especially swing voters, want. On those measures, Net Zero looked like what the voters said they wanted, which is why Boris Johnson’s manifesto in 2019 chose to embrace the 2050 target not scrap it. It’s why in 2019 all the parties except the Brexit Party and UKIP went hard on Net Zero.
