Recent council elections threw up a change that might indicate a new direction for the prevailing wind in British politics.
Since founding member of the Royal Society and avid gardener John Evelyn in the 17th century, sustainability has had an unusual history in Britain. On one side of environmental advocacy we have had aristocrats and upper middle classes working hard to preserve their agrarian assets, obsessed with preserving the beauty of the “natural landscape”, and working with gardeners like Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown to enact terraforming on a massive scale.
“Natural landscape” is a rather elastic term in Britain due to its dense population and intensive farming over the last two thousand years. Massive tracts of forest were felled to build Britain’s world-conquering navy, or blighted into extinction over the centuries, creating undulating hills of heath and grassland where once were trees. It is a verdant landscape, but not a wild one, and much talk of “rewilding” is less about wild forests and grasslands and more about putting heritage cattle breeds in smaller paddocks with bigger hedgerows.
At the other end of the spectrum we have the quietly Marxist environmental arguments of a working class routinely exploited, subject to inhuman working conditions and slowly killed off by pollution-related illnesses. This environmentalism aims to clean the world of toxins and counter the excesses of waste and exploitation to make the world better for all creatures, including humans: consume less to emit less.
Here, carbon emissions fit the latter view of environmentalism – it’s about pollution reduction. Even the modern whizbangery of sustainability technology to reduce emissions smells more of trade than titles, despite budgets that more aristocratic than abstemious.
What is missing is a pragmatic, evidence-based drive from the middle ground of politics. What we have is a regulatory landscape constructed from the ideological initiatives of both sides of politics. A legislative landscape that is confusing, contradictory, difficult to navigate and often a barrier to progress.
Take Britain’s housing crisis. There is a shortage of houses at all price points, especially affordable housing. Housing charity Shelter says there are as many as one million households waiting for social housing and prices are increasing for all owners and renters.
This is why outrage has been brewing about a report in March that Natural England has stopped housing developments in 74 council areas lest they lead to increased emissions of nitrates and phosphates into waterways ahead of the 2030 deadline to reduce them. It would be a reasonable measure to protect fish and birds, except that farmers – our biggest nitrate and phosphate emitters – are exempt. Farmers one: households nil.
The Home Builders Federation says around 120,000 houses are on hold due to this issue. It has asked Natural England to switch from using gross to net population in its nitrates calculator, and to only the stages of a development that will be completed prior to the 2030 deadline. Developers also say The Government’s directive to water companies to upgrade their infrastructure by 2030 is too little and too slow.
Enter the Greens
Amid this mess, two weeks ago in the southeastern county of Mid Suffolk, Britain elected its – and Europe’s – fist majority Green Party local council. The new green seats on the council were all won from conservatives who went from 34 seats to six. Overall, Green local councillors have grown in Britain from 162 in 2014 to 738 today.
There was another green council – an ideology-driven minority administration in Brighton & Hove that was not a success. It focussed on hot-button issues like gender ideology as recycling rates plummeted, garbage strikes increased and outlying housing estates were neglected – a watermelon council, according to Janice Turner in The Times – green on the outside and red in the middle.
Mid Suffolk’s greens seem more pragmatic. Andy Mellen, the leader, is a smallholder growing apples and raising sheep, who supports agriculture but believes in rewilding less productive land. His fellow councillors have backgrounds in entymology and coastal ecology, are discussing funding insulation of thousands of homes, piloting electric busses and starting new farmers markets.
During the election, voters associated private companies dumping sewage into Suffolk’s waterways and sea, with what they saw as the conservative government’s deregulation, corporate greed, short-termism and disregard for local concerns. In contrast, the Green Party tested local waterways for E.coli and warned that they were unsafe for swimming.
Turner reports a sense that the “Conservatives are no longer trustworthy custodians of the countryside”. That they were failing to deal with the problem of planning laws that seem to favour executive homes on greenfield sites and disruptive developments in scenic villages that attract outsiders and do nothing to make housing more accessible to young people in the area.
Will the green shoot of Mid Suffolk flourish into a movement? Time – and the Greens’ performance in the semi-rural county – will tell.