The Conservative Party and environmentalism are often uneasy bedfellows – when the party is up against the wall, one of the first things commentators demand they ditch is ‘all the green crap’, along with foreign aid and ‘woke tosh’. Despite great work by organisations like CEN, this attitude remains pervasive.
Critics can point to the fact that just 10% of Tory voters put the environment as one of their top three most important issues facing the country, but you only need to dig deeper to show that the Conservative coalition is more complex than this: in 2020, YouGov found that 28% of Conservative voters thought concerns about climate change had been exaggerated, 59% thought it had not. On the goal of investing in more renewable energy like wind and solar so that the UK only uses renewable energy by 2030, Ipsos found that 68% of 2019 Conservative voters supported or strongly supported, against just 11% who opposed or strongly opposed.
The above polling places these figures in a vacuum – who wouldn’t support fully renewable energy in the abstract? But the hard fact remains that we are in a low-growth rut. As such, some on the right argue we should rip up environmental protections in a dash for economic growth, often justified by the fact that when push comes to shove Tory voters wouldn’t care or that they would prioritise economic growth over the environmental protections.
But is this really the case?
I dug into the gold-standard British Election Study (BES) to look at the data. The BES asks voters many, many questions, but the one we are interested in is:
Some believe that protecting the environment should have priority even if that reduces economic growth. Others believe that economic growth should have priority even if that hinders protecting the environment. What is your opinion?
Responses range from 0 to 10. 0 means economic growth should have priority and 10 means protecting the environment should have priority.
In 2019, the average response from all voters was 5.4 – so just ever so slightly leaning towards the environment over economic growth. For 2019 Conservative voters, the score was 4.3 – so leaning ever so slightly towards prioritising the economy over protecting the environment, but this really isn’t a large difference. For 2024 Conservative voters, the figure was 4.2. So even among the party’s core loyalists – those who stuck with it even after Partygate, Truss, and Sunak – there is no blank cheque for ignoring the environment or weakening the protections around it.
Of course, it is not enough to look at just the current Conservative Party coalition – the party needs to win back those voters it lost to other parties. How the party does this, and which voters it should seek to prioritise in this regard, is a key aspect of the current leadership election.
First, losses to the left. Of the 2019 Conservative voters who went to Labour or the Liberal Democrats (around 11% and 6% respectively), they are placed slap bang in the middle of the measure (5.2 and 5.3 respectively), seeking a balance between economic growth and environmental protection. Unsurprisingly, the 2% of the 2019 Tory voters who went to the Green Party are more likely to support environmental protection than economic growth, with an average score of 6.9.
On the right, the average score of the 45% of 2019 Tories who stuck with the party was 4.2, and for the 20% of the 2019 Tories who went to Reform UK the score was 3.3. In both cases these voters lean towards prioritising economic growth over protecting the environment. Interestingly the extent to which Reform defectors prioritise economic growth is less than the extent to which the Green defectors prioritise the environment. Those who said they would not vote (who made up 15% of the 2019 coalition) look similar to those who stuck with the Conservative Party.
Does this mean the lesson is that to win back right-wing voters you need to plump for growth over the environment, and vice-versa for the left? Not quite. If we look at the spread of these voters, shown by the lines on the dot and line plot, rather than just the average position, we see that they cross the dashed vertical line – this means that even among right-wing voters some do lean towards prioritising the environment over the economic growth, and the reverse is true to voters the Conservative Party lost to the left.
So what to take from this? Generally speaking, most voters are pretty centrist when it comes to this question. Whoever becomes the next Tory leader needs to resist siren calls for a dash for growth if that comes at the expense of meaningful environmental protections. Obviously, as a reader of the CEN blog you know this already.
However, the word meaningful is important here. The real centre ground for voters is how we deliver economic growth alongside environmental protections. Luckily for the new Conservative leader, a lot of clever people are already thinking about this. For instance, as argued by Sam Dumitriu, head of research at Britain Remade, Environmental Impact Assessments have become a costly bureaucratic hurdle that has not stopped environmental depletion – replacing them with Environmental Outcome Reports that focused on real-world outcomes could boost growth and help us deliver key net zero infrastructure like wind and solar farms. Similarly, allowing environmental assessments to be reused across multiple similar sites would reduce a massive regulatory barrier to delivering new infrastructure we so desperately need – both in terms of time and cost. These are easy, win-win policies a new leader could adopt on day one.
There is no doubt that the Conservative Party faces serious – perhaps existential – problems. In such a situation it is tempting to listen to false friends promising easy fixes, but the fact is if the party wants to rebuild the 2019 coalition it should heed Boris Johnson’s call to not cede the pro-environmental platform to the left. The next leader needs a clear, bold agenda on how we marry voters’ desires for both a dynamic economy and a beautiful environment our nation deserves. Thankfully, the CEN is leading the way in this area.
Views expressed in this blog are those of the author, not necessarily those of the Conservative Environment Network. If you are a CEN supporter, councillor, or parliamentarian and would like to write for the CEN blog, please email your idea to info@cen.uk.com
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