Several days after George Monbiot wrote an op-ed piece in the Guardian about the government’s planning reform. I have been unable to shift it from my mind.
The legislation about to go through parliament is, Monbiot argues,
.. the worst assault on England’s ecosystems in living memory. It erases decades of environmental protections, including legislation we inherited from the EU, which even the Tories promised to uphold.
Monbiot’s piece is required reading for anyone who cares about ‘one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world’. (That’s a quote from the last Labour manifesto, by thew way).
Some ecosystems, such as ancient woodlands, ancient meadows and chalk streams, simply cannot be replaced. But the bill pretends that everything is tradeable. You can destroy an ancient woodland, as long as you deliver an “overall improvement” in woodland cover, namely saplings in plastic tubes.
Justifying the removal of the basic safeguards against the depredation of natural habitats, Keir Starmer is quoted as saying that he had been influenced by ‘my conversations with CEOs’. That astonishing confession – or should that be boast? – is both revealing and depressing.
Maybe all politicians listen to the money, to the bosses and their shareholders, rather than ordinary people, but this is a Labour leader. Surely we have a right to expect more.
This new disregard for the natural world is particularly painful for those of us who care for the natural world and who are generally sympathetic to Labour. I have, on the whole, supported the government’s tough approach to the appalling mess left by their hapless, shambolic predecessors. They have been bad at communication but at least they have had the courage to tackle head-on the various crises besetting our beleaguered country, rather than wring their hands on the sidelines as the Tories did.
But I have always had a niggling fear that deep down, they have a dismissive contempt for people like me – people who live in the countryside and care about it. I remember John Prescott’s sneering remark about people in the country being concerned to preserve their precious views. It was as if that was all the natural world was – a view through a window.
Then, more recently, there was Rachel Reeves deeply stupid and ill-informed taunt, while she was sucking up to developers. ‘Forget about bats and newts,’ she scoffed. In the same vein, Starmer has airily dismissed those speaking up for the natural landscape as ‘zealots’ and blockers’.
Perhaps none of this is surprising. These are urban people and, increasingly, it is clear that there is a great divide in our culture between town-dwellers and country-dwellers. Urban politicians worship at the altar of growth. Somewhere along the line, Labour politicians have concluded those who live outside towns rarely vote for their party anyway, and so they can be patronised, sneered at and ignored.
Of course, they believe in the Environment, but it is with a capital ‘E’ – a safely vague and global thing, to be discussed at international conferences and shouted about on political platforms, representing a worthy, if woolly desire to save Planet Earth. And if there are sacrifices to the local environment all around us – the environment with a small ‘e’, that is – then that is a price worth paying.
Here then is the government’s message: the best way to save the big, important Environment is to be prepared to trash the small, local environment. Woods, moors, farmland, wetlands – they can all be developed over, so long as some great general target is reached.
It is, I suspect, almost impossible to explain the value and importance of these things, to a politician. They belong to a different world, where profit and targets trump the pettifogging arguments of conservationists, naturalists and those who love the countryside.
We’re zealots, blockers. They, marching on the freshly-built highway to a bright, industrialised, shareholder-friendly future, don’t even see us.
