This has given us a whole raft of politicians who offer very low quality arguments backed up not by evidence or logical argument but which work by making ever louder assertions. Anyone who has followed the Brexit debate will quickly recognise the phenomena. Those of us who have been asking questions from the very start about how it is possible to have two different customs arrangements on one island without a border have been answered with assertions that seem to have lost all contact with reality. We are asked to believe in the magic of technical solutions to the Northern Ireland border when not a single meaningful thing has been done to describe in detail what those solutions might be or – heaven forbid – actually try and develop the relevant technology. On the other side of the debate Remainers have become more and more reluctant to admit the obvious truth that many EU schemes are riddled with errors and badly need changing. The European Social Fund and the Common Agricultural Policy are top of my list for heavy reform.
On the rare occasions that we do encounter a politician thinking beyond the normal boundaries and actually trying to figure something out they are usually discovered on the back benches of the major political parties. The Conservative Party, for example, has almost a full Cabinet of serious thinkers available to it. Firmly sat on the back benches as far away from power as the Prime Minister can keep them. Anna Soubry, Nicki Morgan, and Ken Clarke are for instance always worth listening to and learning from even when they strongly disagree with you and all display considerably more capability for forward thinking than anyone currently in government.
With one possible exception. What is going on in Michael Gove’s mind at the moment is genuinely interesting. Week by week we get announcements from his Ministry of modestly sensible measures to tackle seriously important environmental challenges. Quickly accompanied by a string of policies that have the opposite and much more harmful effects coming from either other Ministers or – quite frequently from Gove himself.
Since it is never sensible to dismiss all Conservatives as exactly the same or to refuse to believe that any Conservative could ever implement a genuinely positive environmental policy I think it is important to keep trying to understand Gove’s thinking and to work out which bits of what he is arguing for can be supported and which bits need particular determined opposition.
To start with the positives he has already either announced or implemented quite a number of policies that head in the right direction. He banned the sale of a range of products that contain microbeads of plastics. He announced an investigation of a bottle return scheme that is highly likely to result in a deposit charge quite soon and a significant reduction in use. It has also recently been reported that his Department are seriously investigating an increase in levies charged on companies that use plastics that can’t be recycled easily in order to use the money on improved recycling facilities. If, as seems likely, he actually implements that scheme it would make more difference to the amount of plastics disposed of in the UK than anything done by any government to date. It would make it simply too expensive to wrap turnips in plastic, or deliver a Pizza that is sat on a polystyrene base and force companies across the country to modernise their practices. If he does anything remotely serious on that then it would be very worthy of support and it seems genuinely probable that he will. I’d like to see more and I’d like to see quicker but owt is better than nowt and these moves are all genuinely helpful.
On top of all that Gove has put forward policies for agriculture post Brexit that really would be a massive improvement on the Common Agricultural Policy. That isn’t a hard thing to do but the proposals he’s asked his Department to work up actually sound pretty sensible. It is a lot better to fund farmers for using land sustainably and protecting the environment than to give the very richest farmers subsidies just for owning large amounts of land.
The problems come when you start to set all that against the other side of the equation. Gove seems to understand that plastics are an urgent problem and to be prepared to try and do something about them. He clearly doesn’t think the same thing about fossil fuels. He backs the government to the hilt in its determination to enforce fracking on reluctant local communities and to subsidise the extension of the life of North Sea Oil industry. He’s also been on side with the virtually complete ban on new on shore wind and the wrecking of the emerging alternative energy industry with clumsy changes to ill thought out and much spun pathetically small subsidies. He is also a supporter of the government’s determination to abolish all meaningful planning regulations in order to let building developers wreck green field sites without doing anything meaningful to deliver the homes we actually need. Finally, and perhaps most damagingly, he is a major cheerleader for Brexit.
Gove has not just swallowed all the guff from the leavers about wonderful new trade deals he has been the person who has produced and enthusiastically propagated most of the myths. When challenged on the impact on the environment of those new trade deals he has either been silent or more typically simply resorted to the kind of mindless repeating of empty slogans that so much of the rest of the Cabinet uses all the time. Every single new trade deal that it is possible to sign is going to come with an increase in agricultural imports. That means cheaper prices for consumers. It also means lower standards from UK farms. It simply isn’t possible for a UK farm to stay in the food growing business if it has to sell at the same price as a US farmer who has sown one single crop across a huge acreage and controlled the inevitable attacks by pests with ever stronger pesticides or put their cattle into battery farmed factories and treated them with massive doses of antibiotics. UK agriculture therefore faces a post Brexit collapse in which many small farms go out of business whilst others adopt US style methods and lower animal welfare standards and increase crop spraying. When that happens it is going to be really hard to fight for environmental standards yet Gove has supported the government’s refusal to allow UK courts to have the same rights as EU courts to enforce environmental standards post Brexit.
Gove’s policies are therefore deeply contradictory. He is doing some genuinely useful things but backing other things that will do immensely more environmental harm than anything he has supported. It is for this reason that many environmentalists have accused him of Greenwash.
Is it perhaps possible that a man who got sacked as a Minister for being disloyal and untrustworthy felt the need to rebuild his reputation and spotted an opportunity? Has the Conservative Party perhaps noticed that it is dangerous for it to have become so unpopular with young voters and come to the conclusion that if it does a few easy good things on the environment it can reduce that unpopularity enough to get through the next election? Or is Gove on a slow and muddled road to a genuine realisation that the only successful future for the UK economy and society is to be the first country to adapt to the next phase of technology rather than the last one to grasp the significance of the inevitable shift to greener ways of working and living?
I leave the reader to draw their own conclusion. And to speculate on how long he will be allowed to stay in the environment job or any Ministerial office if he really does start to seriously force the Conservatives to rethink their stance on environmental issues.