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Any British voter who believes in climate change should not vote Conservative in the July 4 general election.
That’s because, in its current state, the Conservative party is endangering people’s lives, jobs and opportunities for economic growth by taking a negative approach to climate action and rowing back on the energy transition.
If all that sounds overly dramatic, don’t blame me. It is almost word for word what a former minister in the Conservative government, Chris Skidmore, told a Bloomberg podcast earlier this month, just before Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called the election.
It was only part of a salvo from Skidmore, an ardent net zero advocate who quit as an MP in January over what he called the “toxic message” sent by government moves to boost North Sea oil and gas extraction.
He went on to describe Sunak’s decision to water down a series of net zero policies last year as “the worst mistake of his premiership”.
“Historians will look back at this moment and recognise this was the moment the Conservative party lost the country, because it no longer spoke to the country about what its future was going to look like.”
I agree with a lot of what Skidmore said. But the bigger question is this: how good is his political assessment? Will Sunak’s move to talk down net zero be a serious vote loser? Or has he cannily improved his chances of staying in power by aligning his party with a green backlash that threatens to weaken climate progress across Europe and beyond? The signs so far are not encouraging for the Tories.
Let’s remember how this net zero rollback began. In July last year, the Tories clung on in Boris Johnson’s old Uxbridge seat in London’s suburbs by a few hundred votes — on a night when they were defeated heavily in two other parliamentary by-elections.
The winning Conservative candidate had vigorously opposed the plans of London’s Labour mayor, Sadiq Khan, to expand an ultra low emissions zone to outer London, costing some drivers of heavily polluting cars £12.50 a day.
Eight weeks later, Sunak announced a “new approach to net zero”. In what became known as his “seven bins speech”, he pushed back plans to end new petrol car sales and phase out gas boilers and cancelled moves to make rental properties more energy efficient.
To widespread bafflement, he also declared he would scrap rules that did not seem to formally exist — including “a government diktat to sort your rubbish into seven different bins”.
Two points deserved more attention than they received at the time, starting with the jolt of hearing a Conservative leader sound as if he wanted to ditch the relatively bipartisan approach to climate policy that has characterised UK politics for much of the past two decades.
Second, Sunak took this contentious step without a broad public mandate. His party made him leader, not the electorate, after the disastrous Liz Truss premiership.
It’s true that he insisted the UK would — somehow — stick to its international climate commitments. And his government quietly kept a raft of important net zero measures promoting everything from heat pumps to green electricity transmission.
But the U-turn sent a loud message, even though some research suggested it would bear few obvious political benefits. When Steve Akehurst, a polling analyst, showed voters a news story about Sunak’s rollback, older Tory supporters’ views of the party barely moved but younger graduates were actively repelled.
The Conservatives went on to lose more by-elections, and in the first major electoral test since the seven bins speech, the party suffered serious losses in local elections this month. Tellingly, one prominent Tory who held on, Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen, is a big supporter of green investment. And Khan was comfortably re-elected in London.
None of this proves the rollback failed. Sunak’s party has been in power for 14 long years. Disentangling the reasons voters abandoned Conservative councillors is complicated and not every green-leaning Tory was victorious. West Midlands mayor Andy Street lost his re-election bid. And Susan Hall, the Conservative candidate for London mayor, did better in some outer London spots where the Ulez is controversial.
Sunak’s move does not look like a vote-winning masterstroke so far. But this might change: voters have a habit of upsetting conventional wisdom. But if Sunak does end up proving it pays to weaken net zero policies, it will be a terrible setback for a party that has long shown climate leadership — and for the wider effort to keep the climate safe.
pilita.clark@ft.com
