He wouldn’t be the only person on the far right to try and claim the moral high ground on the environment. I have lost count of the number of quite sincere UKIP supporters who have told me that they are the only people who are really looking after the countryside because they are controlling immigration and thus cutting population pressure. The idea that we live on one planet and that the critical issue is for that planet is not where the people live or where consumption and production takes place, or the pollution originates but how much of it there is in total does not seem to have occurred to them. There is no national boundary that will stop climate change hitting the UK or keep plastic pollution off UK beaches and the second you check out UKIP’s policies on the coal industry or fuel tax it quickly becomes obvious that they are signed up to making the UK’s contribution to the problem massively worse.
I have more sympathy for those in the Conservative Party who claim to be environmentalists. There are a lot of good people in organisations like the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England who are conservative because they are genuinely interested in conserving the British countryside. If that is your start point then no matter how strongly you want to preserve the status quo it doesn’t take long before you get quite cross about building on the green belt for profit instead of providing homes for local farmworkers. Nor is it so very strange to find that kind of person standing on the picket lines outside the local fracking site protesting against the ruination of a locality that they care deeply about. Similarly there are plenty of Conservatives who don’t want their kids breathing polluted air, and not a few who realise that the sustainable future for business is clean energy and a low carbon low plastics circular economy. It is just a touch unfortunate that the party they belong to has such a dangerous tendency to depend on funding from property developers and the oil business. Or that so many of its leading thinkers have a deep prejudice that the solution to virtually every problem is for the state to scrap regulations and let the market decide what is best. When push comes to shove you can pretty much guarantee that those who determine the main thrust of Conservative policy will be very reluctant to let the needs of the environment over ride the possibility of a quick profit or some easy government revenue. The Conservative Party wants us all to believe it is serious about looking after the environment but sees it as a minor issue that must come second to the serious business of running the economy. The idea that in the long run the only way to have a successful and a sustainable economy is to put environmental economics at the heart of government and business policy making instead of the periphery is not one that too many Conservative Party members have even heard let alone grasped.
All of which leads many people who are sincere about environmental protection into the arms of the Labour Party because it claims to be the only party that stands a chance of actually running the country and implementing environmental policies. Not surprisingly, if you read any Labour Party manifesto you will find a whole series of really quite good statements about what they want to do to protect the environment. The only small problem about this comes whenever Labour has to make a decision between the interests of a group of industrial workers and the needs of the environment. To date what has always happened is that the interests of large groups of trade unionised workers have always come well before the needs of the environment. That is why Labour backs large nuclear power plants even when all the evidence is that they produce over priced electricity and carry unresolved and unresolvable environmental risks and long term legacies. It is also why it has had a historical tendency to back the car industry, the steel industry, the defence industry (e.g. via backing Trident), and the oil industry. If the risk with the Conservatives is that they will dump the environment if it looks like getting in the way of a powerful business lobby then the risk with Labour is that they will do exactly the same if it risks getting in the way of a powerful trade union. There is no reason why a progressive political party can’t put environmental policies at the very centre of an economic strategy for change. The future does, after all, lie with small decentralised businesses and a diverse economy where creative industries, the knowledge economy and science are the main ways that people in the UK earn their living. That isn’t where the hearts and minds of the current Labour leadership lie. Their prime focus in on developing and implementing an industrial strategy based around large industry and Corbyn is so sold on that model that he is determined to pull the UK out of the EU so that he can subsidise UK industry back to success. That doesn’t seem to me to be a promising way forward. The route to success is to be the first country to develop an entirely different style of economy rather than the last one to cling on to an outmoded one. That concept just doesn’t sit comfortably with the world view of anyone heavily influenced by Marxism. In their hearts most Labour politicians of all factions tend to see environmental policies as a useful add on that wins them quite a bit of popular support not the prime component of a national update and transformation.
That is why I have long argued that we need a strong and independent Green Party voice and am so irritated by the constant demands from Labour that everyone joins up to the one true cause of making sure that they get back into power. There is no point in being in power unless you have an effective and a workable vision of what you are going to do and how you are going to do it. The Labour Party doesn’t even seem capable of agreeing this week’s Brexit strategy or mounting a successful assault on a government that is failing to cope with its own divisions. If they get back into power they are going to be desperately struggling with a post Brexit crisis that they have helped to create by weak campaigning in the referendum and even weaker opposition afterwards. It would be a naïve person who would trust them to hold firm to their promises of positive environmental policies once the economic pressures of that mess really start to bite.
The argument that the Greens should pack in and join the Liberal Democrats is even more dodgy. In 2010 I remember voting Lib Dem in Skipton and Ripon because they had the best chance of beating the Conservatives. Days later they entered the coalition. In power they were better at environmental policy than the Conservatives – after all Cameron appointed a climate change denier as Environment Minister – but no one could say that it dominated their thinking in government. It was seen as a bit of a luxury area of policy where they might occasionally succeed in doing something.
So if you want coherent green policies you have to vote for and campaign for the Green Party. That doesn’t mean, of course, that it is impossible for Greens to collaborate with other parties or to form tactical alliances. It does mean that they should never gracefully stand aside without any meaningful payback. If Labour were prepared to stand aside for the Green Party in even a handful of seats in return for support in their marginals then there would be a strong case for collaboration. If the Lib Dems is prepared to do the same then that should also be supported. One Green MP has achieved wonders and having a small group of them could seriously help to toughen up the stance of the next government.
Labour under Corbyn is proving quite good at winning votes in traditional Labour heartlands because he genuinely does want to look after the interests of ordinary working people in the regions and genuinely does have some good policies that might help to achieve that. He does, however, look desperately incapable of winning new voters from the Conservatives. Since he has been very clear that he remains determined to fight every seat and he has refused every invitation to join a progressive alliance the job of doing the heavy lifting of winning seats held by the Conservatives is going to have to be done by someone else. In Richmond that was achieved by an electoral understanding between the Lib Dems and the Greens not to fight each other. That might well succeed in enough other places to make a real difference.
If we are going to stand any chance of taking enough seats off the Conservatives to get a chance to implement some more progressive policies than fracking and building an individualised zero hours contract society then what happened in Richmond needs replicating across the country. A Lib Dem Green arrangement might just help progressive parties to win the next election and a big enough group of Green MPs might just keep them focusing on the crucial challenge of the next decades.
That challenge is very simple to state but rather less easy to achieve. Somehow we need to transform a huge environmental challenge into a major opportunity for constructive change. And we need to do it very quickly.