LONDON — Since Labour swept into office last year, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has traveled the country enthusing over the government’s dream of a humming, futuristic net-zero economy.
The good news, according to polling released Wednesday, is that his vision still has the backing of the public.
The bad news is that support is slipping — and voters aren’t convinced Miliband is the guy to deliver it.
For Miliband’s political opponents, this validates their wider attacks on him as an out-of-touch climate warrior, flogging a net-zero dream voters have rejected.
At Reform’s party conference Friday, party chair David Bull referenced “mad Ed swivel-eyed Milliband.” Not to be outdone, the Conservatives have vowed to squeeze every molecule of oil and gas from beneath the North Sea, deadly heatwaves be damned.
But it also shines a light on a confusing feature of British politics: a misalignment between the stories politicians want to tell about efforts to stop climate change, and stuff the public actually care about.
The polling, conducted by progressive think tank More in Common and the Climate Outreach NGO, found the number of people who think reaching net-zero emissions will be good for the U.K. vastly outnumber those who think it will have a negative effect — 48 percent versus 16 percent.
More people feel that the shift to clean energy has been fair than unfair. In Scotland, more are proud of the offshore wind industry (63 percent) than the oil and gas industry (54 percent).
“Those who seek to divide communities with climate disinformation will not win because they do not represent the interests or values of the British people,” Miliband said in a statement shared with the media.
Despite this, voters are hesitant about the personal impact of a country rushing to go green. Seventy-four percent of people think the U.K.’s commitment to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 will eventually cost them money personally. The gap between those who think it will be beneficial for the U.K. versus harmful has shrunk by 20 points in only a year.
This is frequently interpreted as a sign that a personal desire to help fix the climate is butting up against the hard realities of net zero, which requires changes like fitting millions of heat pumps and EV chargers and overhauling the energy grid.
Further polling released by The Times Tuesday backs up the sense voters are growing more divided on climate change. It shows support for net zero collapsing among Reform and Conservative voters, while overall the issue has slipped from voters’ list of top concerns.
But analysts from Climate Outreach said part of the problem isn’t the message but the messengers.
“Politicians are not well trusted to speak about climate,” the NGO said in an analysis shared with POLITICO. In fact, elected leaders were the least trusted carriers of the climate message — beneath also-lowly ranked protesters and energy company executives.
Trust issues
Voter wariness about pro-climate messages isn’t a feature of green politics in particular, said Emma James, a researcher at Climate Outreach, but a symptom of broader public cynicism about government.
“They don’t trust that politicians are there for people like them. Some audience segments feel that the system is rigged against them,” she said.
It’s not net zero the public aren’t buying, it’s the ability of this government — or any government — to deliver it. Voters believe the NHS remains broken. National projects like high-speed rail lines and nuclear power stations keep being delayed at higher and higher costs.
This creates a problem for Miliband. At a time of deep voter skepticism, his Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) is pursuing precisely that kind of major national project — involving upfront costs, disruption and complex trade-offs, with the promise of huge savings to private and public purses down the line. It will, Miliband argues, generate new jobs.
“We will win this fight by showing the visible benefits of the clean energy transition,” insisted one Labour official, granted anonymity to discuss the government’s internal deliberations.
The story of failure, however, is pervasive and self-reinforcing, said Richard Johnson, a political scientist at Queen Mary University of London.
“Policy delivery has to be tied in with a compelling political narrative and the political leadership that can tell that story and interpret what people are seeing in front of their eyes,” he said. “I wonder now if there is such a high level of cynicism … that even if you did tell a compelling narrative around policy delivery, that people would not believe it.”
Johnson lays the blame with Miliband’s boss, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, “who has been in a way almost catastrophically unable to put together a compelling narrative for his government. Or, quite frankly, even his own leadership.” Downing Street says it is focused on driving economic growth across the country.
This is not isolated to Labour. Under Rishi Sunak, the Conservatives went in search of their own set of climate salespeople — before deciding that there was more political capital in ditching pro-climate policies.
Climate Outreach said Miliband could turn this problem into an “opportunity,” as long as he laid off the grand projet and focused on the visible, local benefits of climate policies.
And there is some evidence that Labour gets it, seen in the government’s move to chip in for the energy bills of people living in sight of unpopular new electricity pylons.
The more conservative or skeptical parts of the British electorate still had deep enthusiasm for messages about protecting the environment, the pollsters said. But most important, the NGO argued, was bringing other voices into the frame.
While politicians are viewed very dimly indeed, experts and scientists are seen as credible messengers, the polling shows. So too are those seen to understand what life is like for normal British people. Farmers were among the messengers who cut through most with traditionalists and those described by the pollsters as “patriots.”
Jeremy Clarkson, DESNZ needs you.
The post Voters still want net zero. Just keep Miliband and Starmer away. appeared first on Politico.
