If an Englishman’s home is his castle then the car is his steed. So deeply is the motorist embedded in both the national and political psyche that pivotal voting archetypes are described by their ride. Political strategists have, over the years, fretted over the affections of White Van man, Mondeo man and Galaxy man. Such is the framing that a student of British politics might be surprised to learn that women also drive. (Female voters get epithets based on homes or shops: Worcester and Waitrose woman).
There are 33mn cars in the UK. England alone has 12 cars for every 10 households. Driving is seen as synonymous with freedom, encroachments on it as an attack on basic rights. There is no reason to think the British are more obsessed with their cars than other nations, certainly not more than Americans. What is perhaps different, though, is the motorists’ place in political mythology. Drivers enjoy the power of being equated with target voters. So when Rishi Sunak declares himself a pro-car combatant in the “war on motorists”, it is easy to comprehend the political excitement.
Few of these political stereotypes bear serious psephological scrutiny. Mondeo Man was originally identified by Tony Blair as Sierra Man. But the Mondeo, an affordable saloon, superseded that model and was also pleasingly alliterative. In as far as the Mondeo represented anything, it was an average aspirational family whose support Labour needed to reclaim. Later, Blair would move up the income scale with Galaxy Man, a people-carrier he used himself.
Perhaps more coherent was White Van Man, who represented an independent tradesman. Initially a term of abuse for inconsiderate drivers, it was adopted by Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper, which ran a column dedicated to this working class hero’s views. Even though these classifications are still too broad to be truly useful, to politicians they represent a set of electorally in-tune social values and voters.
Since the fuel duty protests which destabilised the Blair government in 2000 — years before France’s gilets-jaunes — petrol taxes have been the most sensitive. That revolt’s leader was lionised by the media in ways that would be unimaginable to trade unionists. Although it was led by hauliers rather than car drivers, MPs have been habitually nervous about raising the duty ever since.
And the current claim of an anti-car agenda does hold water. Major cities have introduced congestion charges, pedestrian zones and hostile road layouts. Drivers sit in traffic queues staring at wide and empty cycle lanes. Low traffic neighbourhoods have displaced drivers and their emissions on to already clogged main roads. That advocates have justifications for each policy does not dispel the sense of a strategy to inconvenience drivers out of their cars. And road-pricing may be the next front as EVs shrink fuel duty revenues.
What elevated the issue to national politics was last month’s Uxbridge by-election, where Tories credited their success to campaigning against a hefty tax on polluting vehicles being levied by London’s Labour mayor. While there is something in this, it is also almost certainly being over-interpreted. Such issues are good for by-election protest votes but rarely central to national polls.
Yet the argument can be depicted as a fightback against condescending urbanites with no feel for life in outer suburbs and rural areas where there is limited public transport. The Tories sense, probably correctly, that support for green policies weakens once people feel costs and disruption. Even if, as likely, his words amount to little, Sunak is pitching to be the voice of painless moderation against imaginary absolutists.
However, it is a strategy to shore up the base rather than a plan for victory. It is not enough to deflect voters from evicting an exhausted government which has presided over — and deepened — a cost of living crisis. Today’s equivalents of Mondeo, Galaxy and White van man care about their cars but they care more about the stalled economy.
The divide does illuminate a more profound political issue though. Neither Sunak’s defence of the motorist nor his pushback on net zero measures is likely to alter the course of the election. But the car clash is a proxy for a wider philosophical contest between collective public policy goals and individual freedoms.
The climate agenda will see citizens required to make individual sacrifices for the greater good of hitting net zero goals. Tory unease with it springs from this, rather than mistrust of science. They see a statist mindset and a backdoor to socialism. Some refer to environmental campaigners as “watermelons”, green on the outside, red within.
After years of prioritising individual rights, the political pendulum is swinging back towards collective demands. This goes beyond net zero to a fundamental diagnosis of the UK economy. Blair’s think-tank, which has Keir Starmer’s ear, has called for planning powers to rush through decisions for infrastructure, for centralised use of personal data, and for a digital identity for all citizens.
From planning to tax, AI to climate change, the coming battle is over how far people are ready to yield freedoms to what Labour calls “the strategic state”. This, not any overstated crusade against cars, is the real political tussle of the next decade. Buckle up.