David Cameron’s pledge to lead a ‘new green revolution’, his Norwegian glacier visit in the midst of the local election campaign, and the Tories’ ‘vote blue, go green’ slogan, underline the central role played by the environment in the rebranding of the Conservative party.
The issue has become what Peter Franklin, a Tory commentator on environmental and social issues, terms the ‘signature issue’ of Cameron’s leadership. The environment has also proved one of the few areas where Cameron has been willing to make firm commitments since becoming leader. He has pledged a future Tory government to annual binding targets for carbon emissions, as well as proposing a targeted carbon levy to replace the government’s climate change levy.
And while Cameron has adopted a somewhat schizophrenic approach in his appointments to the review groups tasked with reviewing Tory policy over the next year – scattering Thatcherites like John Redwood, Peter Lilley and Michael Forsyth among them – his choices to overhaul the party’s approach to green issues have been more careful. Alongside the editor of the Ecologist magazine, Zac Goldsmith, Cameron picked former environment secretary John Gummer, one of the few Tories with any green credentials, to lead the quality of life review group.
Cameron was cautious too in his shadow cabinet appointments. The environment portfolio went to Peter Ainsworth. He has since pronounced that global warming is the ‘biggest threat we face’, adding that it has ‘killed more people already than international terrorism’. Another green-sensitive post, trade and industry, was passed to Alan Duncan, who has voiced scepticism about the case for a new generation of nuclear power stations.
Behind the Tories’ apparent shift, of course, lay cold political calculations. Noting the ‘meagre’ content of the Tories’ 2005 manifesto, Franklin suggests that polling evidence from the last election ‘concentrated minds wonderfully’. The party’s disinterest in the environment a year ago rested, he argues, on ‘an election strategy focused entirely on the top five or six voter issues’. This approach, however, overlooked the fact that, while the environment did not factor highly in the concerns of the electorate as a whole, ‘more detailed polling showed that it certainly was for a significant minority of voters’.
Cameron’s real targets, therefore, are to be found in the former Tory heartlands of southern England, which the Lib Dems have been chipping away at since the mid-1990s. As Tim Montgomerie, editor of the Conservativehome.com website, acknowledges: ‘If Romsey, Winchester, Teignbridge, Twickenham and similar seats stay in the yellow column, a Conservative majority [at the next election] looks almost impossible to attain.’
Unsurprisingly, therefore, Cameron’s opening line on the Tories’ ‘Lib Dems for Cameron’ website reads: ‘My Conservative party believes passionately in green politics.’ Perhaps more surprisingly, the Lib Dems have assisted the Tories’ attempt to burnish their green credentials. Last autumn, Oliver Letwin, now one of Cameron’s key strategists but then the Tory environment spokesman, co-authored a widely-reported article on climate change with his Lib Dem counterpart, Norman Baker.
If recent ICM polls are to be believed, Cameron’s strategy is beginning to bear fruit. It shows the environment has now become one of the few issues – aside from the traditional Tory strong suit of asylum and immigration – on which Cameron is trusted more than either Tony Blair or Gordon Brown. Although the Lib Dems remain the most popular party to protect the environment on 29 per cent, the Tories, at 22 per cent, have opened up a five–point lead over Labour, who trail in third place.
The Tory right, however, is starting to chafe at Cameron’s ‘crunchy conservatism’. In the run-up to the local elections, Liam Fox warned pointedly of the dangers of the Tories being ‘tilted too far in one direction’ and ignoring issues such as crime and immigration. John Redwood has publicly questioned whether human activity is changing the climate, while one of Margaret Thatcher’s former aides, Robin Harris, has attacked the business costs associated with Cameron’s support for a ‘son of Kyoto’ agreement and the party’s new-found scepticism about nuclear power. ‘Only windmills will do,’ he sniped.
While attacks from Thatcherites may bolster Cameron’s appeal to centre–ground swing voters, the attitudes of core Tory voters may prove more troublesome. Last month’s Populus survey for the Times found Conservative voters – unlike the Lib Dem supporters he is targeting – heavily against increasing the cost of motoring, and evenly split on new airline taxes to reduce the number of flights people take. Once he begins to spell out the Tories’ ‘green revolution’, Cameron may yet find that saving the planet always comes at a cost.