The sewage crisis was a significant factor in the Tories’ losing support in the “blue wall” in the south of England, electoral polling suggests.
Seven out of 10 voters supported legal measures to eliminate sewage spills in ecologically sensitive areas by 2030, according to polling conducted for Greenpeace by Survation just before the election. Less than a third of voters thought the Conservatives were right to weaken their commitments on the climate crisis and the environment.
The Tories lost 37 of the 52 “blue wall” seats in the south of England, with 24 taken by the Liberal Democrats, who campaigned strongly on sewage and the crisis of polluted rivers and beaches. Some of those seats, particularly along the Thames, include spots where some of the worst sewage problems have been reported.
One in four people in the region told pollsters that the Conservative party’s stance on the environment was a key reason for not voting for them; nationally, only a fifth of people cited this as a reason.
Ed Davey's stunts were derided in certain quarters but each one was linked to a Lib Dem policy, especially about water quality, and it seems to have cut through.
I was saying exactly this to someone the other day. It's striking how many of his stunts took place in/on/next-to water and that was very deliberately linked to how much the Lib Dems were talking locally about water quality and sewage, which their polling had already identified as a resonant issue in their target seats some time ago.
Davey's campaign was so impressive - the Lib Dems usually struggle at the 'air war' during an election, but he found exactly the strategy to garner media attention in a way that coordinated perfectly with the ground campaign Lib Dem activists were running in their target seats - effectively the electoral version of a blitzkrieg. It's going to be the textbook model campaign for how a third party should fight elections under FPTP in future - literally the best third party campaign we've seen in over a century.
Yes, in hindsight, he played an absolute blinder. While Sunak and Starmer were having snooze-fest debates, he was messing around on the water getting all the headlines.
The problem with this angle is green issues mean two things in the UK
- Not building wind farms
- Building wind farms near me
The key green issue on people's minds at the moment is the water quality scandal.
