Sam Hall is the Director of the Conservative Environment Network.
The election results were painful and devastating for Conservatives, with many hardworking and committed candidates losing their seats.
It is now essential that we take time to analyse what went wrong and have an honest and realistic conversation about our future. Voters clearly feel the Conservative Party got a lot wrong in office. However, there is a route back.
To rebuild, we need to win back both Reform voters and those who switched to left-of-centre parties. We need to change, but should not throw the baby out with the bathwater. The environment in particular offers a unique opportunity to win back Labour, Liberal Democrat, and Green voters without costing us Reform switchers.
The starting point for our post-election debate must be the evidence about what voters actually think. Above all, the Conservative Party lost because they lost their reputation for competence and the trust of voters to deliver. For Reform voters in particular, the Conservatives were punished for their failure to reduce immigration, which has been shown in survey after survey to be the top priority for traditional Conservative voters and Reform switchers.
Some will no doubt try to blame green policies for Reform’s strong showing. But CT Group polling prior to the election showed that over 60 per cent of Conservative-to-Reform switchers named immigration as the top issue deciding their vote, compared to only two per cent who named climate policies and net zero. This is also borne out in a survey by Opinium, where 58 per cent of Reform voters chose immigration as their primary concern.
The truth is that Net Zero is not a salient issue for Reform voters and rowing back further on green policies would not have won them back.
Conversely, it is the case that, for other groups of voters, a positive environmental message can be an electoral asset for the Conservatives. Among the public as a whole, the environment remained a top five issue throughout the last parliament. It is popular with many 2019 Conservative voters who decided to vote Lib Dem, Green, or Labour this time, including the two million “Turquoise Tories” identified in some recently-published Stonehaven research.
Despite the victories of Labour, the Lib Dems, and Greens in Conservative heartlands on pro-environment platforms, the salience of green issues in this campaign shouldn’t be overstated. They did not feature prominently in the media debate or in doorstep conversations.
But whether it’s Red Wall voters working in green industries, Blue Wall voters worried about the loss of green space and polluted rivers, or ‘RSPB woman’ who cares deeply about wildlife and landscapes, it is an error to think Tory voters do not care about the environment.
Yet the Conservative campaign did not mention the environment very much and, when it did, opted for a negative message positioning Net Zero as a burden to be minimised.
The origin of this strategy was the surprise Uxbridge by-election victory last summer, which was followed by Rishi Sunak’s speech rowing back on the policy a couple of months later where he delayed the phaseout of new petrol and diesel car sales by five years. During the general election, the party tried to replicate the Uxbridge triumph by wedging Labour on some of its Net Zero policies, such as the 2030 clean power mission; self-evidently it didn’t succeed.
While they were clearly not to blame for the defeat, rowing back on Net Zero did not aid the Conservatives’ electoral fortunes either.
The Reform vote share has risen consistently since Sunak’s speech. Voters passed their initial verdict on the new tack in May’s disappointing local election results, with only (pro-Net Zero) Ben Houchen winning his mayoral contest; the general election has reconfirmed the electoral limits of sceptical messaging on it.
It also meant that the party’s green achievements were undersold. The party’s proud environmental legacy – which includes phasing out coal-fired power stations, building the five biggest offshore wind farms in the world, creating a marine protected area around our Overseas Territories bigger than India, and reforming agricultural payments to incentivise more sustainable methods of food production – barely featured.
The rhetoric made it nearly impossible for the party to get any credit from pro-environment voters – despite deserving it.
Another consequence of the Conservatives ceding the pro-environment ground is that it prevented a sustained challenge to Labour’s big-state, centrally-planned approach to Net Zero, which requires more public spending and the creation of a publicly-owned energy company.
In fairness, there were some isolated attempts to articulate a compelling alternative based on private finance and market signals, which would be cheaper for consumers and more open to innovation; in Opposition our party should develop this important pro-market critique of and alternative to Labour’s energy policies in the new parliament.
Similarly, the reluctance to champion the party’s record on the natural environment let Labour off the hook for their lack of concrete policies to protect and restore nature.
From using our Brexit freedoms to tackle harmful fishing by EU vessels, to ensuring all new homes deliver a net improvement to biodiversity, the Conservatives were arguably the stronger party on nature. But they did not press their advantage in the campaign, despite the manifesto containing several good pledges on tree planting and rivers.
After these results, the Conservatives have a mountain to climb to rebuild trust with voters and get back to a winning position by the time of the next election in 2029. We must tackle the issues that traditional Conservative voters and Reform voters are really motivated by, above all immigration.
But copying Reform’s agenda wholesale won’t win a majority. That’s why we must also put forward a positive, conservative plan for the environment.
