Transport matters a lot - but not in elections. And that, on the whole, is a good thing

I HAVE PREVIOUSLY written in these pages that the previous Government’s ‘war for drivers’ would not be to its electoral advantage. The fact it has just been swept away in a landslide tends to confirm that view. It’s not that going ‘pro-car’ was a contributory factor to this defeat, it’s that it did nothing even to ameliorate the scale of the historic loss.

A quick look back may be helpful. Last July, having just held on to the Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat at a by-election, and choosing to believe it was anti-ULEZ (Ultra-Low Emission Zone) sentiment that ‘won’ it for the Conservatives, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and colleagues decided that the interests of their party would be well served by going energetically after the ‘drivers vote’.

It’s possible, I suppose, that the Conservatives’ worst general election results in at least 50 years (possibly ever – I’ve neither the time nor inclination to look back beyond 1974), I would have been even worse if they hadn’t gone with the so-called ‘Plan’ for Drivers. But, examining the wreckage, that’s highly unlikely.

So, going full-on pro-car was not the reason the Conservatives got hammered, but neither was it even remotely the electoral master-stroke they thought/hoped it would be. All it seems to have achieved was a pretty depressing roll-back from some of the quite good things that Sunak’s one-but-immediate predecessor as PM, Boris Johnson, managed to achieve in the transport space: setting up Active Travel England, supporting a big switch to electric buses, devolving more powers to Metropolitan Mayors, and ‘Decarbonising Transport’, as examples..

The fact that Sunak and his Transport Secretary, Mark Harper, still thought/hoped being ‘proudly’ on the side of ‘the motorist’ or ‘driver’ would do them some good in the recent General Election, as it approached (and, remember, the PM chose the date all on his own), is all the more remarkable given that the tactic did their party no good at all in the London Mayoral election two months before it.

A Telegraph item from July 2023. It didn’t quite turn out that way

Such a stance was arguably more likely to work in London, if anywhere – given the specific issue of the city’s ULEZ – so you might have thought they’d have seen the writing on the wall in the Tory candidate Susan Hall’s abject failure electorally, despite making the ULEZ a principal line of attack against Sadiq Khan.

Shortly after Kahn’s victory, journalist Dave Hill (admittedly no friend of the Tories) wrote that Hall, was “carried away by a belief that (her) passions and protestations are those of a sidelined and ‘silenced’ majority”, arising from which she “jettisoned judgement and embraced denial”. That sounds about right, and sounds exactly like what both Sunak and Harper did.

As I believe is explored further in my colleague Phil Goodwin’s piece in this same LTT issue, Sunak and his credulous cheerleaders at The Sunday Telegraph had literally made the headlines with “I am on (the) motorists’ side”, shortly after the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election. A couple of months later, Mark Harper told his party conference that “It’s the Conservative party which is proudly pro-car”. (I seem to recall he said that to an almost empty conference hall, as he launched his embarrassing Plan for Drivers.

As I have also previously written here, being assertively pro-motorist/driver/car and equally anti-anti-car/motorist/driver, has been shown to be an ineffective electoral strategy at the local level, too. That being the case, the question is plainly “Why do they still try it?” I’ve asked this question many times in numerous different forums without ever getting a convincing answer.

I’m left, then, to draw my own conclusion, based on my reading of the available evidence. This is that politicians – local or national, and of whatever party – make the mistake of equating noise with popular opinion. Indeed, I wrote something along these lines in the conclusion to my piece in LTT876, last September, exploring the issue, which you can see now on TAPAS, 19 September 2023.

The thing is, those who are triggered by the very idea of anything that might conceivably constrain their car use, or indeed anything that might favour those do not travel by car, know full well that noise is the best tactic to employ to get their way. Time and again in recent years, we have seen local authorities respond to incessant noise by pulling out active travel measures, like cycle tracks and Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, even though their own evidence says that the measures are working or, at least, not having the negative effects the noise-makers claim.

Sadly for our democracy, simply making yourself a real nuisance often seems to work… unless those you’re trying to unsettle are committed to the path they have chosen because it’s necessary, because it’s the right one, however loudly some might protest.

Last July, even Sir Keir Starmer, then the leader of the Opposition and now our Prime Minister, convinced himself that the authentic voice of the people in Uxbridge and South Ruislip was anti-ULEZ. “We heard it on the doors”, he said. But what did he mean by that? Quite likely that, of those people who bothered to open their doors to Labour party canvassers, the one issue that stood out from all the usual stuff that people complain about or are otherwise interested in – the economy, health, education, climate change, bins, anti-social behaviour, etc. – was the ULEZ. That usual stuff is just a background hum; but the ULEZ was new, different. Distinctive. Memorable. Noise.

How many people mentioned it, negatively? What proportion? Did anyone know, or count? Or were they just left with an impression? Either way, did Labour canvassers support the city’s Labour Mayor? Did they make the case he did, that it is a necessary to address a public health crisis? Or did they simply return to HQ and report that “They don’t like it, you know” and try to bully their own Mayor into ‘reflecting’ on his decision to implement the scheme. To their shame, it very much seemed they did the latter.

Noise, you see, isn’t evidence of what most people think, nor is something new that you might hear ‘on the doors’. You can much more accurately find out what most people think by asking them sensible questions in appropriate ways about their personal and local transport concerns, and then preparing well-argued and well-presented proposals to address them (as I’ve also explored in previous LTT contributions).

