Pac-Man’s adventures in Metroland

Regular readers of my blog know that my political geography commentaries are peppered with references to food – the university town jam doughnut and the family-sized lasagne dish near the source of the River Thames. This week I’m focussing on a fruit-hungry yellow ghost-slaying hero – Pac-Man. In recent years the Lib Dems have steadily built up a power-base in the Home Counties that amounts to a Pac-Man shape crescent set to eat London from a westerly direction. This includes several district councils that the party mostly or exclusively controls – Watford, Three Rivers, Spelthorne, Mole Valley, St Albans, Hart – and a number of Westminster constituencies it has won or are ultra-marginal – Kingston, Twickenham, Richmond, Guildford, Esher & Walton, Chesham & Amersham, Carshalton & Wallington. We’re pushing towards what academics have called a ‘Yellow Halo’ and we haven’t finished yet.
Winning Chesham & Amersham may prove to be a watershed, response on the doorstep included many reasons for dissatisfaction – long term neglect, a sense that the government is paying too much attention to the Red Wall, mistrust of Boris Johnson, continuing recognition that austerity isn’t over and local services are mediocre, even where the houses are worth £500,000 or more. This could snowball in the coming years as commuters endure deteriorating rail services as TfL and out-of-town rail franchises suffer from unfavourable funding settlements. Grievances about underinvestment and being taken for granted will only magnify.

Pac-Man: eating London from the West

A sophisticated electorate

Our increasing success in these areas around or just outside the M25 has led the party to be characterised as one that represents Metroland, though the result in North Shropshire next month might show we’re much more than that. It’s certainly the case that socio-economic demographics, a high number of graduates and a growing number of ethnic minority voters, mean that many in the commuter belt around London feel instinctively comfortable voting Lib Dem, in the way that solidly blue collar areas (such as my home town of Dartford) do not. This point was made by Dominic Grieve when comparing Chesham & Amersham with Hartlepool, we speak the language of voters across the Home Counties, even if breaking the Blue Wall outside the M25 takes a lot of work (see my previous blogs about how happy certain Conservative voters are about the Green Belt, low taxes and stratospheric house prices).

Hart to Haärt – the parallels with Germany

Voters around the Home Counties, especially in seats with rural hinterland are content to return Conservative MPs but are open to persuasion. This is possibly down to an increasing post-materialist sensibility. The first meaningful manifestation of this was in West Germany during the 1980s with the rise of the Greens helmed by Petra Kelly. This proved to be a head scratcher to political scientists as it represented a departure from the traditional socio economic or occupation-based labour vs capital arm wrestle. West Germans had become rich enough for long enough to look for something else from the political class than just more money, they started to demand a better environment and quality of life improvements instead. It is this post-materialism and a quality of life focus that enables the Lib Dems to have a stake of power in Hart (in coalition with localists), part of the consultancy belt of North Hampshire. Hart is a pretty special place, it has the lowest level of deprivation out of 326 districts in England, on the face of it the Conservatives should be rock solid in Hart, but they lost of control in 2012 and haven’t been back in power since. There are extreme levels of affluence across the Home Counties, in Surrey and Buckinghamshire in particular, but this doesn’t mean the Tories have an unshakeable grip, like Labour has over coal and steel communities.

Petra Kelly (left) took the Greens to unprecedented levels of success in West Germany tapping into post-materialist politics

Soft Tories – their power fatigue

While Labour manages to compete in a few hotspots here and there, the Home Counties at council-level are generally a three-way toss up between Conservatives, Lib Dems and independents/localists. The intensification of competition since 2019 has exposed weaknesses in the Conservatives where they have been long-term incumbents, under pressure they have started to buckle with infighting, defections and vote share collapses. The most eye-catching examples of this are Spelthorne, Tunbridge Wells and Waverley boroughs.
Attitudes towards holding power divide the left and the right. Progressives want power as a means to an end, making a difference, conservatives are content to hold power as an end of itself, keep the others out, they have dangerous notions of fairness, equality and human rights – we can’t have that! That being the case it must take a special level of dysfunction within the Conservative party to see local groups disintegrate – this is either down to personality clashes or a recognition that there is no longer a place for centre-right free-marketeers like Ken Clarke, Anna Soubry, Philip Hammond or Rory Stewart.

Staines massive – in Lib Dem hands, no-one expected that!

