“Ever wonder why no-one from the planet’s Green-leaning
parties or environmental concern groups ever says anything very substantial
about car-usage or the restriction of such?”
Except Joan, his entire newly-founded Cabinet looked at him
as if he’d fallen from the skies. He took a few seconds to look around this
antique, stately room before speaking.
“Because they all drive cars…”
Pollitt knew this wasn’t wholly true. It was mainly because,
if there was one vote-losing policy it was restricting people’s right to drive.
Ruin the NHS, have the poor relying on Food Banks, but for God sake don’t touch
drivers. Electoral suicide. The only time Brits looked to insurrection it was
when there were fuel shortages like back in the day. They wouldn’t stand for
it.
You could prove global warming right in their faces and they’d
say fine, do what you have to, but don’t stop us driving. Don’t even try…!
Barry Pollitt knew he was the wrong man to be Prime
Minister, principally because he was the best man for the job. If you wanted an
honest man who would look at the problems of the world squarely and take
appropriate action, he was perfect. Unfortunately, nobody really wanted such a
man for Prime Minister. In so many ways, it was the last thing they wanted.
He was Prime Minister by default and everybody knew it.
The Tories had become so right wing, they’d gone off the map
completely. Out of Europe in a fit of pique; so many cuts in services, to the
disabled, to the poor that even loyal tories were desperate for a less evil
version of themselves. They’d presided over a cull and were now virtually
unelectable. Cameron had become, even against his own almost-forgotten
predictions, power mad and had reverted to Bullingdon-type and had made enemies
out of his contemporaries Johnston and Osbourn by denying them a chance at the
top job. The Labour Party had gone through a disastrous Milburn period when it
didn’t know if it was the party of the past or the future and had elected
Pollitt out of equal parts desperation and complacency. He had one thing the
others hadn’t – charisma. The ‘5% what you say, 95% how you say it’ factor they
hadn’t seen since the early Blair years.
And now here he was at his first Cabinet meeting telling
them he wanted the British public to stop driving their cars.
The Cabinet Secretary, Sir Desmond Flynn, looked around at
their faces, the elected government of the only-just United Kingdom and smiled.
This was going to be fun, he thought.
But, news travels extremely fast in political circles. No
sooner had Pollitt uttered his proposals, it seemed that the entire ‘Westminster
village’ was abuzz with it. Newspaper editors held wildcat meetings. Labour
Party grandees whispered prophecies of doom and wondered who they could wheel
in next. Within minutes power industry moguls were weighing up costs and
plotting downfalls.
Everyone began devising plausible ways of denying the truth of Barry Pollitt’s statements.
Virtually no-one of any powerful consequence saw any merit
in what he had said at all. A few Greenpeace types were wheeled out on Andy
Marr’s show and the like to verify statistics and give it ‘the-end-of-the-world-is-nigh-unless..’
routine, but no-one of any consequence
backed him at all.
There were even early hints that he was some sort of crack-pot or maybe even a crack-head.
‘He says that private cars are a major cause of global
warming. Is he mad?’
‘He wants us to drive only on certain days of the week. Is
he insane?’
The policy proposed by Pollitt was the one adopted by the
city of Paris for a brief period only six years ago and before in the
nineteen-nineties in an effort to reduce smog levels in the city. Odd
numbered-registration numbers one day, even-numbered the next with penalties
imposed for non-compliance. Car-sharing to be encouraged and rewarded with
tax-breaks. He'd exempted those needing vehicles due to disability. Was this such a big deal?
Seemingly it was!
Much was made of the fact that Pollitt himself didn’t drive.
He’d witnessed a young child being killed by what had transpired to be a
drunk-driver in the town of his youth and had been scared off driving as a
consequence. The press screamed that this was what made Pollitt prejudiced
against drivers.
‘How can a non-driver tell drivers what to do?’
There were demonstrations on the streets of Britain. Much
horn-tooting as snakes of cars clogged up Whitehall and the motorways.
Pollitt had appointed the joyously named Joan Green as his
Environment and Transport Ministers combined. She was one of only three Green
Party MP’s elected and, Pollitt thought, the most likely to support him in his
new ecological adventure.
Joan Green wasn’t so sure. She liked the idea of raising her
party’s profile and having someone in government certainly did that but, the
Green Party had skirted the issue of car usage for as long as it had existed
and, though she gave the outward appearance of resolution, inside she wanted to
run as far away as possible from this ‘car-accident waiting to happen’, as she’d
quipped with her dinner party friends at home in Brighton. The Green Party
manifesto was further left than anything the Labour Party had attempted for fifty years
(mainly because it had little chance of major electoral success), but it
blanched from telling it’s friends and supporters, never mind the electorate,
that they couldn’t drive their Renault Picasso’s. That was political suicide,
however much environmental sense it made. Carbon emissions could be cut back in
other, less controversial ways. Global agreements could be reached; other forms
of energy could be adopted. Windfarms and renewables. Nuclear, even.
Pollitt was both a political cynic and an idealist. He’d
gone along with the National Executive on most of their ‘election winning’
policies, bland and innocuous though they were designed to be. Slight rise in
Minimum Wage, new job deals for the unemployed, tax and interest rates fiddled
about with so that they made little real difference to anyone; protect the NHS
while privatising little chunks of it. The usual ‘smoke and mirrors’ pragmatic nonsense
of politics which had no effect on the grand design of power and wealth staying
very much in the hands of power elites. Once elected, he’d blind-sided them
with a little bit of idealism, for which he’d either be assassinated or in some
other form got rid of. Maybe they’d mire him in some contrived scandal – his
very own Zinoviev letter? He didn’t care that much. Let them do what they
wanted. At least his point would have been made.
He looked out onto the gardens at the back of Downing
Street. What use was a Prime Minister anyway? Just a puppet of the powerful.
Might as well cause a stir while you have the chance…
