Around nine in 10 voters who intend to switch from Conservative to Labour at the next election state that “green growth” is important for the future of Britain’s economy.
An Opinium survey shared with The Guardian found that 82% of all respondents backed the growth of Britain’s green industry, to boost the economy in the same week as the prime minister announced a series of U-turns.
It revealed that, of more than 5,000 adults, the green economy was even stronger among swing voters who supported the Conservatives in 2019.
The survey coincided with the prime minister’s U-turn on several net zero policies – including pushing back the ban on the sale of new non-zero emissions vehicles, and phasing out gas boilers.
Subscribe to Sustainability Beat for free
Sign up here to get the latest sustainability news sent straight to your inbox each morning
Whilst the prime minister has said that the UK has improved at a faster rate than other countries, some statisticians have been been quick to correct the point.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s More or Less programme, which examines statistics related to the headlines, Hannah Ritchie from Our World in Data told presenter Tim Hartford:
“If you start out very bad, you actually have a much better time of achieving an impressive reduction”.
They made the comparison with France, “France has not achieved as impressive reductions but it does have lower emissions per person and that’s because in 1990 it has much lower emissions than the UK.”
“And a big part of that is because most of France’s electricity comes from nuclear which is very low carbon and also hydrocarbon.”
She continued: “It was starting out in a position where it had very low emission from electricity already.”