The sudden reverse in Spelthorne is quite something, this was a majority Conservative council since it was configured as a borough in 1973 up until last summer. As recently as 2015 the Conservatives won 31 out of 35 seats, in 2019 a majority of 31 slumped to just seven, with the Lib Dems gaining five seats. Six Conservatives quit in the summer of 2020 and formed the United Spelthorne Group amid allegations of bullying within the local Conservative group. Spelthorne Borough is now led by Lib Dem councillor Lawrence Nichols thanks to Green Party and Independent Spelthorne support – bearing in mind the Borough’s electoral history this is one of the most improbable (but welcome) local government stories this century.
Tunbridge Wells was also Conservative for all this century until May. The borough contains some very well-heeled picture postcard villages such as Lamberhurst and Goudhurst, but the natives are restless – this is one of a few examples where Tory misrule is being punished severely at the ballot box. The Tunbridge Wells Conservative group has a reputation for being ineffective, and perhaps here lies the opportunity across the shires – local people are well off but that means they’re also demanding. They expect better, in the last two elections the Conservatives have lost 19 councillors in Tunbridge Wells, the Lib Dems group and the localist Tunbridge Wells Alliance have the bit between the teeth and it would be no surprise to see the NOC Conservative administration turfed out next year.
South West Surrey constituency was not regarded as a target seat for the Lib Dems at the last election, but Paul Follows leapt from fourth to second in 2019, increasing our vote total from 6,000 to 23,000. I get the feeling that Paul is hugely under-the-radar within the party because his local group also overturned Conservative dominance in Waverley Borough from scratch. Waverley contains the attractive small towns of Godalming, Farnham and Haslemere, however the local Conservatives, known for infighting, lost 30 seats in 2019, handing power to a Lib Dem-Farnham Residents coalition. The Lib Dems won no seats in 2015, so again this amounts to a political earthquake. In typical low-key fashion Paul Follows took over leadership of the council in April, as part of the power-sharing deal with the Farnham localists.

The rapid rise of Paul Follows – South West Surrey is now in play

The future – taking Paddy’s path

In 2019 remainer discontent across the South was the dog that didn’t bark, the Conservatives lost St Albans and Putney – they were expecting to lose a lot more. The last election presents a strategic quandary for the Lib Dems, all of a sudden we picked up a substantial vote share in seats we’d never won or were competitive in before. What to make of this? Could this be part of a welcome trend or just a Brexit blip? Should we be chasing seats in the South West we’ve won before instead? If we are going to win big in Metroland it’s time to take a leaf out of Paddy Ashdown’s book. He returned to the UK from Geneva in the late ‘70s, and said to his local party, “Give me three shots at this seat, I will work it tirelessly, I will squeeze the Labour vote in Yeovil, I won’t expect any help from outside, I will raise community issues every week and eventually enough people will believe we can win.” It didn’t go to plan, Paddy didn’t win it in three, he won it in two. Adopting this relentless and focussed approach could pay off in say Wantage, or Hitchin & Harpenden, where we polled over 20,000 – it’s no longer fanciful to suggest a Lib Dem victory, we’ve got to the tipping point where knocking more holes in the Blue Wall is possible if we play our cards right.

A young Paddy Ashdown – relentless and focussed in pursuit of electoral success

My other geography-themed blogs can be found here – this blog explores rural politics and how the rural agenda is different from towns and cities:

https://returnoftheliberal.wordpress.com/2021/06/02/field-of-dreams-a-liberal-revival-in-the-countryside/

This blog notes how several yellow clusters are gaining in size and are close to merging, if this continues we’ll have a Yellow Wall across Avon, Somerset, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Wiltshire:

https://returnoftheliberal.wordpress.com/2021/07/30/is-a-yellow-wall-emerging/

We’re on a road to Zero

Recently American magazine The Atlantic published a feature titled ‘How the U.S. Could Slash Climate Pollution by 2030’, it was an unusually unsatisfying piece for an otherwise high-brow publication, short on context or detail. It skirted over the when, the how, the why and the how much – the basic tenets of journalism. America has had one President after another that has been indifferent or hostile to the green agenda I guess it’s understandable their internal debate has not caught up with the rest of the industrial world yet. Joe Biden is the greenest President ever (by default), if the US ever wakes up it will probably own most low carbon intellectual property, until then the UK is ahead of the curve in terms of implementation and technology. Unlike America we’ve got a pretty good idea of how to decarbonise because we’ve been doing it for a decade or more. Let’s take a look at how we can push things forward.

