These next few months will be critical for the future of the Conservative Party and its prospects of returning to power in five years’ time. Leadership candidates will vie to show they can reunite a broad Conservative coalition, rediscover traditional conservative principles, and set out a credible plan to deliver a more prosperous and secure Britain. As three former Conservative leaders made clear over the weekend, a strong environmental platform can tick all these boxes.
Frustratingly, the Conservative election campaign largely ignored the environment and failed to capture any political advantage from the overlooked successes the Conservatives had in government, from phasing out coal, to protecting over 4.3 million square kilometres of marine environment around the Overseas Territories.
Instead, it favoured a strategy of appealing to Reform voters by downplaying down the party’s hard-earned green credentials. Polling carried out by the CT Group before the general election showed this approach was flawed. Among Conservative to Labour switchers, net zero was both popular and salient, with 72% saying net zero would affect how they would vote. On the flip-side, 61% of Reform switchers named immigration as the area they cared about the most, compared to 2% who said net zero. Tougher policies on immigration, not row-backs on climate goals, were needed to change their voting intention.
Now in a new parliament, aspiring Conservative leaders must learn the lessons from the campaign and set out a bold plan to stop climate change and restore nature. In doing so they would be following in the footsteps of recent Conservative leaders, such as Margaret Thatcher, David Cameron, and Boris Johnson, all of whom were advocates for environmental action and all of whom won significant parliamentary majorities.
Embracing the environment does not mean giving up on winning back Reform voters. It is undoubtedly true that the party will need to win back a big share of Reform voters by the next election, but a clear plan to reduce immigration is the best route to do that. Further weakening environmental policies will not shift Reform voters, and will only serve to alienate current Conservative voters and the voters the party needs to win back from Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens.
Championing the environment does not mean blindly following Labour’s proposals. Conservatives should advocate policies that go with the grain of individual preferences and free markets, seek to empower communities and harness innovation, support economic growth, and focus on unlocking private investment in new green industries.
After all, the environment is a conservative issue – both because of our commitment to passing on a better inheritance to those who come after us, and because action on the environment is essential for economic prosperity and national security. That’s why the Conservative Environment Network has published a new manifesto to guide the future of conservative environmentalism.
With the new Labour government pushing for a more expensive, statist approach to net zero, Conservatives should instead champion market-led decarbonisation that keeps costs low. We should offer green tax cuts to households, such as stamp duty rebates and cuts to VAT on public EV chargers, to make clean technologies more affordable. Rather than using big state subsidies and setting up nationalised energy firms to win green investment, we should increase the tax breaks on offer for green industries inside freeports and fast-track planning for renewable infrastructure and port upgrades. Instead of nationalising the railways to boost green travel, we should encourage greater competition.
Conservatives also have the opportunity to drive ambition on nature recovery, with Labour’s manifesto having very little new to say about this vital policy area. We should scrap red tape that is delaying and adding cost to nature recovery projects, for instance around beaver reintroductions, street tree planting, and marine conservation. We should also make greater use of Brexit freedoms by ending harmful bottom trawling mostly carried out by EU fishing vessels, protecting the budget for post-Brexit nature-friendly farming schemes, and reforming legacy EU environmental rules to be less prescriptive and more outcome-focused.
Finally, we should champion an international approach to the environment, shunning symbolic grandstanding at environmental conferences and focusing ruthlessly on protecting our national interests. We should strengthen free trade with our allies to bring down the costs of clean technologies, secure our supplies of critical minerals, and build alternative green supply chains to China’s. We should do more to protect the abundant nature in our Overseas Territories through expanding the Blue Belt of marine reserves and the Darwin Plus grant schemes.
The party’s path back to power at the next election runs through regaining the voters’ trust. This must include environmental issues. To see the green shoots of recovery, the next Conservative leader must set out their own positive conservative plan to meet our environment commitments.
First published by CapX. Sam Hall is the Conservative Environment Network's Director.
They would be emulating the policies phrazle of previous Conservative leaders, like Margaret Thatcher, David Cameron, and Boris Johnson, who were all proponents of environmental action and had substantial parliamentary majorities.