Given the urgency of the problems we face it is important to welcome positive policies when they come from the two major parties. It is also important to maintain a healthy scepticism and an independent political party that wants the issue to be centre stage of policy making.
Gove certainly talks an excellent game on the environment and it makes a change to have a Conservative Minister who claims to genuinely understand that something has to be done. Some of his measures on single use plastics and on subsidising farmers to look after the environment on their land are massively preferable to the outright denial of climate change from the Minister that went before him under Cameron.
There are, however, serious flaws in Goves policies. For example, this week he made an excellent case for more marine reserves. Yet he has done absolutely nothing to ensure that the ones that exist in the UK are effectively policed. Marine reserves in the UK are little better than a nice name. Much damaging activity can take place within them and almost no resources are devoted to actually protecting them. In most of them fishing can still take place entirely legally. This is utterly inadequate tokenism. We need proper enforcement of protection. Along most of the UK’s inshore waters ocean bottoms have been stripped bear of life by practices like dragging scallop cages across the sea floor. It is going to take them decades to recover if they ever do. Nice words aren’t enough. We need hard and effective actions.
In the same week that Gove made his excellent speech about protecting the environment three anti fracking protestors went to jail. One of them for 16 months. Not for being violent. Not for assault. For standing on top of a vehicle for 3 days and causing a bit of inconvenience to a contractor. Laws that allow that to happen aren’t passed by judges. They are passed by governments. The same government that has told local planning committees that they cannot exercise their own judgement over whether they want fracking but must reject onshore windfarms if there is even one objector. The same government that Michael Gove is a member of and whose fracking policy he supports. His fine words on the environment are being accompanied by some very unpleasant policies.
We also heard some very fine words from Jeremy Corbyn this week about the environment. Accompanied by some rather better policies. He announced that installing solar panels on every building in the UK would form an important component of his strategy for reviving industry in the more neglected regions of the UK. That is an astonishingly ambitious policy and to be admired. I must confess that I have only been campaigning to make it compulsory that 100% of all new or heavily modified properties must include arrangements to generate more energy than they use. When it comes to existing buildings I have always thought that heavy subsidies and encouragement to change should be applied and that we’d quickly be able to get a very high proportion of properties able to generate and store their own power but not 100 per cent any time soon. Credit to Corbyn if he can find a way of doing 100 per cent!
This kind of policy commitment is very welcome. What is even more welcome is that there were some genuine signs that Corbyn has now understood that the best industrial strategy for the UK is to look to the future and get this country on the front foot of the changeover to environmentally friendly products and manufacturing techniques. However, and there is almost always a however when it comes to fine words on the environment, this excellent policy needs to be viewed in the context of other policies he has adopted. For a start he is still in favour of large nuclear power stations. Long after it has been demonstrated that nuclear power is massively more expensive than renewables and both are less cost effective than better insulation and measures to reduce use. We also still don’t have the faintest idea how we are going to clean up the mess after nuclear has finished working or have any ability to completely rule out a dreadful accident. It is the public that will be expected to pay for the clean up and storage problems and the public that is being asked to pay more on their energy bills to pay for clumsy new nuclear power stations. Those power stations do, however, bring quite a lot of jobs with them and the union subscriptions paid by those heavily subsidised jobs creates a strong lobby within the Labour Party to keep going with a failed nuclear experiment. There is no sign that either Corbyn or the wider Labour Party has the remotest intention of changing its dangerously deluded policy and deciding to move away from nuclear power.
When it comes to plastics Labour Party policy is a little better but still not remotely adequate to the scale or the urgency of the challenge. Companies up and down the country are already responding to massive consumer pressure to try and sell products with less plastic content and to wrap them in things that sit easily in the environment. Those companies need support and encouragement to do so faster and they need research programmes funded by the public into new materials and new methods and methods of mass producing them cost effectively. The companies that are taking the opposite approach and are deliberately dragging their feet need the costs of their actions imposed on them and not on the tax payer and future generations. What is needed is a wholescale transformation of manufacturing, transportation and supply in the UK so that we are making products that contain no plastics and then transporting them to be sold to the consumer without plastic wrapping. Economically and technologically that ought to be centre stage of any effective industrial strategy that is intended to equip UK manufacturing to compete into the future. Morally and environmentally it needs to be done very rapidly before the layer of plastic we are covering the earth in does even more damage.
I have yet to hear Corbyn say anything that indicates he gets the scale of the challenge that this represents or that he understands the urgency and the central importance of acting on it. For the Labour Party the issue still feels like a nice little add on policy to be adopted if possible after they’ve done the serious stuff like helping steel plants and car factories.
There is, of course, a real prospect that Corbyn and the Labour Party could be persuaded to follow such policies with rather more energy and determination than they have shown in the past. Just as there is a chance that the Conservative party will start conserving things properly. Provided of course that there is a strong Green Party snapping at their heels and winning enough votes at elections!