3 August 2023
Many MSPs also privately acknowledge the failure to bring the public with them on this subject, compounded by two horrific sexual assault cases by transgender women, Isla Bryson and Andrew Miller/Amy George, which came to light in the months after the bill’s completion. As a recent Guardian/More in Common focus group discovered, it was these cases rather than the legislation itself that had cut through to the voters.
30 July 2023
Luke Tryl, UK director of More In Common, a charity that tracks debates about contentious issues in Britain. says: “People welcome meaningful examples of corporate social responsibility, but what they don’t want is virtue signalling.
“But there’s a real grey area in which kind of inclusion initiatives fall into taking a political stance and which fall into actually just being a good corporate citizen – and that is a really tricky line for businesses to walk.”
29 July 2023
“If the Tories try to position themselves as just anti-green then the voters will kind of bristle at that,” Mr Tryl said. “But what will be an opportunity for the Tories is if they position themselves as green but sensible, which is what they were trying to do with Grant Shapps trying to constantly paint Keir Starmer as being in the pocket of Just Stop Oil.”
He added: “People hate Just Stop Oil. It actively alienates people from the cause.”
29 July 2023
During a focus group, convened by More in Common for the Guardian, they broadly backed current commitments to tackle climate change – and in some areas thought the government should go further.
28 July 2023
In this month’s issues tracker, More in Common finds that with heat wave Cerberus sweeping across Europe, climate and the environment comes third and is the highest level of concern recorded in More in Common’s polling in the last six months with a quarter of the public (24 per cent) identifying it as a top issue.
Polling for More in Common also found that “voters are nearly five times more likely to say that the government is not doing enough on climate change than say they are doing too much. Even those in the most conservative segments are much more likely to think the Government is not doing enough”.
27 July 2023
The Uxbridge defeat could be interpreted as suggesting that policies aligning with the net zero agenda are not popular with voters; however, evidence from polling in recent years would suggest otherwise. The polling group More in Common has found that half of all voters believe the government isn’t doing enough to get to net zero, with 72 per cent of those polled above the age of 30 considering themselves worried about climate change.