Comment: Reform voters and net zero

Reform UK is polling at its highest level yet. 

Running on an anti-net zero ticket, the party isn’t currently predicted to win any seats at the next General Election. But Reform doesn’t need to win any seats to lose the Conservatives plenty of them. 

Even without representation at Westminster, Reform could shape the conversation on net zero if the mainstream parties pivot in response to Reform’s rhetoric, deepening the risk of climate change being used as a ‘wedge issue’. 

Two years ago, the party’s Chairman, Nigel Farage, called for a referendum on net zero (albeit to a very muted response). This week, party leader Richard Tice said Reform would scrap the UK’s Net Zero targets and use the money to improve the NHS instead. As well as pitting the NHS directly against net zero, Tice doubled down on the call for a referendum on net zero, claiming they would win it “hands down”.   

As campaigners and journalists have been quick to point out, there’s consistently high levels of support for net zero across the mainstream political spectrum. So on the face of it, Tice’s prediction of an easily won referendum is unlikely to come to pass . 

But while support for net zero is holding up among Conservative as well as Labour voters, are Reform voters different?

The short answer is ‘yes’ – at least on the limited evidence available so far

Reform voters and net zero

As a new party that has only recently achieved polling numbers to justify closer attention to their voters, relatively little is known about Reform voters’ climate opinions. 

Approximately 200 Reform voters (those intending to vote Reform at the next general election) have taken part in Climate Barometer surveys to date, so comparisons should be understood in this context, but some stark differences are apparent.

In contrast to supporters of all other parties, Reform voters express clear opposition to net zero policies. 70% say they oppose the target of net zero emissions by 2050, with 52% strongly opposing it. And 72% believe that people who campaign on climate change are ‘out of touch with most of the country’.

A clear majority (75%) of Reform voters also hold the belief that it will ‘cost too much to tackle climate change now and we should be prioritising other things’, and many (79%) believe that the UK should not be taking steps to tackle climate ‘until other bigger countries, like the US and China agree to do the same’. 

Levels of support among Reform voters for building more wind and solar capacity are net positive, but still well below the levels seen across the rest of the population. 

Some of the views of Reform voters seem to reflect an exposure (and susceptibility) to conspiratorial anti-net zero narratives: they are more than twice as likely as Conservative voters to believe that 15 minute neighbourhoods are an ‘attempt to restrict where people can drive, and control where people can go’.

Who are Reform voters?

Reform voters are likely to have previously voted Conservative, and on some climate issues, Reform and Conservative voters speak with one voice: one recent survey found similar levels of support for expanding the oil and gas industry in the North Sea (much higher than for supporters of other parties).

But for the most part Conservative voters are closer to the other mainstream parties than to Reform in terms of their views on net zero.

Reform voters are more likely to have opted for ‘Leave’ in the EU referendum, to be older, and not to be university educated. This description would also apply to the ‘Loyal Nationals’ segment of the population, and indeed, More in Common data shows that Loyal Nationals are the segment polling highest for Reform at the next general election.

But Reform voters can’t be straightforwardly equated with Loyal Nationals. 

More in Common data shows that they are far from the only segment considering switching to Reform. And although Loyal Nationals share some views with Reform voters on immigration, as well as concerns about costs and fairness when it comes to some net zero policies, they consistently report the third highest levels of concern about climate change.

In contrast, unpublished polling shared with Climate Barometer by the pollster Steven Akehurst showed a whopping 65% of Reform voters (299 in a sample of 4000 respondents) indicating that they were either ‘not very’, or ‘not at all’ worried about climate change.

Reform voters aren’t easy to pigeon hole. When a party plays to disenfranchisement with the mainstream, voters’ grievances can come from across the political spectrum. 

The cost of net zero: will Reform’s arguments cut through? 

Richard Tice hasn’t denied that there’s a broad social consensus on net zero, but argued this week that the public is only supportive because people haven’t been ‘told the true cost’ of net zero.

There is no evidence to suggest that people want to abandon net zero when the potential costs are emphasised, but there is a clear drop-off in support. And concerns about the costs of the transition being unfairly distributed are highest among Loyal Nationals, who, despite their varied voting intentions, are exactly the sort of voters Reform is trying to attract. Loyal Nationals are the segment most likely to agree that a ban on petrol and diesel cars is unfair because it would add extra cost to daily life (70%, compared to 46% average).

There’s widespread agreement across the population that the impacts of climate change will be costly and damaging, and that it would ‘cost too much not to tackle climate change now’. But that doesn’t mean the public aren’t also worried about the costs green policies may bring. The UK government’s public attitude tracker shows that 69% of people currently believe that the net zero transition will increase their living expenses, while wider polling shows a majority think the transition will be expensive for the country as a whole.

At a minimum, there are genuine concerns about the costs of living that politicians from any party can use to build fear about how net zero policies will impact ordinary voters. 

Disrupting the discourse

Reform UK claims that the drive for net zero will cost £30 billion each year. Government figures, and analyses by the Climate Change Committee, do not back this up – and the costs of not taking rapid action to decarbonise far outweigh the costs of investing in reaching net zero.  

But that doesn’t mean that the arguments around cost should be dismissed, and they speak – in a way very obviously reminiscent of the Brexit debate – to the emotive power of pitting expenditure of any kind against funding for the NHS.  

The Reform rhetoric exploits a tension that many in the climate movement will recognise: although the path to net zero can and should be fair, current policies don’t do enough to guarantee this. During a prolonged cost of living crisis, there is a real risk of being viewed as on the ‘wrong side of the argument’ in terms of the costs to consumers of the transition to net zero. 

Although many Reform voters currently say they ‘don’t want to carry out more climate action’, or that ‘net zero could never be fair’, campaigns may yet gain traction if they can advocate fairer terms for householders (e.g. free heat pumps for people on low incomes), and build trust in the ‘offer’ from central government.

And with 30% of Reform supporters agreeing that energy companies should pay the ‘majority of the costs for reaching net zero’, laying the bill for the transition firmly at the door of big energy companies is a campaign tactic that even voters across the political spectrum would likely be on board with.