Patrick English: When it comes to policy renewal the Conservatives have space to think, but not to disconnect from the public

Dr Patrick English is Director of Political Analytics at YouGov and their spokesman on political research.

Yesterday Kemi Badenoch launched a ‘policy renewal programme’ for the Conservatives, looking across briefs and at all proposals and plans within and around government.

The timing of the launch is significant – as of now, we have (most likely) somewhere around four years to go until the next British general election. The Conservatives have not long been ousted from office, and the public still hold a very negative view of them.

According to the latest YouGov polling, the Conservatives have a net favourability score of -44, compared to just -28 for Labour and -33 for Reform UK. The Liberal Democrats lead this particular metric at -8.

The public are also not paying attention in any meaningful way to the Conservatives and their policy positioning. With the next election so far away, and foreign affairs and security dominating the headlines, it’s no wonder that neither the party nor their leader have featured in YouGov’s News Tracker (which reports what the British public have been seeing and hearing about in the news) this year.

But it is precisely under this sort of cover when it makes the most sense to do the deepest thinking and focus most on process and procedure. This long work, and the work least likely to excite or even get noticed by the public, is best done when the lens of public opinion and scrutiny is firmly focused elsewhere.

The Conservatives in opposition will not get anything like the media attention they have been used to for the 13 years leading up to July last year, and must pick their moments and use their resources wisely to maximise their coverage.

This, plus the general lodging that the issue appears to have in the brains of the political right across democracies worldwide, is very likely why Badenoch and the Conservatives decided to take aim at Net Zero as their first major statement of the ‘new era’ of Conservative thinking and policy planning.

The announcement that the Conservatives in power would abandon the UK’s legally binding pledge to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050 is an interesting opening gambit from a process which should, in theory, be aimed at bringing the Conservatives back onside with public opinion.

The reason being is that the net zero pledge, passed by Theresa May’s government in 2019, is one of the few genuinely universally popular policy pledges out there. Support for the UK reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050 reached as high as 70 to 75 per cent last year.

This week, YouGov asked the public again regarding their support for or opposition to the government’s commitment to cutting carbon emissions to net zero by 2050. Despite political headwinds, support still sits at almost two-thirds (61 per cent). Just under a quarter (24 per cent) are opposed.

Not only this, but even 2024 Conservative voters are more likely to support the pledge (52 per cent) than they are to oppose it (38 per cent).

The only group who oppose the policy are Reform 2024 voters, by a margin of 26 per cent to 58 per cent.

The wide ranging public support has baked in the fact that the public expects that reaching net zero comes at a direct cost to them in terms of energy bills. YouGov polling from last month suggested that 45 per cent of the public believe that their bills have increased because of net zero energy policies. Just 2 per cent said they believed it had caused a decrease.

In this light, Kemi Badenoch, and the political right at large, are firing starting guns on what looks like a tough uphill battle – not least because the main cited reason for going against net zero (that it comes at a direct cost to families and households) is something the public already believe and still, by high margins, support the net zero pledge regardless.

While the Conservatives have the cover of a (relatively, or comparatively) low public profile to work with, for their sake they must not mistake this for a license to construct processes, procedures, and ideological positioning which ultimately delivers policy which pays little or no mind to public opinion.