The folly of labeling air conditioning ‘far right’

If you want to understand what lies behind the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform party and its consistent – indeed, deepening – lead in the UK polls, I have a suggestion: French air conditioning.  

To be more specific, if you want to understand the difficulty Reform’s opponents have in tackling it and why the party’s rise seems inexorable, the row going on at the moment in France over air conditioning offers a guide.

When you insist that wanting cool air is ‘far right’, you are in the same sphere as those who say that protecting borders is pandering to the far right

The New York Times reports how Marine Le Pen has said, with her typically incisive populist touch in the middle of a heat wave, that if she became president she would introduce a “major air-conditioning equipment plan” around France. She was backed by an opinion piece in Le Figaro, arguing that “making our fellow citizens sweat limits learning, reduces working hours and clogs up hospitals.”

With its equally typical tone-deaf response, the French left is using the heat wave to campaign against air conditioning. Libération, the left’s house newspaper, called air con “an environmental aberration that must be overcome” because it uses up too much energy. 

We’ve all heard the arguments many times. But more than that, Brits live in a country where air con is viewed by the authorities as something close to evil. In Florida, aircon is standard in 95 percent of new homes, as in Australia where 75 percent of homes have it. In Europe, long considered an aircon backwater by Americans, it is present in 30 percent of Italian homes and 40 percent of Spanish houses. And it is entirely normal in hospitals and care homes almost everywhere. Except, of course, in the UK – despite the appalling consequences of this. Last year 496 people died in care homes from heat, with a further 473 dying in hospitals. 

But there is one argument against aircon I confess to not having come across before, until I read the New York Times report. A French talk show host introduced its debate on Le Pen’s proposals by asking, “Is air-conditioning a far-right thing?”

If you want to take advantage of technology to be cool in your own home, you may, it seems, be far right.  Forget the fact that modern air-to-air pumps remove much of the green issues around cooling, for some supposed progressives, the very concept of cool air is seen by some as “far right.”

Which brings us to Reform, and also to the protests currently taking place in Britain outside asylum hostels and hotels. Because if you insist that wanting cool air is “far right,” you are in the same sphere as those who say that protecting borders is pandering to the far right, and that worrying that your neighborhood is housing sex offenders and dangerous young men also shows you are far right. You are removing any real meaning from the term by using it to describe mainstream ideas held by tens of millions.

And so the more you insist that such ideas are far right, the more you turn your defeat into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Screaming “far right” at people who want air conditioning won’t lead to anyone deciding they would rather sweat in the heat, just as labeling as far right anyone concerned over the influx of asylum seekers in their neighborhood won’t cause them to suddenly take stock and welcome them into the village. 

Quite the opposite, in fact. Because the more you label politicians who support ideas which are widely popular as “far right,” and the more you attack those who agree with those politicians, the more likely you make it that those you attack will draw the logical conclusion: that those politicians are the ones on their side. And the more their support will grow.

But more than that, the more likely you also make it that those who really are far right are able to present themselves as being smeared, because the term has become devoid of real meaning.

How is it that such a basic lesson still needs to be learned?