Guest election blog – Plaid Cymru 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. I continued to vote Lib Dem until the coalition and have since voted Labour or Green.  I now live in the constituency of Caerfyrddin in West Wales where there’s a three-horse race between Plaid Cymru, Labour and the Conservatives.

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

Things I like:

• Reverse biodiversity decline by 2030 and reach net-zero targets by 2035: ambitious and easy to say in opposition. But they’re saying it, and I like it.
• No new oil and gas drilling: listening to scientists is the new taking money from corporate shills.
• Invest £4b in public transport: the HS2 white elephant is classed as an England and Wales project even though not one metre of its track visits Wales. Plaid have calculated £4b as the Welsh share of the project. Which really makes you wonder what sort of transformative good that £50b could have been put to had it been invested around the UK, rather than on saving commuters between London and Birmingham thirty minutes of eating Pret sandwiches on a platform.
• Undergrounding of cables instead of pylons: Mary had a little lamb, It ran into a pylon. 10,000 volts went up its arse, And turned its wool to nylon. Also: good idea.
• Introduce an environment bill to mandate private companies to conduct due diligence to avoid environmental harms in their supply chains: I don’t know who Environment Bill is, but he sounds great.
• Take control of the Crown Estate and invest profits into green jobs and climate change research: the Crown Estate owns £600m of Welsh assets, including the seabed. Profits from these go directly to the Treasury and 25% ends up in the King’s building society account to ‘cover his living costs.’ £110m last year.  Plaid thinks this money would be better invested in Wales, rather than on toothbrush valets. I agree.
• Welsh Green New Deal: reskilling employees and apprentices into the green and net-zero sector. Intelligent, sensible policy. No wonder the Tories hate this stuff.
• Stronger enforcement in SSSIs: if they can invest enough to find out who keeps dumping tyres on our SSSI riverbank I’ll be very happy.
• The measurement of growth to factor in the nature emergency and climate change: they’ll be trying to find out if we’re happy next.  
• Increase Air Passenger duty and kerosene tax for private jets: I was initially wary of this policy as I thought it was going to hit the King hard when he next takes his Airbus Voyager to COP29, but then I remembered that on top of his Crown Estate cash he also gets a Royal travel grant and I was on board again.
• Ynni Cymru: nationalise energy and expand community-owned renewables. Wales is a net-exporter of energy. This energy is then sold back to Welsh consumers who have the highest bills in the UK. If I lived in Wales, which I do, I’d be annoyed about this. Which I am.
• Energy company windfall tax: tax the energy companies who have been raking in £1b a week since the energy crisis started? Those guys? Oh fine, if we must.

Things I don’t like:

• Opposition to the Sustainable Farming Scheme 10% tree cover target: there was a huge backlash from farmers – the backbone of rural Welsh identity and I suspect Plaid support – over this, and Plaid’s sashay into delaying the plan for a year was indicative of what happens when realpolitik gets in the way of promising what you like when you’re in opposition.
• Scrap NVZ regulations (nitrate vulnerable zones): another farming backlash, another policy at odds with their words about biodiversity.
• Controlling TB in wildlife: I guess this means badgers. I’m friends with lots of farmers, who are all great, who are adamant this is essential. And I’m friends with lots of conservationists, who are all great, who say it isn’t. So I’ve taken a comprehensively cowardly approach to the issue so far, of not learning enough about it so that I don’t have to take sides. But all things considered, badgers are brilliant, and I prefer them alive.

Overall assessment: I admire much of this manifesto and having already written about the policies of the Tories and Reform, it was nice to read something not written by short-term opportunists or the unhinged. Whoever wrote it is engaged with the issues we all face and a lot is said about biodiversity and the climate crisis. There is, however, a significant tension between Plaid’s ambitious sentiments, and its unwillingness to upset farmers. Living in a farming community I hear about the pressures they’re facing every day. I have much sympathy. But Wales is 95% agricultural land, and habitat loss has been a huge driver for the collapse of biodiversity. Plaid’s fear of upsetting their core support is understandable, but Earth is also the only assemblage of life in the known universe, and it might be a good idea to keep it that way.

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.