North Sea drilling could threaten Andy Burnham's green credentials
3 min read
The prospect of new licenses for oil and gas drilling is not a vote mover in and of itself. Seen in a climate change context, it could be, however.
In this week’s edition of The Guardian’s "dining across the divide", a feature where people with opposing political beliefs share a meal, one diner said he wouldn’t vote Labour “if Andy Burnham goes ahead with North Sea oil drilling”.
It is safe to say that Finley, 23, is a bit of an outlier in this regard. The Labour manifesto pledge on this – no new licenses for North Sea drilling – has been under much scrutiny, and much attack, over the long hot summer which has thus far constituted the whole of Burnham’s time as Prime Minister. Persuasion UK’s research on this shows that among the general public, by varying wording slightly, it's possible to get pluralities both supporting and opposing expanded drilling. We can take this to mean it is something that, on the whole, the public does not think very much about.
Because issues that people do not think about very much do not move votes, it would be misleading to say that any significant numbers of people will do as Finley plans to and let Burnham’s decision on this issue decide their vote.
What the public, and particularly the bits of the public inclined to vote Labour, are thinking about, however, is climate change. While for Labour the electoral upside of new licenses is basically nil – something people don't think about has happened, they continue to not think about it – the electoral downside is potentially quite large, because of the way that this issue connects with a variety of others that people do, in fact, think about. Renewable energy, for instance, is reliably preferred over oil and gas, and Persuasion’s testing has shown that the strongest argument against new licenses is one that foregrounds climate change.
The public’s ideological level concern about the changing climate is often underrated, parsed in political conversations via secondary benefits like cheap energy and green jobs. In truth, however, the British public really care about climate change – for around a fifth, the environment is the number one issue facing the UK (this has ticked up after a summer of extreme weather). It’s about a third for Labour voters, meaning that it is Burnham’s base who are more concerned.
If climate and net zero are reliably strong issues for the voters Burnham needs, this is not the case for the Conservatives. Kemi Badenoch's recent pronouncements against net zero present difficulties for the coalition that the Tories need to catch (to simplify, the anti-net zero stance is popular with Reform/Conservative swing voters; it's not so popular with Liberal Democrat/ Conservative swing voters). It’s an issue where the potential Labour vote is united but the potential Tory vote divided.
Alienating left bloc voters and accordingly bleeding support to other progressive parties was one of the downfalls of Starmerism. The “Burnham bounce” has been all about the return of these progressive voters. If the Prime Minister wants to keep his standing in the polls, it will be unhelpful, to say the least, to be perceived as being poor on climate. As such, while the licenses issue alone might not hugely move votes, if it is packaged as part of a broader message about climate policies and political positioning (a packaging the Greens already seem keen to provide), it could prove damaging to Burnham.
Electorally, the prospect of further oil and gas licenses does little as a positive case to draw people to Labour. However, the potential downside risks of widely socialised arguments and news stories about the PM's party being blasé on climate change are notable.
Morgan Jones is Deputy Director of Persuasion UK
