‘Neither party has a great deal to say about it,’ says polling expert Sir John Curtice on climate crisis.

We spoke to the polling expert Sir John Curtice – who’s professor of politics at Strathclyde University. We asked him why climate change isn’t front and centre in this election.

Sir John Curtice: I think so far as the Conservatives are concerned, having leaned against some of the net zero proposals and loosened somewhat the requirements so far as heating and cars are concerned, but then discovering that this didn’t seem particularly to do anything to improve their position in the polls, I think perhaps they’ve concluded that this wasn’t necessarily an issue that was going to work for them. Meanwhile, Labour, of course, have reined in their ambition, so far as public spending on so-called green investment is concerned. I think they, like any UK government, are going to be primarily reliant on the private sector so far as delivering net zero is concerned, so that to that extent at least, neither party really has a great deal to say about it.

Ciaran Jenkins: I’ve just been looking at a YouGov poll that said that for young people, 18 to 24 years old, the climate is their top priority. That’s 20 per cent of people. Does this tell us that this has been an election campaign largely around issues that matter more to older people?

Sir John Curtice: No, actually. All the evidence, when you ask people how concerned are you about climate change, both data from Ipsos, data from YouGov, data work done for the Department for Net Zero, that all of those surveys tend to find that it is actually older people who are somewhat more likely to say they are concerned about climate change than the younger people. I’m afraid the image that you get, because it’s young people who tend to be on the streets, is perhaps more a reflection of the fact that younger people are more likely to be on the streets about any issue. Actually, concern about climate change is very widespread across our society, although we do not all necessarily agree. And this is the crucial point, we do not necessarily agree about what is the best way of trying to deal with it. I’m not immediately acquainted with the poll that you cite, but I am certainly aware of plenty of other polls that suggest that for the most part, it is the economy, it is the cost of living, it is the state of the health service that are the principal preoccupations that people say that they have.

Ciaran Jenkins: And it’s an election in which the Conservatives seem incredibly preoccupied with trying to stop their supporters from voting for Nigel Farage and Reform. Now, in that light, do you think that Mr. Farage’s comments saying that the west provoked Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will have any effect at all on voters switching from Conservative to Reform?

Sir John Curtice: They might. Certainly this is the first time that the Conservative Party has felt able to actually criticise what Nigel Farage and Reform were saying, as opposed to saying to voters, ‘If you vote for Mr Farage you’ll get Sir Keir Starmer.’ And some of us suspect the Conservative Party should have been doing this quite a long time ago, given the extent to which Reform are taking votes off them. It’s over one in four 2019 Conservative voters who are currently saying that they are backing Reform. It’s something he said well before, but maybe not so many people are aware of it. We’ll wait and see. I think it’s always been the case with Mr Farage. He clearly is the most charismatic and most effective campaigner in this election, but he’s also the one who is most at risk of saying something that also puts people off.

Ciaran Jenkins: There’s been a lot of headlines, hasn’t there in this election, about these super polls that look at the possible results in individual constituencies. One of them has Rishi Sunak even potentially losing his seat. Do you think people are reading too much into some of these?

Sir John Curtice: They’re reading too much, and you certainly shouldn’t be relying on these polls to tell you what’s going to go on in individual constituencies. That is pushing them too far, although that is the way that journalists are inclined to report them. What you should be using them for is as evidence as to how the geography of party support, more broadly across sets of constituencies, looks as though it’s going to change. And what all of these polls show, that support for the Conservatives is falling more heavily in constituencies that the party is trying to defend.

Ciaran Jenkins: There’s a huge variation, isn’t there, in these super polls? Some of them have the Tories on just 53 seats after the election, others have them on as many as 160-something. Does this not make this a particularly difficult election, do you think, to call?

Sir John Curtice: Yeah. I think the thing that’s most difficult about this election and where the uncertainty is probably going to last all the way through, unless there’s a dramatic turnaround, is just how bad the defeat for the Conservatives will be. There is, frankly, debate amongst pollsters about whether the methods that we are using are going to prove to be robust enough for these seats estimations. Given that, again, what one needs to realise is we are in unprecedented territory. We have not had a party in post-war British politics down by 25 points in the polls, and this does make it much more difficult to anticipate just what the geographical distribution of that drop is going to be.

Ciaran Jenkins: The fact that Rishi Sunak appears to be visiting Tory seats with quite significant majorities, safe seats, what does that tell you about the Conservative strategy in the final couple of weeks of this campaign?

Sir John Curtice: Certainly you want to focus your resources on where a local campaign might make a difference. And it’s long been obvious that, where the Tories should be focusing their efforts is, broadly speaking, constituencies where their majorities are of the order of between 30 and 35 points, ie. deeply, deeply into Tory territory.