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The UK has (so far) avoided the sort of stark polarisation seen in nations like the US and Australia. But the country has its own particular story to tell on polarisation and climate change.
The world-leading Climate Change Act was passed with near universal political consensus in 2008. Famously, in campaigning ahead of the 2010 election, David Cameron posed for photos with a husky in the North Pole and was confident enough in the political appeal of climate change to promise he would lead the “greenest government ever”.
Once elected, though – and facing pressure from the right of the party on a range of issues including what would become Brexit – there was a sharp pivot in government rhetoric: in response to concerns about household bills and burdensome regulations, Cameron promised to “cut the green crap”. The long-running Ipsos MORI tracker poll of concern about climate change shows concern levels declining following the failure of the much-hyped Copenhagen UN summit in 2009, and reaching their lowest ever level during 2013.
This period was characterised more by an absence of public and political debate than by active polarisation, described in a report by Climate Outreach as “climate silence”. But there were also active efforts to prevent political polarisation from taking root, as it had done in other English-speaking countries, including the creation of the Conservative Environment Network and research on how to better engage centre-right audiences.
Analysis by Carbon Brief found that, between 2011 and 2016, editorial articles in publications such as The Sun, The Telegraph and the Daily Mail generally opposed action to tackle climate change, citing “unreliable” science and “expensive” environmental policies. By the end of that decade, however, those newspapers had ‘changed their minds’. By this point the outgoing Prime Minister, Theresa May, had made achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 part of the Conservative Party offer on the environment.
By 2021, following the publication of the Britain Talks Climate resource (showing how to engage across the whole of British society) and ahead of COP26 in Glasgow, there was a firm sense of political consensus around climate policies. But even during this period, differences between Conservative and Labour voters persisted. A YouGov tracker of the degree to which people think the threat of climate change is exaggerated showed up to 40% agreement among Conservative voters, but rarely more than 15% among Labour voters.
An unexpected by-election win for the Conservatives in the summer of 2023, widely interpreted as a protest vote against the expansion of the London Ultra Low Emission Zone, sparked a chain reaction culminating in Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announcing delays to some net zero targets. Perhaps as importantly, this marked a significant shift in the rhetoric around net zero, and the most recent Carbon Brief analysis of editorials (covering 2023) identified another uptick in anti-green commentary.
The Conservative Party suffered their ‘worst ever’ result at the 2024 General Election. As well as general dissatisfaction with the Conservative government, polls consistently showed that worries about the cost of living, the condition of the NHS (and for some, immigration) were the biggest influences on how people voted.
Climate change – and more broadly environmental problems like air pollution and sewage in rivers – were also cited by voters when asked to select their top three most important issues going into the election. But was climate change a ‘vote winner’ at the election?
Echoing previous research showing an appetite for greater leadership on climate change, a large (20,000 people) survey by Focal Data on behalf of Persuasion and ECIU found that 53% of voters who had switched their vote from Conservatives to Labour (or the Liberal Democrats) believed that Government policy on climate change should be going further and faster that it has been (27% thought it should be going more slowly).
And polling by More in Common on behalf of E3G went even further, showing that Rishi Sunak’s decision (in September 2023) to slow down some of the country’s net zero policy timelines had a negative impact on voters. People were twice as likely to say that delaying net zero targets was one of Sunak’s biggest mistakes, than his biggest achievements.
Whilst the General Election was not fought on climate and net zero grounds (compared with the last General Election in 2019, there were roughly 50% fewer mentions of ‘climate’ in the British media election coverage), these findings suggest that there is currently no political capital to be found in opposing green policies.
The only party standing on an anti-net zero ticket were Reform UK – but the same More in Common polling found that immigration was overwhelmingly the reason that people voted for this party. Only 4% selected Reform’s environmental policies as a reason for voting for them.
Polling by Opinium for the Conservative Environment Network (CEN), conducted just before the 2024 General Election was announced, suggests that playing into Reform UK’s anti-net zero stance will not be a vote winner for the Conservative party.
One important finding is that although Reform UK is (uniquely among the other mainstream parties) campaigning on an anti-net zero ticket, climate change is not currently a salient issue for Reform voters. The CEN polling found that only 2% of Reform voters listed climate change/net zero/environment as their primary concern (the majority chose immigration as their primary concern).
This mirrors polling carried out across multiple European countries, ahead of the EU election which saw significant gains for far-right parties. In Europe, as in the UK, the rise in support for right wing parties does not appear to be driven by these parties’ policies on climate change (even if they tend to hold anti-net zero positions).
Trust & influence: Beyond ‘trusted messengers’
Trust is the currency in which all communicators trade – and currently, its in short supply. Against this backdrop, do climate campaigns stand a chance?