The comparative unimportance of transport in the electorate’s mind, in national or local votes, is, in my view, a very good thing; one that resonates with transport planners’ understanding that transport is a means, not an end in itself.

This comparative electoral unimportance should embolden decision-makers to do more of what their transport policies say they want to do, and hold their nerve when they do so. It should encourage them to tune out the ‘noise’ in their inboxes and make the most clear-headed judgements they can on the overall balance of public interest. Our leaders should take heart that the electorate at large has repeatedly revealed itself to be broadly happy with measures that clean their air, improve their health, make their streets safer, and which help stave off climate change and mitigate its effects.

My brief researches into the recent General Election results tend to back this up.

Let me start with Mark Harper himself, and see how the high priest of pro-motoring rhetoric faired. In 2019, he was elected MP for the Forest of Dean, gaining a whopping 60% of the vote. OK, so his party was expected to do badly, but surely such a high-profile supporter of ‘hard-working’ motoring families should still do well enough in a high car-owning, largely rural constituency (fewer than 12% of households have no access to a car). Well, his 60% vote share was cut to 33.5%, and he lost his seat by just under 300 votes.

Where else shall we look? How about Exeter, where two trial Low Traffic Neighbourhood schemes were scrapped just last month, after a great deal of noisy opposition? The Conservative candidate backed Harper’s ‘Plan’ for Drivers and also took an anti-LTN stance, while the Reform candidate stood on a national platform that was anti-net-zero, anti-LTN and anti-ULEZ. Nevertheless, those two together polled just 28% of the vote, and the LTN-supporting, no-car-owning Labour candidate, Steve Race, held the seat for Labour with a 45.3% share.

Next, let’s go to Oxford East, where there’s been no end of noise over the past couple of years about the city’s LTNs and proposed ‘bus gates’ (main street traffic filters). Here, the anti-LTN Independent Oxford Alliance came 5th with 6.1% of the vote, and another anti-LTN independent (Amir Ali) got 4.5%. The Conservative candidate, who also took an anti-LTN stance polled 12%.

Nevertheless, the sitting Labour MP was returned with 50.3% of the vote, and although this was down on a 57% share in 2019, that might partly be because the Green party increased its share by 8.2%, coming second. The LibDem candidate, who ran on a partly pro-sustainable transport ticket (and not an anti-LTN one), came 4th. Together, Labour, Green and LD polled over 70% of the total votes.

Now to Wales where, as you may know – it’s been covered by LTT quite a bit – Labour’s introduction of a default (not blanket) 20 mph limit in built up areas has been persistently attacked by Welsh Conservatives in recent times, and was one of their key campaigning points for the General Election. Well? By my reckoning, the Conservatives lost 11 seats in Wales and, as a result, now don’t have any MPs in that country at all. Not a single one. I wonder if they’ll reflect on their tactics at any point?

And finally, let’s revisit Uxbridge and South Ruislip. Here, the two same Conservative and Labour candidates who fought the by-election were up for MP-ship again. The Conservatives kept attacking the ULEZ, while Labour largely ignored it this time. What happened? Labour won the seat for the first time ever, by a slightly larger margin (587 votes) than they failed to win it in 2023.

Was this partly because the Reform vote took some votes away from the Conservatives? Possibly. But, then, the Greens also polled several thousand votes more than they did in the by-election.

I’ll conclude my quick review of the General Election results by looking at how the vote went in those (England & Wales) constituencies having the highest proportions of car-owning households (lowest proportions of non-car-owning households). You might have expected these places to be more receptive to the ‘Plan for Drivers/pro-car rhetoric of Sunak & Harper. Well…

At the 2019 General Election, the 132 constituencies with the highest proportions of car-owning households (from 86% to 92.4%) all returned a Conservative MP to Westminster. At the 2024 General Election, the Conservatives lost 64 of these seats (almost half, 48.5%)! The constituency with the very highest proportion of car-owning households (North East Hampshire, 92.4%) was lost to the LibDems. This was one of six of the 20 constituencies with the highest proportions of car-owning households to switch from the Conservatives to another party. In the other 14 constituencies, the Conservative vote share reduced by a minimum of 20%.

Again, my point is not about whether the ULEZ did or didn’t do the job in Uxbridge and South Ruislip, or whether ‘pro-car’ or pro-active travel and therefore (allegedly) ‘anti-car’ statements were influential in other constituencies (or, in the case of Wales, a whole country). It’s that a topic which some politicians spend so much effort campaigning on or worrying about really isn’t a pivotal issue in the minds of the vast majority of voters at election times.

I suppose an additional point I’m effectively making is that campaigning positively for effective measures to promote active travel, rather than being defensive about them, could be a constructive electoral tactic, if not a decisive one. It’s hard to tell, because not many politicians outside of Waltham Forest (see my previous piece in LTT893 and TAPAS, 5 June 2024) have seemed to try it!

So, here’s my takeaway message. Not just for this Government, or the last one, but for every politician who knows we need to reduce the Climate Change pressure that’s threatening the future of the planet; who wants to help us live in a more civilised way; who recognises that the motor car needs to be kept in a place befitting its role as a servant and not master; and who seeks to enable far more people to walk, wheel, cycle and use public transport and far fewer people to drive far less frequently.

When opposition arises, as it inevitably will, however well-articulated the narrative of the need for change, bear in mind that the lesson of this General Election, and of many previous elections, is that, despite the noise, bluster and sloganeering, there’s nothing to fear in pursuing a positive message of change about how we travel.