In many ways, it is incredible they got away with it for so long. For the past decade or so, mainstream politicians across Europe have stopped promising to improve their voters’ living standards. Instead, they have boasted about their plans to limit them. They have extolled the virtues of a higher cost of living, deindustrialisation and restrictions on personal freedoms. And they expected most people wouldn’t mind or perhaps even notice – because all this was to be done in the name of ‘saving the planet’ from climate change. But in 2023, that elite green consensus came crashing down to Earth.
