Net zero is popular and essential. Labour must take the fight to Badenoch and Farage
5 min read
Evidence shows that rolling back our climate ambitions would do nothing to win back voters from Reform, but instead risk losing crucial votes to the Liberal Democrats and Greens. Labour must not buckle on net zero.
Following their success at the local and mayoral elections, Nigel Farage and Richard Tice have been acting as if they’d won a referendum on the UK’s net zero target.
Sections of the media have been all too happy to oblige them, rushing to explain the rise of Reform as an expression of a supposed growing antipathy towards the government’s ambitious plans to achieve a clean power system by 2030 and to accelerate the transition to net zero.
But that’s not how the voters themselves see things. Despite Kemi Badenoch joining hands with Farage to attack one of her predecessor's most important legacies — the enshrining of the net zero by 2050 target in law — public support remains high. In fact, both are running in the opposite direction from a British public that overwhelmingly recognises the threat that the climate crisis poses to their communities and their livelihood, and who want to see action taken.
There’s no evidence to suggest that net zero was a deciding factor in the local elections. In fact, recent polling found that concerns about immigration, healthcare and the economy were the chief factors driving voters to Reform, with less than four percent of respondents saying that climate change and environmental issues influenced their vote.
Despite Farage and Tice’s best efforts to make the climate crisis the latest frontier of a culture war, a majority of those who voted Reform in these elections support policies to keep the UK on track to meet its net zero targets. The message from voters of all colours is clear: we don’t want Trump-style climate denialism here.
Such denialism is leading both the Tories and Reform to strange positions on the very means to deliver the lower bills, jobs and increasing living standards that voters are demanding. Tice has accused Ed Miliband of being “obsessed” with renewable energy. But it is Tice, Farage and Badenoch who are in the grip of an obsession they appear powerless to resist.
How else can one explain the following quote from Mr Tice, raging against any renewables or clean energy infrastructure in his backyard of Lincolnshire: “We will attack, we will hinder, we will delay, we will obstruct, we will put every hurdle in your way. It’s going to cost you a fortune, and you’re not going to win. So give up and go away.” These are measures that will deliver lower bills for his constituents, as well as jobs and economic growth on top of the £980m and 12,209 jobs that clean industries already support in Greater Lincolnshire.
Indeed, the region is at the heart of one of the UK’s largest net zero clusters, with the sector supporting a revival in advanced manufacturing and over 13,000 jobs, including at Siemens Gamesa, which has installed enough offshore wind capacity to power approximately 1.5m homes. Meanwhile, on the Mersey, where Reform’s candidate edged to victory by a margin of just six votes in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election, the transition to electric vehicles — which the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit has estimated could grow the automotive sector by over 150,000 jobs — is helping to secure the future of Stellantis’ Ellesmere Port Plant, which switched over to producing electric vans last year.
That’s before we even get to energy security. One of the defining features of our economy and politics over the past fourteen years has been the rise in insecurity. Insecure work, insecure borders, and yes, an insecure energy supply. Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine exposed the UK’s overwhelming reliance on international fossil fuel markets over which we have little control.
The previous Conservative government’s failure to tackle this issue during peacetime meant that when war came, our economy and billpayers, from consumers to businesses, were brutally exposed. Yet the position of Reform and the Conservatives is not to try and insulate ourselves from this insecurity and reliance on Russia by rapidly growing our home-grown clean energy, but to instead bury ourselves in Putin’s warm embrace.
As the Labour government reckons with the political implications of these elections, we must listen and learn from what the voters have told us. But the evidence is clear that rolling back our ambition on climate would do nothing to win back voters from Reform, but instead risk us losing crucial votes in marginal seats to the Liberal Democrats and Greens who talk a good game on net zero even as they fail to provide a credible plan of how to get there. Recent research by Persuasion UK found that ‘Green curious’ or ‘Lib Dem curious’ voters outnumber Reform curious Labour voters even in the Red Wall.
After fourteen years of Tory mismanagement involving a sustained deterioration in our public services and stagnating living standards, many people feel our politics is broken. In some ways, it should be no surprise that Farage’s siren song about a nation in decline resonated. But we can, and must, be confident in telling a story of our own — about how the transition to a cleaner, greener, and more secure Britain is helping to revive our nation’s industrial heartlands, make us safer and more independent, and ensure lower and less volatile energy bills.
Far from being an electoral liability, the net zero transition is part of the solution to the problems facing those communities who feel they’re not being listened to. It has the potential to deliver transformational change in those areas of the country where disenchantment with the status quo runs deepest. It offers them something that they’ve been denied for far too long, and the absence of which allows populists to thrive: hope.
Luke Murphy is the Labour MP for Basingstoke and Chair of the Climate APPG.
