THE world’s high-temperature records have been broken, and broken again, in recent days. Another wake-up call to politicians about the overheating of the planet? No: the reaction of both Sir Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak has been to fiddle while Rhodes burns — and tens of thousands of British people are evacuated.

The cause of this cognitive dissonance has been the Uxbridge by-election. Labour failed to win, it is said, contrary to pollsters’ predictions, because of a revolt against plans by the Labour Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, to extend his Ultra Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ) scheme to impose daily charges on the capital’s most-polluting cars and vans (News, 17 March).

Voters don’t like paying for green policies; so let’s dilute the policies, knee-jerked Labour and Conservatives alike. Sir Keir immediately called on Mr Khan to modify his anti-pollution plans. Mr Sunak is planning to water down the UK’s net-zero carbon-emissions target in a “proportionate and pragmatic” way.

Tory backwoodsmen have set up a Net Zero Scrutiny Group — as dodgy a euphemism as the European Research Group — claiming that action to arrest climate change will “cripple our car industry, flood the market with cheap Chinese cars and pile further costs on people’s already stretched incomes”. Fires, floods and hurricanes, presumably, will be better.

There are several problems with this political panic.

Philosophically, it makes a category mistake; for the environment is not a part of the economy; rather, the economy is a subset of the environment. Electorally, even though a by-election can be swayed by a single issue, General Elections are usually determined by a broader sweep of factors. Politically, since the original ULEZ scheme was devised by a Conservative, Boris Johnson, it is abandoning a cross-party consensus on an issue as massive as global overheating. We must not allow our politicians to play politics with the climate before the next General Election.

But Labour is right to be kicking itself over the ULEZ débâcle. The party trumpets its special care of the poorest in society. Yet the ULEZ scheme has been designed so that it will impose a charge of £12.50 a day on diesels that are more than seven years old, and petrol cars made before 2006. Who drives such old bangers? People who cannot afford to buy new ones. Poor people. So, ULEZ is a regressive tax: it penalises the poor more than the well-off. It was not just badly timed; it was badly designed.

Mr Khan argues that ULEZ is designed to improve air quality. Good idea. Some 4000 Londoners a year die prematurely from air pollution. Lung cancer in non-smokers, which has doubled since 2008, has been linked to fine-particulate pollution emitted by vehicles. This concentrates in the air close to ground level, at child height. But particulate pollution also comes from brakes and tyres — on posh new cars and electric vehicles — as well as old high-polluting engines. So, why is there not a ULEZ charge on other cars, too?

Time for a rethink, the politicians say. OK, but that must not mean dumping the fundamental need to address human-made environmental degradation. The rethink should come on the detail of how, at home and abroad, we expect the poor to pay for the climate-complacent indulgences of the rich.