When Theresa May gave him the job I suspect she thought she had sent him a hospital pass. After all that was her strategy for dealing with Boris Johnson. She knows Boris well so she couldn’t possibly have made him Foreign Secretary under the illusion that he was a safe pair of hands who could handle diplomacy. Which means that the only logical explanation is that she gave him the job to finish off his career. And to be fair her strategy is proving a success. If all she is interested in is finishing off rivals and she doesn’t care about the country’s reputation.
With Gove it is not turning out as expected. He isn’t making a fool of himself by following his far right friends who think that physicists don’t understand what carbon dioxide does or how to measure it. Instead he has been making a series of rather good speeches on the extent of the environmental challenge.
More surprisingly he has actually changed UK policy in a couple of very helpful ways. For the last couple of years DeFRA has been consistently refusing to accept that neonicitinoids damage bees and other pollinating insects. Or that they soak our soils with chemicals that damage vital organisms that no one is studying. The evidence has mounted steadily that these chemicals weaken honey bee colonies even at low field level doses and damage other insects including bumble bees. They also build up in field margins and hedgerows to levels way beyond the safe doses assumed by scientists to be all that we need to worry about. Yet the UK had consistently opposed restrictions and simply echoed the propaganda put out by the makers of the products.
Inside weeks of taking over Gove had signed the UK up to supporting a ban. That meant facing down a powerful lobby of large landowners, many of whom are big contributors to the Conservative Party. He has risked annoying them further by stating that he intends to direct future agricultural subsidies towards improving environmental land management instead of the current system of paying large number of very rich people for owning land regardless of what they do with it. He’s also committed himself to backing land restoration projects like increasing tree cover and bringing back the beaver. More recently he has declared that we need to use a lot more of the UK aid budget to help control the huge quantities of plastics that are dumped into rivers in poorer countries.
It is tempting to see all this as a cynical exercise being conducted by a politician who realises that he badly needs to restore his damaged reputation. I don’t think that is what is going on. Gove has always been a conviction politician who believes fanatically in the correctness of his own judgements.
When he is wrong that makes him very dangerous because he doesn’t listen to criticism. So, when he was Education Secretary he followed his own bizarre fantasies about what children needed to learn in the 21st century. Ignoring the views of anyone who had actually taught a modern child. Then he got himself convinced that the UK needed its sovereignty back and went all out for Brexit. Completely ignoring any evidence that this would weaken the country and leave it more subject to foreign influence that it couldn’t control. Or that it would damage the economy.
When he is wrong he can therefore be very dangerous. Which makes it tempting to deny the possibility that he might sincerely believe that the British landscape badly needs protection and have some good ideas about how to do that. It is even tempting to dismiss what he believes as a product of a very dangerous mindset. After all Hitler was a vegetarian with an interest in restoring the German landscape to its ’natural’ state. It is not unusual for far-right nationalists who hate outsiders to extend that hate to alien animals and to have faith in the merits of getting back to the land in its most natural state.
Yet I think we should resist that temptation. I’ve long believed that there are large numbers of Conservatives who actually believe in the merits of conservation. Those of us who recognise the scale and the urgency of the environmental challenge need to back them when they put those convictions into practice and challenge them when they are wrong.
So I think we should be prepared to take Gove at his word and to praise and back him for every measure that he puts forward that actually genuinely does help the environment. Then call him out all the stronger for every time he does the exact opposite.
It is a lot better to have the Minister responsible for the environment talking up the dangers of climate change and to see £600 million being spent on electric vehicle charging points than to have that Minister ignorantly denying that there is any problem. It is genuinely helpful to have a Minister who actually goes some small way towards recognising that over producing, over consuming and recklessly disposing plastics is an utterly unsustainable economic model.
Yet those small commitment are pathetically short of the standard that we need. It is deeply harmful for him to talk with apparent sincerity about climate change and then back fracking. He is part of a government which has weak as dishwater policies on modernising our industry to equip it for the next generation of green technology. The Conservatives are forcing through a massive house building programme – yet doing almost nothing to insist that those houses are generating electricity, have electric vehicle charging points and are built in inner cities that are crying out for renovation instead of covering green fields with executive homes. This is a government that is spending huge amounts of money on the giant white elephant Hinkley Point project that locks the UK into decades of over costly nuclear energy without any proper assessment of the scale of the worst-case risks.
There is no shortage of policies that the current Conservative government is following that are doing immense damage to the environment or which are simply missing out on equally enormous opportunities for positive change. So I intend to remain very cynical about Gove’s attempts to cast himself as a genuine environmentalist. Not least because Cameron declared that he would lead the greenest government ever and then instructed his Cabinet to “ditch all this green crap”.
Nevertheless, I do believe we should support every positive measure Gove comes up with and encourage every Conservative who actually tries to do something useful for the environment. We can’t afford to write off useful actions coming from any side of the political spectrum and there has been plenty of evidence in the past of the Labour Party treating environmental issues as a bit of an irrelevant side issue that shouldn’t get in the way of proper working-class politics.
Equally we cannot afford to stop campaigning for what we really need. A complete switch in the whole way we organise our economy is needed in order to make it genuinely sustainable locally, nationally and internationally. You can bet your bottom dollar that no Conservative will come up with policies to do that.