In opposition David Cameron made encouraging remarks about environmental protection and its place in conservative political thinking. He acknowledged the fundamental truth, that conservatism and conservation are connected not merely etymologically but also politically. For a long time we have been bullied by left-wingers into thinking that conservatism is another name for the interests of big business, and that big business puts present profit before the long-term good. And in opposition David Cameron seemed determined to show that those statements are nonsense. Conservatism, he rightly perceived, denotes the attitude that we all share, which is the desire to look after what we know and love, and to ensure its survival.
However, the Coalition’s programme for government addresses environmental issues that have been placed on the agenda largely by the left. Matters that trouble conservatives – the local food economy, Green belts, town planning, the countryside and the architectural heritage – are not widely seen as environmentally significant, since they are dismissed by left-leaning Greens as concerns of the ‘middle classes’. But it is the middle classes – in other words, those with a home and commitment to home – who have the greatest stake in a shared and sustainable environment, and what matters to them matters to all of us.
David Cameron promised, in opposition, to rescue planning procedures from the ‘regional’ bodies set up by New Labour, and to return them to local communities. But the recent budget proposes to streamline the procedures and simplify them in favour of the applicant. This is surely a step backwards – another example of the surrender to economic interests that is the main obstacle to a coherent environmental policy. There are few success stories in environmental politics, but one of them is the 1946 Town and Country Planning Act, which saved our countryside from destruction by ribbon development, and helped to prevent the suburbanisation that has blighted the towns of America and made it impossible to manage an ordinary life without driving for two hours a day. There are conservatives who are suspicious of planning controls – planning, they think, is a dirty word, signifying government interference in matters that ought to be the citizen’s concern. But there are two kinds of planning – that favoured by the left, in which government initiates and controls the process, and that favoured by conservatives, which encourages enterprise but which constrains and limits what can be done. The Coalition rightly recoils from the first kind of planning; but it does not seem sufficiently to recognise that this increases the need for the second kind.
The Coalition has taken a firm stand against airport expansion, and I thoroughly commend its attitude, since there is a real political cost attached to penalising any form of transport. Travel has to become harder, more expensive and more unpleasant if the world is to regain its equilibrium. However, the Coalition also promises a high-speed rail network, and remains silent about roads – which have surely proved far more devastating in their environmental impact than any other form of transport. Since taking office the government has been unswerving in its support for the high-speed rail link between Birmingham and London, and ministers have even used the derogatory ‘nimby’ word to dismiss those who oppose the scheme. Ever since Ruskin the point has been made that we destroy our environment not by living in it but by speeding through it; but that is an unpopular thing to say, and I suppose the Coalition can hardly be blamed for not saying it.
The bulk of the government’s proposals relating to the environment concern energy and the threat of climate change. There is an important question of balance here, which I am hoping the government will one day address. The panic over global warming (whether or not founded in scientific truth) has been used to divert all attention towards the search for ‘clean energy’, and towards global treaties, the main effect of which would be to punish the West for sins that can no longer be rectified. Not surprisingly the treaties remain unsigned or ineffective, and meanwhile the local, soluble problems go unaddressed. As things stand there is no hope of reducing emissions without recourse to nuclear energy, and the Liberal Democrats have, for whatever reason, made opposition to nuclear energy one of their defining policies. (I suppose they have to define themselves in some way.) All other solutions seem to me to be fraught with insurmountable difficulties, or to be phony, in the manner of wind farms, which are neither clean nor efficient, and which are in any case a form of aesthetic pollution.
People on the left don’t on the whole mind aesthetic pollution: this too is a blow against the middle classes. But it is the most serious of all impediments to a conservative environmental policy. By undermining people’s love of country and their sense of peaceful settlement, aesthetic pollution destroys the motive from which real stewardship springs. It brings about a transfer of environmental problems from the people to the government, which then confiscates the solution and makes a mess of it. And while on this topic, what is the government proposing to do about light pollution? The adverse effect of this on wildlife, on sleep, on the charm of both town and country, is widely known. Since the Coalition’s programme rightly emphasizes the importance of wildlife corridors, habitats and bio-diversity, it would be a natural step to recognize that our native species are in need of darkness too.
But this leads to the real question concerning wildlife: who, in the past, maintained and protected the habitats and corridors, and who destroyed them? The answer goes to the heart of the conflict between socialists and conservatives in our country. Habitats, hedgerows and bio-diversity have been maintained by small-scale resident farmers, by country sports and by the associations of volunteers, such as the Anglers Conservation Association and the Game Conservancy Association. They have been destroyed by agribusiness and socialist planning, by the subsidies offered to absentee landlords by the Common Agricultural Policy and by the loss of the local food economy and the small farmers who depended on it – a loss accelerated by the favouritism bestowed by successive governments on the supermarket barons. Hedgerows and habitats don’t look after themselves: they are an obstacle to agribusiness and an offense to the utilitarian mind-set. Stewardship will only revive if those who reside in the countryside are once again given the motive to look after it, which is why the Coalition is right to put the repeal of the Hunting Act on the agenda, if only at the bottom of it. But that measure should be integrated into a wider agenda, which is to lift the burden imposed upon our environment by the subsidies and regulations which stand in the way of our natural desire to maintain it.