Wind turbines in the North Sea – set to increase in capacity in the next decade

A Fossil Free future

Britain is on a path to net zero carbon emissions, there is a political consensus for that, the main debating points are how long it’s going to take us and how we’re going to do it. Sir Ed Davey recently stated that the Lib Dems policy is to have 80% of UK electricity generated by renewables by the year 2030. This is a stretch, but will be like moving from 4th gear to 5th gear in a car (I’ll get those combustion engine references in while people still understand them). Since 2010 renewables market share has moved from 6% to 40%, so the pace of change to get to 80% only has to increase slightly. It’s not quite as straightforward increasing the current forms of renewables to reach 80%, however, as the dominant form is wind – intermittent and unpredictable. As we phase out fossil fuels, all of which are ‘on demand’ and flexible, I.e. a thermal power plant can operate from 1% input to 100%, the reliance on electricity that is not constant – solar – or wind, which varies hugely, means we’ll have to deploy a lot of grid-balancing and storage infrastructure to keep the power flowing. Certain forms of renewable can be ‘on demand’ – biomass, biogas and geothermal, others such as wave and tidal can be constant – all of these are not deployed to scale in the UK yet but they all could be . . .

These charts show electricity usage over different timeframes, the one on the far right shows how we’ve switched from coal to renewables since 2012

Lightning strikes twice

Many people I’ve spoken to who were hold outs against the transition to renewables I believe were instinctively clinging onto a raft – Britain has been incredibly lucky in having ample coal, oil and gas resources, which we’ve exploited hugely since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Why not just keep on drilling? Aside from the climate change aspect of fossil fuels, their supporters overlook the emasculating geo-politics of hydrocarbons – there’s been four oil shocks in my lifetime, and we’re currently suffering a gas hike, all of these are down to events far beyond the UK’s control – the Yom Kippur War, the Iranian Revolution, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and growth of demand in China. This winter’s gas bills will be painful, but we can make it our last hydrocarbon shock if we want to.
Renewables offer good news for the world and for the UK. Instead of countries being rich in hydrocarbons or totally deficient, every country around the world, even landlocked ones will be able to tap into at least one form of renewable power. Mongolia, for example could use solar PV, heat pumps and concentrated solar power. Hopefully this will blunt the scramble for energy resources and lead to a more equal and peaceful world in the future. The UK won the lottery with fossil fuels, we also strike lucky with renewables – we can tap into all the major ones. Two forms, we’re especially rich in – wind and tidal – we’re the windiest country in Europe and have some of the strongest tides in the world in places such as the Pentland Firth. The potential is huge, but nothing is inevitable so I’ve modelled a few scenarios for 2030:

Bad case
The UK only progresses to 60% renewables, it’s still dependent on significant nuclear and gas generation. There has been increases in deployment of wind, solar and biomass but the rate of installation has slowed compared to the 2012 – 2020 period.

Average case
The UK reaches 70% renewables, nuclear and gas are reduced but still in the mix. As wind is taking up a bigger share significant grid-balancing and storage is in operation, the UK has made tentative steps to tap into new forms of renewables – biogas, wave and tidal make up a few %.

Hitting target
We took some risks, we pioneered a load of technology but we made it to 80%! As imports make up 10%, nuclear and gas are reduced to a small rump of the electricity market. Wind has been capped at around 50% of the market and the remaining 30% is made up of already established solar and biomass, but the newest forms – biogas, wave, geothermal and tidal already feed several gigawatts into the National Grid.

Hydropower was almost the exclusive form of renewable generation until 2000

For those who have got this far who are sceptical that this is possible or it’s a disruptive and costly change I would point out the following. If we had a conversation about electricity back in 2000, if you championed the existing forms of electricity and dismissed renewables it would be no surprise, aside from hydro no renewable had been deployed to scale around the world, the
rest all had to prove their worth. The increased commitment to renewables under the coalition government means that we’ve decarbonised our electricity by 67% between 2012 and 2021. The past nine years have shown that renewables can move from fringe to mainstream, they can do so very quickly and that there’s no significant increase in electricity bills by doing so. Going from 40% to 80% will be more difficult, it will cost more money. However, if you’re conservative you have to recognise the financial advisory maxim: ‘past performance is a good indicator of future outcomes’ – we can turn on the renewables tap and we can make it work, we know what that looks like. All of the forms of renewable power mentioned here are either available to deploy (wind, solar, biomass), have been proven to work in other countries (geothermal, tidal), or proof-of-concept has been shown and could be scaled up (biogas, wave, tidal). We’re not talking about end-of-the-rainbow tech like nuclear fusion.

