Guest election blog – Labour by Guy Shrubsole

.

I’m an environmental campaigner and author of The Lost Rainforests of Britain and Who Owns England?, and the forthcoming book The Lie of the Land.

My politics are what the climate campaigner Leo Murray calls the ‘free-range left’: lefty, green, pluralist and free-roaming. I’ll be voting in the constituency of South Devon on 4 July.

This is my review of the environmental implications of the Labour Party’s election manifesto, plus the nature policies it trailed prior to publishing its manifesto.

Things I like:

• Labour’s manifesto refers repeatedly to the “nature emergency” and “nature crisis” – in addition to the climate crisis. Sure, it’s just words, but this is a welcome recognition by Labour – that ‘environmental issues’ aren’t confined to climate change, as desperately urgent as that is. The manifesto also states the fact that Britain is “one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world”.
• Labour has committed to meeting 30×30 – to protect 30% of England (and the UK) for nature by 2030. The Conservatives made a commitment to do this in 2021, as part of a UN-backed Leaders Pledge for Nature; I’m glad Labour still supports it. But 2030 is just six years away, and currently only 3% of England is protected and properly managed for nature – so if they take power, they’re going to have to introduce some bold new policies to meet the goal.
• So it’s really good to see the outlines of some bold policies on nature starting to take shape – starting with a Land Use Framework, something the current Tory government has utterly failed to publish, despite promising to do so. Labour says its Land Use Framework would balance “the need for long-term food security with the recovery of nature”. Explicitly prioritising nature here is important, as is the emphasis on long-term food security. One hopes Labour is starting to shape a more meaningful measure than simply pandering to the ‘productivism’ of the NFU – one that recognises the UK is over-abundant in sheep, yet produces only half the fresh veg we eat. The next government will also need to set up a Land Use Commission to ensure any Land Use Framework is an ongoing process, not just a lone report that gathers dust on a shelf.
• Labour’s nature policies also include creating wilder national parks: “We will help protected areas like national parks and national landscapes to become wilder and greener”. Code, I suspect, for finally implementing the recommendations of the Glover Review in full (neglected by the Tories) and giving National Park Authorities (NPAs) reformed statutory purposes for nature recovery. Of course, to make our national parks wilder will also need other changes: they are not, in fact, owned by the nation, but mostly by private landowners. Empowering NPAs to buy more land themselves is essential.
• Labour has promised to “empower communities to create new parks and green spaces by introducing a new Community Right to Buy to help them purchase and restore derelict land and green space of community value.” This is excellent, and applies what Angela Rayner and Keir Starmer have previously announced around community ownership of pubs and village halls, to land and nature more broadly. Labour appears committed to introducing Scottish-style Community Right to Buy laws in England, meaning communities can not only designate ‘assets of community value’ (as at present) but also get first right of refusal on buying them when they come up for sale. Imagine communities in England being able to do what the people of Langholm in Scotland have recently done – they’ve bought a 10,000-acre former grouse moor belonging to the Duke of Buccleuch, and turned it into a nature reserve.
• Labour’s manifesto pledges to “expand nature-rich habitats… including on public land.” Their pre-manifesto nature policies also state that “We will help coordinate nature’s recovery with bodies responsible for public land and major landowners‘. This may sound anodyne, but in fact could be one of the most significant policies – the first inklings of a Public Nature Estate: an idea that Wildlife & Countryside Link have been calling for, and which I’ve written about more here. As Wild Justice’s Mark Avery says in his book Reflections: “It is bizarre that government opts out of land ownership as a means of delivering wildlife recovery.”

Things I don’t like:

• Labour’s policies on access are disappointingly weak. Having previously hinted last year that they might introduce a Scottish-style right of responsible access, the party has seemingly u-turned, and the retail policies that have made it into the manifesto are small and piecemeal. Pledging three new national forests will do very little to address the fact that there’s no right to roam in 85% of England’s woods (many of them kept off-limits by large pheasant shoots). Promising a series of national river walks does nothing to address the fact that 97% of our rivers have no clear access rights for swimmers and paddlers – yet it’s been these ‘river guardians’ who’ve done so much to draw attention to pollution in our waterways. I take heart from Labour’s words “as part of our plans to improve responsible access” (my emphasis), and hope for a broader conversation about access rights and responsibilities after the election.
• Despite some encouraging policies, I’d have liked a lot more of them – and more detail. There is clearly much work that Labour will need to do to develop nature policies if they take office.

Things that appear to be missing:

• Whilst Labour talk about tackling the scandal of sewage in our rivers, there’s no mention of agricultural river pollution – the other half of the crisis besetting our waterways. Farming’s significant contribution to the state of our rivers seems to be a taboo subject for nearly all parties competing in this election – with the notable exception of the Green party, whose manifesto explicitly calls out “our food system” as “the greatest driver of nature loss and pollution in our rivers”. If Labour takes office it must be bolder in taking on the NFU and agribusiness interests in tackling agricultural river pollution.
• If the next government is to meet 30×30 in time, it will need to end the vicious political attacks on Natural England that has characterised this government’s relationship with environmental regulators generally. Our green watchdogs are far from perfect, but a lot of that is due to a decade and a half of austerity and the Tories’ ideological obsession with deregulation – and being in hock to landowning and shooting interests. I’d like to see Labour make a firm commitment to restoring Natural England’s budgets and independence.

Overall assessment:

Manifestos are often slim and vague documents, and Labour’s manifesto doesn’t say nearly enough on nature. Yet it does recognise the urgency of the nature crisis (and that it’s not the same thing as the climate crisis), and with the nature policies the party announced prior to the manifesto launch it’s started to put in place some solid building blocks. It’s early days, but if Labour is prepared to turn the page on the Tories’ deregulatory impulses and their bowing to landed interests, things could get interesting. In talking about nature on public land, communities taking a stake in caring for nature, and reinvigorating our national parks, there’s the stirrings here of a social democratic approach to nature conservation that’s not been seen for many years. But if they win the election, Labour will have just five short years in which to achieve 30×30, meet Environment Act targets and turn the corner on nature’s decline. They will also be under huge public pressure to clean up our rivers and give people the greater access to nature that they yearn for. Labour will need to be much bolder in office than they’ve so far dared to say in opposition.

Would I vote for these environmental policies? Yes – but I’d like there to be more of them!

This is one of a series of opinion pieces on the political parties’ 2024 general election manifestos. They were commissioned by Wild Justice several months ago by approaching a wide variety of conservationists and environmentalists long before the date of the general election was known. Some people who originally agreed to write pieces found the date and short timescale impossible and had to back out. We did not know what they would write and their only brief was to pick one or two political parties’ election manifestos and tell us what they liked and didn’t like about their environmental policies. We didn’t tell people what to write and we haven’t edited what they wrote (except to squeeze things into a common format, to correct minor grammatical and spelling errors and typos). The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Wild Justice.