David Cameron is right to insist that conservatism is about rescuing society from the state. For state solutions are rotten with unintended consequences, are operated by bureaucrats who escape the net of accountability, and are in the long run simply ways of augmenting the growing list of state dependents. The ‘big society’ is another name for Burke’s ‘little platoons’; and if any problems admit of social solutions – solutions conceived and executed by volunteers, acting for the common good – environmental problems are first among them.
Conservatism therefore means trusting people to act for themselves, while creating the incentives that will permit them to do so. It means respecting small-scale local initiatives, facilitating the culture of volunteering, and lifting the burden of regulations that prevent people from taking responsibility for themselves and for those who matter to them. Many of our environmental problems are the direct result of the burden of health and safety regulations which impede every small scale initiative. I am glad to know that the Conservative Party contains people who murmur against these regulations. But it would be nice to know that someone was prepared to do something about them. For instance, the regulations that require so much of our food to be packaged at source, and which have so augmented the mountain of non-degradable packaging that there is not a corner of the kingdom where it isn’t accumulating in unsightly heaps.
The problem of plastic pollution is surely fundamental to environmental politics. The Coalition’s Initial Programme promises to ‘work towards’ a zero waste economy, and shows some awareness of the problem. But there is waste and waste. Some degrades and leaves the world undamaged. But some accumulates. The real problem is not waste as such, but the packaging that immortalises it. This problem can be overcome only if the supermarkets are confronted with another kind of regulation: not one that permits them to transfer their costs (in the form of immortal rubbish) to future generations, but one that compels them to meet the costs of their actions themselves, for example, by selling unpackaged products, or by using bio-degradable wrappings. Confronting the supermarkets is not something that politicians are very good at. New Labour sprinkled peerages and knighthoods on the supermarket bosses like confetti, in the hope of retaining their support. But to tackle the environmental destruction wrought by the modern food economy the supermarkets have to be opposed, not appeased. This means that they must be seen for what they are, as businesses which have no attachment or loyalty to the places where they operate, and whose primary interest is in externalising their costs. A real market economy is one in which costs are internalised by the participants. As things stand the supermarkets, which are the by-product of a massive regime of hidden subsidies and government sponsored externalities, are not sustainers of the market economy, but parasites upon it.
Ministers have yet to speak out against the kind of out-of-town development which favours the supermarkets over the local shops, and which can strike a town dead from one day to the next. They have yet to draw attention to the environmental degradation that results from regulations that impose disproportionate burdens on small shops and small farmers and which favour supermarkets and agribusinesses. I am confident that David Cameron is, at heart, a Tory of the Burkean school, who prefers small things to big things, personal relations to impersonal organisations, and honest accounting to the habit of passing on costs. But I hear none of this from the Ministry of the Environment – not yet, at least, but only pleas in favour of GM crops, and the usual protestations of commitment to ‘renewable energy’.
Of course, being in a coalition is not easy. But the Environment Ministry is a Conservative fiefdom and an opportunity has arisen to show that conservatism is about conserving, not destroying. I look forward to the time when Zac Goldsmith, now a conservative MP, and a leading light in the battle for the environment, is brought into the new government, even if only in a subsidiary rôle. His courageous defence of conservatism as the right approach to environmental politics, his accumulation of knowledge and expertise during his years as editor of The Ecologist, and his learned and well-argued book (The Constant Economy) which entirely refutes the callow utopianism of the Left-leaning Greens – all these have earned him an honourable place in the environmental movement, and in the hearts of conservatives of the younger generation.
One thing is certain (and Goldsmith has done much to argue the point) which is that the environmental agenda has to change. Of course we must reduce carbon emissions, and of course we must strive to obtain treaties that unite the nations around that goal. But the real need is for a rebirth in ordinary people of the motives that lead them to take care of things around them. This means freeing them from the bureaucrats, lowering the cost of private initiatives, and lending support to the volunteers. It means supporting those who wish to protect near and cherished assets from the global entropy. Above all it means taking a stand against those who would off-load their costs onto future generations, and whose actions erode the natural impulse to look after what is ours. I believe there is a growing awareness that the environmental agenda must be rescued from the global activists. People are more disposed to accept that comprehensive edicts imposed from above should be replaced by small scale local initiatives shaped from below. But without the help of government those initiatives will be impeded by the vested interests, and without a new approach to regulation the incentives will not be in place that encourage people to take on the task of stewardship for themselves.
One way to do this is for the government to search for citizens’ initiatives to which it can give indirect support, by changing the regime of regulations, or by encouraging local Members of Parliament to play their part and to report back to Parliament. Initiatives like the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England’s ‘Stop the Drop’, towards a proper deposit system for plastic bottles, or the ‘Pack it in’ campaign working to enforce existing laws on packaging, or the various volunteer groups under the aegis of the Wildlife Trusts – all such initiatives could benefit from government support. And by this I mean support offered in a conservative spirit, not with a view to controlling what is done, but with a view to channelling the activities of concerned and responsible volunteers into cogent legislation, when the need for it has been properly shown.
This column originally appeared at ResPublica.
