Guest election blog – Conservatives by Henry Morris

The Conservative and Unionist Party Manifesto – by Henry Morris

I am an ultra-marathon runner and a comedy writer.

I first voted in 2011. That was in Harrogate, when my vote went to Phil Willis of the Liberal Democrats. Willis had unseated the Tories when they tried to parachute Norman Lamont into a presumed safe seat in 1997. Willis was likeable. Ex-Chancellor Lamont, on the other hand, incorrectly accused my sister of short-changing him for half a pint of lager when she was working behind the bar in The Knox Arms. I continued to vote Lib Dem until the coalition and have since voted Labour or Green.  Since I now live in Wales, I’m fortunate to have an alternative to Labour: this time I intend to vote for Plaid Cymru.

Here are my thoughts about the environmental implications of the Conservative’s election manifesto.

Things I like:

• Whoever wrote this has an excellent comic ear. A passage such as: “we will reform the ‘Price Review’ regulatory process for water companies. This will consider how we move to a more localised catchment-based and outcome-focussed approach, that better utilises nature-based solutions” sounds exactly like the kind of corporate drivel that middle-managers use in place of plain language.

Things I don’t like:

• Net Zero. A lot of bluster about ‘delivering net zero by 2050’, at odds with the subsequent three pages where they leverage all historic progress on it against doing as little as possible.
• Flooding. They’d like to spend a lot of money on flood mitigation. Not a bad idea, but with an odd ring when you consider they wish to continue licensing oil and gas production. The science – significantly more settled than modern weather patterns – tells us that persisting with fossil fuel extraction will exacerbate extreme flooding events. I’m worried lest people might mistake the Conservatives’ unfamiliarity with the laws of physics for unfamiliarity with the wellbeing of anything beyond corporate interests.
• Planning. Simplify it. Good news for donors, bad news for wildlife.
• Hunting. They will be making no changes to legislation that is being persistently flouted. Put another way, a party priding itself on its toughness on crime looks the other way if the crime involves wildlife.
• Immigration. A lot of nativist nonsense aimed at vilifying vulnerable people that completely ignores the potential for a billion climate refugees.
• Natural England and the Environment Agency. Having already cut these bodies they want to improve their ‘accountability and give them clearer objectives’. Demanding they do better with less sounds like gaslighting to me. What could it be about agencies designed to hold government to account that they dislike so much?
• Biodiversity. ‘We introduced our landmark Environment Act including ambitious targets to halt nature’s decline by 2030 and Biodiversity Net Gain.’ Eh? Why do they want to halt Biodiversity Net Gain? Is it because this disordered sentence needs a comma? (Not the butterfly, which ironically would fall victim to such a policy.)
• Reverse ULEZ. Why are Tories against clean air?
• Electric vehicles. Two pages of babble about ‘world-leading’ electric vehicle production, from a government that pushed back the ban on new petrol vehicles to 2035.
• Water. ‘Last year 90% of our designated bathing waters were classified as ‘good’ or ‘excellent’.’ OK, let’s see a picture of a Cabinet minister swimming downstream of an intensive poultry farm in the River Wye. NB: They want to ‘work with the regulator to further hold water companies to account’.That’ll be the regulator they’ve been systematically defunding.
• Designate our 11th National Park. It’s unclear whether National Park Eleven will permit the industrial killing of game birds and all competing wildlife, but if most of the other ten are anything to go by, you wouldn’t bet against it.

Overall assessment: Interesting. Headed for catastrophe, the Tories had the opportunity to save a few votes by promising the earth, safe in the knowledge they wouldn’t have to deliver. Instead, environmentally speaking at least, this manifesto is pitched squarely at ill-informed amnesiacs. It fails to engage in any telling way with climate breakdown or biodiversity collapse, and most of the problems it purports to address were either created or exacerbated by the politicians who wrote it. As such, it can’t really exist apart from the other four unfulfilled manifestos they’ve put out since 2010. On the plus side, if you can overlook the existential emergency in which we all find ourselves, it is quite funny.