R & D and economies of scale have taken the cost of mainstream renewables below gas and nuclear

In conjunction with COP26, the Think Tank Onward published a report ‘Thin Ice?’ This looks at changing attitudes in Britain to climate change and net zero policies. In an ideal world the UK public should have ‘got’ global warming the 1980s, climate science took a quantum leap thanks to the analysis of 140,000 years of ice core data which documented the long term carbon cycle and showed how temperatures since the start of the Industrial Revolution have gone off at a tangent (funnily enough this work was done by Soviet scientists at their Antarctic base before their oil drilling programme really took off). During the last decade, however, as we can see by the graph, acceptance of climate change has become a cultural norm.

Every age group now shows a strong majority concerned about climate change, finally!

Opinion varies slightly across the UK towards the concept of net zero, with heavily industrialised areas still less keen. What does this mean for the Lib Dems politically – pushing a strong green agenda in London and the South East is no problem, but what of our historic heartlands the South West and mid-Wales? If a selling job is possible then the potential for offshore wind, geothermal and tidal needs to be established for Cornwall and Devon, and biomass/biogas for mid-Wales. Overall I think the public has given the green light to clean energy and hope that future governments match the Lib Dems aspiration.

This map documents relative levels of support for net zero, green showing the most, purple the least

Liberals in the UK have made a huge contribution to the global environmental narrative – Lib Dems President Des Wilson’s push for cleaner air in the 1980s has prompted the worldwide eradication of lead from petrol. Sir Ed Davey’s policies in coalition have set a global template for decarbonisation in a major economy which is now being followed by the US, China and Japan, who have all set net zero policies in the last year. When the Chinese needed an expert to show them how to clean up their polluted cities they asked Sir Ed to appear on their version of Question Time – they know his work is globally significant. We are not the Green Party but we are part of the Green movement, and long may that continue.

Des Wilson – a hero to all Green Liberals

We’re on a road to zero

Recently American magazine The Atlantic published a feature titled ‘How the U.S. Could Slash Climate Pollution by 2030’, it was an unusually unsatisfying piece for an otherwise high-brow publication, short on context or detail. It skirted over the when, the how, the why and the how much – the basic tenets of journalism. America has had one President after another that has been indifferent or hostile to the green agenda I guess it’s understandable their internal debate has not caught up with the rest of the industrial world yet. Joe Biden is the greenest President ever (by default), if the US ever wakes up it will probably own most low carbon intellectual property, until then the UK is ahead of the curve in terms of implementation and technology. Unlike America we’ve got a pretty good idea of how to decarbonise because we’ve been doing it for a decade or more. Let’s take a look at how we can push things forward.

• 

Wind turbines in the North Sea – set to increase in capacity in the next decade

A fossil free future

Britain is on a path to net zero carbon emissions, there is a political consensus for that, the main debating points are how long it’s going to take us and how we’re going to do it. Sir Ed Davey recently stated that the Lib Dems policy is to have 80% of UK electricity generated by renewables by the year 2030. This is a stretch, but will be like moving from 4th gear to 5th gear in a car (I’ll get those combustion engine references in while people still understand them). Since 2010 renewables market share has moved from 6% to 40%, so the pace of change to get to 80% only has to increase slightly. It’s not quite as straightforward increasing the current forms of renewables to reach 80%, however, as the dominant form is wind – intermittent and unpredictable. As we phase out fossil fuels, all of which are ‘on demand’ and flexible, I.e. a thermal power plant can operate from 1% input to 100%, the reliance on electricity that is not constant – solar – or wind, which varies hugely, means we’ll have to deploy a lot of grid-balancing and storage infrastructure to keep the power flowing. Certain forms of renewable can be ‘on demand’ – biomass, biogas and geothermal, others such as wave and tidal can be constant – all of these are not deployed to scale in the UK yet but they all could be . . .

These charts show electricity usage over different timeframes, the one on the far right shows how we’ve switched from coal to renewables since 2012

Lightning strikes twice

Many people I’ve spoken to who were hold outs against the transition to renewables I believe were instinctively clinging onto a raft – Britain has been incredibly lucky in having ample coal, oil and gas resources, which we’ve exploited hugely since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Why not just keep on drilling? Aside from the climate change aspect of fossil fuels, their supporters overlook the emasculating geo-politics of hydrocarbons – there’s been four oil shocks in my lifetime, and we’re currently suffering a gas hike, all of these are down to events far beyond the UK’s control – the Yom Kippur War, the Iranian Revolution, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and growth of demand in China. This winter’s gas bills will be painful, but we can make it our last hydrocarbon shock if we want to.
Renewables offer good news for the world and for the UK. Instead of countries being rich in hydrocarbons or totally deficient, every country around the world, even landlocked ones will be able to tap into at least one form of renewable power. Mongolia, for example could use solar PV, heat pumps and concentrated solar power. Hopefully this will blunt the scramble for energy resources and lead to a more equal and peaceful world in the future. The UK won the lottery with fossil fuels, we also strike lucky with renewables – we can tap into all the major ones. Two forms, we’re especially rich in – wind and tidal – we’re the windiest country in Europe and have some of the strongest tides in the world in places such as the Pentland Firth. The potential is huge, but nothing is inevitable so I’ve modelled a few scenarios for 2030:

