So we voted Conservative and all we got was these lousy windmills

Like most of you, I've never been to Workington. The nearest most of us get to West Cumbria is a nice B&B in the more accessible parts of the Lake District. I am therefore, like all those soy-latte drinking, man bag toting think tankers in London, eminently qualified to talk about "Red Wall" voters and why the government's green strategy is a veritable minefield just waiting to blow up in ministers' faces. It's not that the idea of 'decarbonising' is a bad idea but rather that the headline - 'no more diesel or petrol cars after 2030' - is guaranteed to get the wrong sort of debate once people in Workington are allowed out again.

Instead of a measured conversation about how we maintain industry and keep the lights on while shifting to a 'green' future, we will get a debate about cars. And cars matter. I apprecate that the badly dressed, scruffy-bearded policy wonks in London don't think cars matter, but they do - even in lefty-voting, metropolitan elite dominated places like Oxford, cars are important.

In a town filled with students, populated by many of the trendiest greens going, and run by lefties, the number of cars has increased over the last ten years. Cars really do matter and this means that if you make your headline 'Build Back Better' policy about phasing out the cars people drive right now then you're going to get some kick back. Not from the sort of people you've put on you policy panels or the nice young folk you employ as 'Special Advisors' but from the bloke in Aspatria with a six-year old 4x4 in his drive. Instead of 'how can we make Britain greener', we have 'why are you taking my car off me'.

If you spend any time on Twitter, you will have noticed how the green stuff has brought about a shift in the emphasis of transport planners. Until recently transport planning was utterly dominated by trains and, to a large extent, this remains the case despite railways literally destroying value. But now the new generation of planners want to talk about 'walkability' and 'bikeability'. These planners want to hem you into tidy little 15-minute neighbourhoods within which all your needs can be met. And fifteen minutes walking is about a mile - this creates a series of semi-isolated factory towns and represents a withdrawal back to the pre-car days when ordinary people seldom travelled more than a few miles from their front door. A sort of renewed feudalism driven by the idea that travel is destroying the planet.

Although current news is understandably dominated by the ongoing Coronovirus pandemic, this anti-car (I know electric cars are still cars but people will see it as anti-car) attitude represents a big city focused, London-centric view. That bloke in Aspatria isn't going to cycle to Cockermouth to visit his brother, especially since he's got his wife and two kids in the car with him. And there probably isn't a reliable bus service even if he'd consider the cost and inconvenience of such an option. To people in Workington - as well as for people right across the UK - the car isn't some sort of indulgence but is absolutely vital and central to their lives. Even for people who don't own a car. If you're planning on 'levelling' up places like Workington (or Keighley, or Mansfield, or Recar or a hundred other small towns in the North and Midlands) you don't do it by questioning the centrality of the car to the lives of everybody living in those places.

If, instead of "we're taking your car off you", the headline had been, "we're going to invest in greener energy and support new green technologies" then those Red Wall voters would mostly give the thumbs up. But because the government decided it preferred to impress the producers on Newsnight and a load of green-inclined voters in West London (who aren't going to vote Conservative any time soon), we have a set of policies that are floating face down in the water.

We see this time and time again as London-based policy people design policies that reflect their lives then impose them onto people who don't live, and probably don't want to live, those lives. A housing policy dominated by a set of people who think five-story terraced housing is the only beautiful housing form, an economic strategy founded on the delusion that people in grand London offices can pick industrial winners, and a rural policy written by people whose experience of the countryside is visiting Daddy's place in the Cotswolds. Food policy gets written to impress the policy wonk's vegan girlfriend and public health continues with its sneering, snobby view that everyone outside London, and especially in the North, is a fat ugly drunk with a fag in their mouth.

I don't speak for 'Red Wall' voters but I'm sure that they, after getting Brexit done and clamping down on immigration, wanted a change of tone. Less of the preachy, righteous stuff beloved of the think tanks and public policy mongers, and more practical and down-to-earth ideas about better schools, improving hospitals, protecting jobs, building roads and planting trees. People wanted government to do its job better, to invest in local infrastructure, and to talk in the same language rather than spend its time nudging us into state-approved lifestyles, or nagging us about our middle-age spread or the second glass of wine.

Instead they're taking the 4x4 off us and building lots of windmills for folk in Workington (not West London, obviously) to stare at. We have an energy policy that looks like it was designed in California homw of the brown out. All based on the delusion that wind power is all we need. Plus the same loud posh tutting about how you should get a bike or walk more. Which is fine until you've three kids to get to two different schools and then to get to work in another town. Seems to me that, if we want to get a better approach, we should move the government's green planning team to an office in Aspatria, give them a bike each and see what they come up with. I'm pretty sure the policy will have a load more sympathy to cars and driving than current transport policy, will probably mention taxis as important, and might treat buses as something other than a sort of poor persons' train. Maybe too, there'd be less emphasis on millions of inefficient, expensive to maintain, and not especially green windmills because that's all they'll see out in the Solway Firth - shore to shore windmills.

....