Want to win public support for green policies? Learn to present them more clearly

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I was still playing chess in the county league in the 1990s. Many of the matches took place in school classrooms in the evenings, and if I was on top in my game, I would copy my hero Garry Kasparov and prowl the room while I waited for my opponent's next move.*

This gave me the chance to read the children's work that had been pinned up on the walls. It was often about the environment, and it usually revealed that the issues of greenhouse gases that cause global warming and chemicals that damage the ozone layer were tangled together in the children's minds.

As their teachers thought this work worthy of being honoured, I assumed that the issues were entangled in their minds too.**

I thought of those days when I read this in a report on the Guardian website this morning:

Tom Burke, the co-founder of the green thinktank E3G, predicted that those within Labour who are antagonistic to green measures will seize this moment. He said: "There will be pressure inside Labour – some people will take fright from this.” Some trade unions have deep reservations about the transition to a low-carbon economy, and some in the party are fearful over Tory attacks on climate policies.

But Burke warned that Starmer should not listen to these concerns. He said: "They should be very careful in generalising from this to climate policy more generally. What Starmer should do is not attack his own side, but communicate far more effectively what the consequences will be of climate policy failure. That’s what’s missing from this debate."

Because ULEZ isn't about climate change: it's about reducing air pollution London and so reducing its serious effect on health - children's respiratory health in particular.

If Labour*** had presented ULEZ to voters as a health measure it might well have won more support, because threats to your children's health are urgent. But most voters probably assumed the measure was something to do with climate change, which seems a more distant threat.****

So campaigners need to do what those children and their teachers didn't do: untangle these issues so they are better understood by the public.

* In his Chess for Tigers, Simon Webb advises you to keep an eye on an opponent who is having a long think while you prowl. If they start shifting in their seat as if they are about to move, you should, he says, go back to the board and make a show of thinking hard about the position. This will make them think even longer about their move and increase the chances they will lose the game on time. I tried this several times and it works.

** In case you see this as political indoctrination, the idea that children should be interested in nature and care about it was central to 20th-century children's literature. And no one would call Enid Blyton woke.

*** Yes, I know it's a policy of the Conservative government.

**** The psychologist David Smail used to talk about 'proximal' and 'distal' threats. I think this is useful jargon.