The Lib Dems have a plan to start banging on about the climate

LONDON — The Liberal Democrats — the third-biggest party in the U.K. parliament — reckon they have found a winning political formula. 

Talking about the climate. A lot. 

Fresh from landing a record haul of 72 seats at the 2024 general election by falling off kayaks and targeting customers at the upmarket Gail’s Bakery chain, the Lib Dems’ next trick will be to hammer home just how green they are. 

“People are now voting for us because they do see us as a pro-environmental party and movement,” Pippa Heylings, member of parliament for South Cambridgeshire and the party’s energy and climate spokesperson, told POLITICO. “And that matters to people, because they don’t see anybody else … standing up for that.” 

The Lib Dems believe the party could exploit a green-shaped gap at the top of politics. 

Labour is scared of the threat posed by net-zero skeptic populists Reform UK, Heylings claimed — even if the extra cash thrown at Ed Miliband’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero in June’s multiyear spending review suggests otherwise. 

Her party’s main target, though, is Kemi Badenoch’s ailing Conservative Party. 

Last year, Lib Dems gobbled up seats across the so-called Blue Wall — once-staunchly Conservative constituencies in the leafy home counties — and regained 18 seats from the Tories in the old Lib Dem spiritual stronghold of southwest England. 

The Lib Dems have decided they can, by talking up net zero and the environment, poach still more “pro-international” and “outward-looking” Tory voters, Heylings said. 

Badenoch’s decision to ditch a totemic policy backing net zero by 2050 — made into law by then-Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May — has triggered “real discontent, disappointment and frustration” from liberal-minded voters who have, so far, stuck with the Tories, she argued. 

Shadow Tory Energy Minister Andrew Bowie said in February that setting “arbitrary” climate targets “leaves us economically worse off and at a competitive disadvantage to other nations as well.” The Lib Dems, who back hitting net zero as early as 2045, are betting that voters disagree. 

The Labour government’s failure to bring energy bills under control, after promising before the election to cut them by up to £300 a year, has landed them in trouble. | Neil Hall/EPA

The latest seat-by-seat polling from YouGov shows the Lib Dems adding a further nine seats if a general election were held today. 

“We’re actually the largest third party in a century. The Conservatives are in a tailspin. I see ourselves as basically the unofficial official opposition, and we’re constructive opposition,” said Heylings.  

The local and the national 

The Lib Dems’ political opponents claim hypocrisy. 

“There are … countless examples of Lib Dems opposing clean energy projects at a local level across the country,” said Labour MP Josh MacAlister, a member of the backbench Growth Group that wants to see more urgency in building new homes and U.K. infrastructure. 

MacAlister may be thinking of MPs like Layla Moran, a one-time Lib Dem leadership candidate who has joined her Oxfordshire constituents opposing a local solar farm. It is exactly the sort of massive clean energy project needed to accelerate to net zero so quickly — but Moran says she shares local voters’ “anger and frustration” at the plans. 

Heylings nonetheless believes the Lib Dems have the data to back their green rhetoric. 

A quarter of the party’s current voters named climate change and the environment among the top issues facing the country, almost twice as many as the public as a whole, according to polling commissioned in May by the party’s new internal green caucus, Liberals and Democrats for Nature and Climate. 

Asked why they had backed the Lib Dems, more than a third (34 percent) of its voters gave at least one environmental reason for why the party had won their support — such as sewage leaks, nature preservation and tackling carbon emissions. 

“A desire for strong action on climate and the environment is a key reason why many Liberal Democrats voted for the party at the last election. Liberal Democrat voters want and expect strong action both from the government and their local MP to protect the environment,” the paper, published by polling think tank More in Common, said. 

All about bills 

But talking up environmental policies at every turn brings political risk, too, especially if it looks like going green is being prioritized over voters’ immediate worries about living costs. 

Voters have “clear limits” on backing climate policies, the More in Common analysis argued, and would not support “significantly higher bills or taxes” to fund the green transition. The Labour government’s failure to bring energy bills under control, after promising before the election to cut them by up to £300 a year, has landed them in trouble. 

The Lib Dems are trying to reassure nervous voters.  

Party leader Ed Davey recently unveiled plans to break the link between gas prices and electricity costs. | Adam Vaughan/EPA

Party leader Ed Davey recently unveiled plans to break the link between gas prices and electricity costs, which he said will bring down bills and encourage people to switch from boilers to climate-friendly heat pumps. “People aren’t seeing the benefit of cheap renewable power,” he said. 

They have also pledged to move clean energy generation off lucrative subsidy deals struck with developers years ago and onto new deals in line with more recent subsidies. The Lib Dems claim this move could knock £200 a year off bills. 

Davey used a speech Wednesday to offer red meat to would-be Lib Dem voters, with a pledge to take on net-zero skeptics, including populists Reform UK. Going green is “a Liberal Democrat energy policy in service of the British people. Not a Nigel Farage energy policy in service of Vladimir Putin,” Davey argued.

Heylings, meanwhile, brushed off the not-in-my-back-yard tag, used by those who claim Lib Dems talk a good game on climate and the environment while working to block anything which might upset local voters. 

“I’m not anti-house building. I’m not NIMBY,” she said. “I’ve been working with developers on this. You can do both house-building and nature recovery. You can do high environmental standards and they can still be affordable.” 

Labour veteran Diane Abbott once called opting for the Lib Dems the “dustbin” vote. The party has between now and 2029 to persuade voters they are a lot cleaner and greener than that.