I can scarcely believe I’m writing this, but it’s hard to dodge the conclusion. After 14 years of environmental vandalism, it might have seemed impossible for Labour to offer anything but improvement. But on green issues, this government is worse than the Tories.
The last prime minister to insist that growth should override every other consideration, and to fling insults at anyone who disagreed, was Liz Truss. She called those of us seeking to defend the living world an “anti-growth coalition”, “voices of decline” and “enemies of enterprise” who “don’t understand aspiration”.
Now Keir Starmer has picked up her theme and run with it. Those who challenge government policies that might promote GDP growth, however destructive and irrational, such as the planned expansion of Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton and Doncaster Sheffield airports, are “time-wasting nimbys”, “zealots” and “blockers”, engaged in “self-righteous virtue-signalling”.
After all, these are the kind of people who might send “congratulations to the climate campaigners” whose legal challenge stopped plans to build a third Heathrow runway at the court of appeal. Or who insist that Heathrow expansion should be blocked because “there is no more important challenge than the climate emergency”. Oh, hang on, that was Starmer, writing in 2020. You know, the one you voted for, not the new model, channelling the worst Tory prime minister of modern times.
Now his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, insists that growth “trumps other things”, including the government’s environmental commitments. The verb is unfortunate. The government’s new rhetoric is horribly reminiscent of the convicted felon: monomania, slogans and insults take the place of nuanced and complex policy.
It makes sense to improve east-west rail links and construct more reservoirs and offshore windfarms, as Reeves promised in her speech , and we urgently need new, genuinely affordable housing (alongside systemic change in the housing market). But there’s no justification in a climate emergency for airport expansion or new trunk roads, such as her Lower Thames Crossing. The “sustainable aviation fuels” the government plans to rely on don’t exist, and won’t materialise at scale.
Reeves mocks environmental concern in true Trumpian fashion, claiming that people object to schemes like the third runway she has just announced at Heathrow because they “might add something to carbon emissions in 20 years’ time”. There’s no “might” about it. They will. But who cares what happens in 20 years? It won’t be her problem.
Of course, this also means that such projects won’t deliver growth for 20 years, either. In fact, some evidence suggests that airport expansion doesn’t deliver growth at all. But even if it did, and the growth were used to fund new hospitals (a big if), we’d have to wait 20 or more years for that dividend. Is this really the policy?
An alternative would be to build hospitals now. As they are huge employers and help people return to work, they would appear more likely than airports to generate growth, as well as meeting our urgent needs. But a full hospital building plan is now a less urgent priority for the government than airport expansion. This contributes to the impression that, like Truss, when Reeves and Starmer say “growth”, what they really mean is meeting the demands of predatory lobbyists.
But let’s for a moment take them at their word. Let’s imagine that economic growth should be treated as the overriding national purpose. Let’s ignore the economist who standardised GDP, Simon Kuznets, who advised that “the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income”. If this is the agenda, Starmer and Reeves should read a report published earlier this month, not by Extinction Rebellion, but by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries. It warns that without immediate and decisive action, climate breakdown could reduce the size of the global economy by 50% between 2070 and 2090.
In other words, if Heathrow’s third runway is built, by 2040 it might or might not contribute a tiny increment to GDP. But it would, if the warning is correct, contribute to a comprehensive economic collapse shortly afterwards. Starmer accuses objectors to such schemes of having “slowed down our progress as a nation”. But when that “progress” is a demented rush towards the precipice, perhaps a slowing down – and a change in priorities – would serve us well.
But no – everything must be sacrificed to the god of GDP. For example, though chicken factories (huge steel sheds containing tens of thousands of birds) are killing the Wye and many other rivers, Steve Reed, the environment secretary, insists that planning permission for them should become easier to obtain. Planning is the only effective point of intervention: once the factories are built, the nitrates and phosphates they produce inevitably wreck nearby rivers. They are also likely to kill far more economic value than they create, as they ravage local economies built on tourism and block more benign developments as a result of nutrient overload. In this and other respects, the government is pre-empting its own water commission, which some of us see as one of the few signs of environmental progress since the Conservatives.
Last week, in a spectacular act of despoilation, Starmer sank the climate and environment bill, whose purpose was to bring government policy into line with its international commitments. Labour ordered its MPs to talk the bill out of time, and threatened to withdraw the whip from those who supported it.
The government’s attack on regulators goes even further than Truss’s. As bodies such as the Environment Agency, Natural England, the Health and Safety Executive and the chemicals agency UK Reach crumple through a lethal combination of underbudgeting and political hostility, Reeves insists that the job of regulators is to “drive growth”. But that is not their role. They exist to protect us, regardless of the demands of capital. After 15 years of deregulation through budget cuts and ministerial nudges, the results include the death of our rivers, the degradation of our soil, a catastrophic loss of wildlife, air pollution and noise exceeding safe levels, and a toxic load whose impacts on human health we can only begin to guess at. How does any of this improve our lives?
But never mind, let’s melt human life and the natural world down into money. GDP, a number which incorporates great harms as well as benefits, must trump all else. Then the government will have some numbers to boast about, even if they represent a decline in our wellbeing – our genuine prosperity.
These people may be more competent than Truss, but after just six months in power they have become as terrifying in their cold fanaticism and intolerance of dissent. Did you vote for this?