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Widespread disillusionment following the Conservatives’ decision to weaken net zero commitments may have been a contributing factor in the party’s worst electoral performance in its parliamentary history, to the extent to which it fed into “narratives concerning competence and trust”, new polling suggests.
The result of the 2024 General Election may have been influenced by voters, including those in the Conservatives’ ‘Blue Wall’ heartlands in the south of England, rejecting the former Government’s increasingly sceptical approach towards climate and energy security issues, Survation data suggests.
In a speech last September, Rishi Sunak criticised “eco-zealots”, delayed the ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2030 by five years, loosened the 2035 phase-out of gas boilers, and scrapped home insulation measures requiring landlords to insulate their rental properties.
In June, he vowed to “max out” North Sea oil and gas reserves, authorising more than 100 new drilling licences at the Rosebank oil field, which holds an estimated 500 million barrels of oil.
According to Survation polling of 10,000 respondents, between 24 June and 3 July, almost half of voters in the 251 seats lost by the Conservatives said they believed that the Government should not have abandoned its net zero policy commitments. Around 25% of respondents in the south-east, where the Conservatives lost 51 seats, stated the party’s stance on climate change and the environment had dissuaded them from backing them.
The Conservatives lost 24 of their 57 seats in the south of England to the Liberal Democrats, a party which pledged to raise taxes on water company profits, with policies concerning climate, energy policy, nature and the environment ranked by Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth as being bolder than those in Labour’s manifesto.
Survation’s research found that addressing the sewage crisis was particularly important for respondents in the south of England, 70% of whom favoured setting stronger legal targets.
Jack Peacock, strategy and research manager at Survation, told Byline Times that “in the south, sometimes called the Blue Wall, the environment and climate change are important issues. The Conservative were smashed in these regions”.
While Mr Peacock said that climate change and the environment were not key factors in determining the outcome of the election – as only 18% of voters polled by Survation cited it as the main issue influencing their vote – he argued that “the environment and climate change are relevant to the extent to which they feed into narratives concerning competence and trust”.
“The Lib Dems made a big deal out of sewage, as it is emblematic of a government’s failure to govern,” he added. The party won a record number of seats in the election, as did the Green Party.
Opinium polling for the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, published on 5 July, found that 73% of voters who rejected the Conservatives in favour of the Lib Dems and Labour were strong supporters of the legally-binding 2050 net zero target, supported by 61% of the general population. The target requires governments to ensure that greenhouse gas emissions from all sectors of the economy are equivalent to those removed from the atmosphere.
Of the voters who ditched the Conservatives for the Lib Dems or Labour, 76% also said they believed that renewable energy sources offered better prospects for improving Britain’s energy security than oil and gas extraction, compared with 64% of the general population.
Prior to the election, polling by advocacy group, the Conservative Environment Network, highlighted the dangers of abandoning net zero commitments, concluding that 89% of Conservative voters open to voting for other parties favoured a consensus on tackling environmental issues.
Some 35% of voters, according to polling carried out by Savanta for the climate charity Possible last month, said they had heard less about climate change during the 2024 election than during the 2019 election, with just 16% saying that they had heard too much on the topic.
Abandoning the Climate Cost the Conservatives Votes – And You Money
The failures of successive Conservative Governments to provide reliable, affordable domestic energy has made Britain more vulnerable to external price shocks which have reverberated through the economy, pushing up energy bills and worsening the cost of living crisis.
Rather than pursuing a policy of rapidly expanding renewable energy and home insulation following the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, the Government sought to end the purchase of Russian oil by importing £19.3 billion worth of fossil fuels from petrostates including Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
This exacerbated Britain’s dependency on volatile international natural gas markets, which according to ECIU research from August 2022, caused 95% of the increase in energy bills which affected households in the aftermath of the Ukraine conflict. The International Monetary Fund concluded in July 2022 that Britain was the worst affected country by the energy crisis in Western Europe.
Since the Coalition Government decided to “cut the green crap” in 2013 – which added approximately £2.5 billion to household energy bills, according to Carbon Brief – British homes have also become among the worst insulated in Europe. A February 2020 analysis of 80,000 European homes by climate management firm Tado found that British homes lose an average of 3°C of heat every five hours, more than any other country surveyed.
The Voting Environment – A Climate In Need of Change
Labour’s landslide victory, in which the party won 405 seats despite gaining a 33.8% share of the vote, threw the First Part the Post (FPTP) voting system back into the spotlight.
The Electoral Reform Society said last week that the 2024 General Election was the most disproportional on record, in terms of votes cast not matching the seats gained in Parliament. The so-called ‘deviation from proportionality’ score was at record levels: in other words, seats did not come close to representing the votes cast. It left 58% of voters without an MP that they chose, while 74% of votes either went to losing candidates or were ‘surplus votes’ for a winning candidate.
Under a system of proportional representation, the Green party would have won more than 40 seats in Parliament rather than four, as the 7% of votes the party garnered culminated in it gaining just 0.7% of MPs.
The cross-party group Compass launched a campaign last month to target Conservative-held seats by supporting 30 parliamentary candidates who advocated for PR to replace FPTP.
Key seats targeted by the group included Wycombe, formerly held by Steve Baker, the founder of anti-net zero backbench pressure organisation the Net Zero Scrutiny Group, and North East Somerset, where Jacob Rees Mogg lost his seat.
According to Jack Peacock, the election result reflected “a multi-party election fought under a two-party system”.
“Anywhere where voters had a stick to beat the Conservatives, they did,” he said. “The extent of tactical voting is clear. The Liberal Democrats achieved the same share of the vote as in 2019, yet went from winning 11 seats to 72.”
A growing number of environmentally-focused advocacy groups, think tanks, and NGOs are now advocating for electoral reform – which they believe would better reflect the increasing enthusiasm that a large contingent of voters have for far-reaching, stringent climate and energy policies.
Labour’s Sent ‘Clear Message’ On Environment
Mel Kee, head of campaigns at climate advocacy group Green New Deal Rising, argued that the election result “sends a clear message to the Labour Government about what people want to see from their Government”.
She told Byline Times that Green New Deal Rising activists knocked on 10,000 doors during the course of the campaign and “found that transformative change for the climate was high on people’s agenda”.
“These concerns cut across party lines – and at the election we saw people who had previously voted for a range of different parties come together to vote in candidates who promised clear and urgent action at the scale we need,” she told Byline Times. “One clear example is the Green gains in Waveney Valley and Herefordshire, which had previously been Conservative strongholds.”
On Thursday, a report by the independent Climate Change Committee found the UK is not on track to meet its climate targets and that only one-third of the emissions reductions required by 2030 can be accounted for by credible policy plans.
As the Labour Party commands a healthy majority in the House of Commons, it remains to be seen whether it can deliver ambitious policy changes.
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