Starmer has a strong green record – but a rightwing backlash weakened his plans

Keir Starmer gives a speech at the Cop30 climate summit in Belem, Brazil, in November 2025. Photograph: Mauro Pimentel/PA View image in fullscreen Keir Starmer gives a speech at the Cop30 climate summit in Belem, Brazil, in November 2025. Photograph: Mauro Pimentel/PA Analysis Starmer has a strong green record – but a rightwing backlash weakened his plans Fiona Harvey Environment editor Prime minister was forced to row back on some policies despite strong support among voters for climate action Keir Starmer has faced a problem no Labour government has needed to deal with before. His energy and climate policies – core to solving the cost of living crisis – have come under attack from opposition parties, which have made dismantling the agenda one of their top priorities, second only to immigration, in their pitch to voters. This is new in British politics, where a cross-party consensus on the climate and environment has held at least since the days of Margaret Thatcher. She warned the UN of the climate crisis in 1988; David Cameron in 2006 urged voters to “vote blue, go green”; Theresa May enshrined in law the requirement to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050; Boris Johnson championed the Cop26 UN climate summit in Glasgow in 2021 ; even Rishi Sunak only tried a partial rollback of green policies as a last desperate throw before calling an election. But Kemi Badenoch has weaponised the climate and energy agenda , with Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, her most frequent named target in the cabinet. She has vowed to abandon the net zero target, boost drilling in the North Sea , scrap the windfall tax on oil and gas profits, and repeal the 2008 Climate Change Act . View image in fullscreen Keir Starmer and the Prince of Wales during a visit to the Emilio Goeldi Museum in Belem, Brazil, during the Cop30 summit. Photograph: Aaron Chown/PA Nigel Farage’s Reform party has gone even further, openly denying climate science and threatening to withdraw from the 2015 Paris agreement. This tearing apart of the longstanding consensus threw Labour into disarray. Some within Starmer’s inner circle started to whisper that his eye-catching pledge – one of the five key “missions” he set for his government – to decarbonise the UK’s electricity by 2030 was a liability, and should be dropped. They briefed against Miliband to key sections of the media and forced a halving of the target of a pledged investment of £28bn in the green economy . That advice was out of step with voters, and deeply flawed, experts have told the Guardian. Ed Matthew, UK director of the E3G thinktank, points out that polls continue to show that voters still support climate action. According to More in Common polling for the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, on the eve of the local elections in May, two thirds of the public still want the country to meet the net zero target. “Starmer made the bold move to set a whole of government mission to make the UK a clean energy superpower,