The UK’s governing Conservative Party clawed back a third of their polling deficit behind the Labour opposition after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he would scale back the government’s green agenda to save Britons money.
The Tories trail Labour by 16 points in the latest survey by Deltapoll, conducted Sept. 22-25, after registering a 24-point deficit 10 days earlier. People intending to vote Conservative rose five points to 28%, while those planning to vote Labour fell by three points to 44%. The Liberal Democrats were unchanged on 10%.
With the next general election due by January 2025 at the latest, Sunak has put his Tories into campaign mode and plans to roll out a series of policies over the coming weeks he said will alter the UK’s long-term trajectory. The first was a dramatic scaling back of his green agenda, including pushing back a ban on the sale of new diesel and petrol cars by five years to 2035.
The moved sparked a backlash across the political spectrum, and businesses also hit out at the goalposts being suddenly shifted. But while it is just one poll that may prove to be an outlier, the data highlights the electoral rationale for the premier’s green backtracking.
Based on questions commissioned by Bloomberg in the poll, there is majority (56%) support for Sunak’s delay in banning fossil-fuel cars, compared with about a fifth who oppose the move. A majority (64%) also think it is more important to reduce the personal cost of meeting the UK’s climate change targets, compared with 22% who think tackling climate change is important no matter the cost.
Read More: Sunak Gambles on Voters Focusing More on Costs Than Climate
