Support for the current Downing Street administration is plummeting, and environmental concerns are one of the main reasons.
A new poll published today, Wednesday 4th February 2026, shows that Labour’s ‘anti-nature rhetoric’ has significantly damaged the party. Carried out by Savanta, analysis shows that 28% of Reform backers and the same proportion of current Green advocates feel less likely to vote for Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government in the next general election because of his remarks about ecological rules.
Speaking in December, the Labour leader discussed a report on Britain’s nuclear energy industry, in which he described ‘pointless gold-plating, unnecessary red-tape… well-intentioned but fundamentally misguided environmental regulations’. According to the statement, these factors have helped make the UK the most expensive country in the world to build atomic power stations.
The fallout from this messaging appears to have been significant, with 19% of the public who voted for Labour in 2024 now less likely to do so as a direct results of these comments. This comes at a time when a government assessment of nature and biodiversity collapse, published last month, identified habitat and species loss, climate disruption and ecosystem decline as fundamental threats to national security.
Starmer also openly welcomed and backed the Nuclear Regulatory Review, which had just been published at the time, and included proposals to remove some of the red tape around environmental protections. Among other things, existing rules around habitat preservation in national parks would be abolished. A number of nature-aligned groups – such as The Wildlife Trusts, RSPB, National Trust, Wildlife & Countryside Link, and the Office for Environmental Protection all responded with warnings that the report and its suggestions were based on factual inaccuracies.
As a result, there is a high risk of unnecessary and avoidable environmental damage if legislation is scrapped. In a rare display of cross-party agreement, MPs and peers from across the political spectrum have also raised red flags in relation to both Starmer’s statements and the implications of reforming nature protections.
You can read a new report by The Wildlife Trust – Why the Nuclear Regulatory Review is flawed and how it could turn the nature crisis into a catastrophe – here.
‘The evidence is clear: the Nuclear Regulatory Review has accepted inaccuracies from self-interested developers about the need for and costs of environmental mitigations,’ Browne continued. ‘As it considers the flawed Review recommendations on nature, the Government must avoid taking these at face value without considering all the evidence. To do so would be to embark on deeply damaging environmental regression, based on poor evidence, to the detriment of nature, people and climate.’
Image: Phil Hearing / Unsplash
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