Bad case
The UK only progresses to 60% renewables, it’s still dependent on significant nuclear and gas generation. There has been increases in deployment of wind, solar and biomass but the rate of installation has slowed compared to the 2012 – 2020 period.

Average case
The UK reaches 70% renewables, nuclear and gas are reduced but still in the mix. As wind is taking up a bigger share significant grid-balancing and storage is in operation, the UK has made tentative steps to tap into new forms of renewables – biogas, wave and tidal make up a few %.

Hitting target
We took some risks, we pioneered a load of technology but we made it to 80%! As imports make up 10%, nuclear and gas are reduced to a small rump of the electricity market. Wind has been capped at around 50% of the market and the remaining 30% is made up of already established solar and biomass, but the newest forms – biogas, wave, geothermal and tidal already feed several gigawatts into the National Grid.

Hydropower was almost the exclusive form of renewable generation until 2000

For those who have got this far who are sceptical that this is possible or it’s a disruptive and costly change I would point out the following. If we had a conversation about electricity back in 2000, if you championed the existing forms of electricity and dismissed renewables it would be no surprise, aside from hydro no renewable had been deployed to scale around the world, the rest all had to prove their worth. The increased commitment to renewables under the coalition government means that we’ve decarbonised our electricity by 67% between 2012 and 2021. The past nine years have shown that renewables can move from fringe to mainstream, they can do so very quickly and that there’s no significant increase in electricity bills by doing so. Going from 40% to 80% will be more difficult, it will cost more money. However, if you’re conservative you have to recognise the financial advisory maxim: ‘past performance is a good indicator of future outcomes’ – we can turn on the renewables tap and we can make it work, we know what that looks like. All of the forms of renewable power mentioned here are either available to deploy (wind, solar, biomass), have been proven to work in other countries (geothermal, tidal), or proof-of-concept has been shown and could be scaled up (biogas, wave, tidal). We’re not talking about end-of-the-rainbow tech like nuclear fusion.

R & D and economies of scale have taken the cost of mainstream renewables below gas and nuclear

Public opinion latest

In conjunction with COP26, the Think Tank Onward published a report ‘Thin Ice?’ This looks at changing attitudes in Britain to climate change and net zero policies. In an ideal world the UK public should have ‘got’ global warming the 1980s, climate science took a quantum leap thanks to the analysis of 140,000 years of ice core data which documented the long term carbon cycle and showed how temperatures since the start of the Industrial Revolution have gone off at a tangent (funnily enough this work was done by Soviet scientists at their Antarctic base before their oil drilling programme really took off). During the last decade, however, as we can see by the graph, acceptance of climate change has become a cultural norm.

Every age group now shows a strong majority concerned about climate change, finally!

Opinion varies slightly across the UK towards the concept of net zero, with heavily industrialised areas still less keen. What does this mean for the Lib Dems politically – pushing a strong green agenda in London and the South East is no problem, but what of our historic heartlands the South West and mid-Wales? If a selling job is possible then the potential for offshore wind, geothermal and tidal needs to be established for Cornwall and Devon, and biomass/biogas for mid-Wales. Overall I think the public has given the green light to clean energy and hope that future governments match the Lib Dems aspiration.

This map documents relative levels of support for net zero, green showing the most, purple the least

Liberals in the UK have made a huge contribution to the global environmental narrative – Lib Dems President Des Wilson’s push for cleaner air in the 1980s has prompted the worldwide eradication of lead from petrol. Sir Ed Davey’s policies in coalition have set a global template for decarbonisation in a major economy which is now being followed by the US, China and Japan, who have all set net zero policies in the last year. When the Chinese needed an expert to show them how to clean up their polluted cities they asked Sir Ed to appear on their version of Question Time – they know his work is globally significant. We are not the Green Party but we are part of the Green movement, and long may that continue.

Des Wilson – a hero to all Green Liberals