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During David Cameron’s first political iteration, as opposition leader, he urged the British public to “vote blue, go green”. Once in power, his team were told to get rid of “the green crap” — Conservative strategists believed environmental priorities were unpopular with the electorate.
Now Rishi Sunak is languishing in the polls, after watering down net zero policies and seeing England’s rivers and coasts despoiled by sewage. And the Tory party may have to count the cost in rural regions that have always been a deep shade of blue — a swath of voters is jumping ship, attracted by the pro-nature pitch of the Green party.
In the latest local elections, the Greens took more seats from the Conservatives than from Labour (32 to 31). It’s the second wave of a dramatic surge: in May last year, three-quarters of the party’s gains were from the Tories across the south, south-east and east of England. Much of this was in picturesque areas where, says Green co-leader Adrian Ramsay, locals feel “overlooked” or “left behind”.
The battle throws up intriguing questions about the nature of English environmentalism: love of the countryside and “conservation” does not always point the same way as climate policies. Government departments approving green energy infrastructure now face protests from Tory colleagues on the ground, councillors are defecting for the Green party and local voters are fleeing.
“Voting Conservative has often been a habit, a tradition here,” says Ramsay, speaking from Waveney Valley, a new constituency straddling the Suffolk to Norfolk border where he is standing to be MP in the coming battle for Westminster. Conservatives never faced a serious threat here but the Greens can now point to similar fertile patches in Hertfordshire, Oxfordshire and Sussex.
For Tories across East Anglia, this is inducing gloom — candidates gripe about Green party leaflets featuring watercolours of the region’s gorgeous landscapes and note the irony of environmentalists campaigning against pylons, pipelines, substations aimed at supporting a decarbonised electricity supply. But they struggle to formulate a counter-attack. “Local candidates can’t speak up,” one local Tory tells me. “Anyone with a chance of winning has to match these pledges and oppose all development.”
The Greens hold every seat in the council ward covering Sizewell on the Suffolk coast, where plans for a third nuclear power station have sparked a bitter campaign. The party is now part of the administration of two of three district councils covered by the Commons seat Ramsay is targeting — one of them led by a high-profile local councillor and former town mayor who defected from the Tory party.
A plan to erect pylons all the way from Norwich to Tilbury in Essex, partly to make the most of the wind farms off the Norfolk coast, is causing havoc for local Conservative MPs. Loss of green space and “restoring nature” are prominent in the Green campaigns, says Ramsay, who insists that opposing developments such as solar farms is consistent with the party’s desire to protect nature by using more sophisticated green technology.
Analysts have started to spot a pattern in British Election Study data, noting that Tory to Green switchers are over-represented in the east and south of England. They can flesh out a picture of those who voted Conservative in 2019 under Boris Johnson (a prime minister who took the environment, if not much else, seriously) and then Green last May.
“They are an interesting breed,” says Steve Akehurst, a polling analyst. These blue-to-green switchers are notably more female but otherwise look like other Tory voters: older, richer, homeowners, more likely to be Brexiters and socially conservative. One thing sets them apart: “They are just really into nature issues.”
Some political observers see an unholy alliance of conservationists, the anti-growth movement and affluent Leavers rebelling against change. According to political historian Glen O’Hara, “it’s essentially a set of reactions against modernity on both left and right”.
And pollsters remain sceptical that local gains can translate into much more than the current one MP — Green voters rowed in behind Labour in past general elections. But analysts say that these “anti-Tory Tories” could help the Greens become a potent force beyond areas where they take on Labour from the left.
There are many shades of green — as anyone gazing out across the Suffolk marshes will tell you — and the problem with dismissing this phenomenon as a protest vote is that the rural Tory heartlands have a lot to protest about. Conservative strategists might need to wake up and sniff the brackish air.
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