Guest election blog – Recent past and impending future by Ben Goldsmith

Ben Goldsmith is an environmentalist and financier who manages the investment firm Menhaden which focuses on energy and resource efficiency as well as Nattergal Ltd, a new venture focused on large-scale ecosystem restoration. The Goldsmith family has been active in environmental causes with his late father, James, campaigning against genetically modified crops and globalised free trade; his uncle Teddy, co-founder of the Green Party and The Ecologist magazine; and his elder brother Zac being a government minister, including in Defra. Ben was a non-executive member of Defra’s Board for several years. He is a strong advocate for rewilding and changes to agriculture.  

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.” Aldo Leopold

Our rivers are choked with human sewage and livestock slurry. Our seas, once among the richest found anywhere, no longer teem with fish. On land, formerly common wildlife species are now far from common; others are in freefall. Birdsong, colour, vibrancy have been all but drained from our landscapes. The UK consistently ranks among the most nature-depleted countries in the world.

And yet, all is not as it seems. During the last decade something has shifted. Anyone who has spent a lifetime caring about the natural world can’t fail to have noticed it. First quietly, then in a stampede, people have tuned into the vital importance of nature, not just as the source of everything that we have and everything that we love, but viscerally. We are nature. Nature is us.  Our physical health and our inner sense of wellbeing are essentially nourished by spending time in nature. Increasingly people know it, and are seeking out wild places, learning about the importance of keystone species such as beavers, marvelling at the reintroduction of white storks and white-tailed eagles and complaining furiously at the state of our rivers. Poll after poll shows that the clamour for more and better nature is coming from all corners of society, rural and urban, young and old, political left and right. And it has been working, more than perhaps we’ve really noticed.

Imagine if you’d been told a decade ago that the entire farm subsidy budget would be underpinned by the principle of ‘public money for public good’, with all payments conditional entirely upon the restoration of nature; that further payments would be available for the good things restored nature does for us, such as protecting us from flooding and drought, cleaning our air and water and storing carbon; that a 25-year Environment Plan replete with ambitious, ratcheting targets would be given legal underpinning by a comprehensive Environment Act, policed by a new Office for Environmental Protection; that the UK would have created in a decade no-take marine reserves in its near-pristine overseas territories amounting to an area the size of the Indian sub-continent, as well as a suite of new marine protected areas in British waters with bans on trawling in a growing number of these; that the amount of British aid spending allocated to nature overseas would have risen from a few tens of million a year to more than a billion; that fishing for sand eels, the base of the whole marine food web in British waters, would be banned; that pine martens, wildcats, beavers (beavers!), wild boar, white storks, white-tailed eagles, golden eagles, ospreys, cranes and perhaps soon lynx would all be back and thriving in Britain.

There is so much more to do and much of this is far from perfect; but we ought still to allow ourselves a moment of satisfaction at quite how much has been gained in recent years. This has all been because of growing demands from the public for nature recovery. Which is why it is incomprehensible that Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives have been ‘green hushing’ the one pillar of their record in government that would delight nearly everyone if only they knew about it. Tory rhetoric on the environment during the last two years has been woeful, with some Tories seemingly undermining accepted science on nature recovery, pandering to conventional vested interests, launching attacks on the environmental arm’s length bodies and generally playing to an audience that polls reveal to be inconsequential. A large proportion even of Tory voters switching to Reform, a party with nothing good to say on the biggest set of issues of our time, say they do so in spite of their own personal concern for environmental issues. Conservative commentator Peter Franklin wrote just now that “Sunak’s decision to diminish the green Conservative legacy… was not only morally questionable, it was politically useless to boot.” Thankfully there have been few actual reversals or dilutions of policy, and all the best stuff simply rolls on.

Labour has never really considered itself the party of nature and Labour politicians, with the possible exceptions of Michael Meacher and Hilary Benn have never convinced voters that the party is interested in these issues. Tory DEFRA Secretary of State Michael Gove demonstrated more understanding and enthusiasm for nature than a string of earlier Labour ministers. That may now be changing. It is not lost on the Labour leadership that investing in nature is a genuine vote winner, especially among floating voters. Alongside the Liberal Democrats, Labour has wasted no time in pressing home the fact that the Conservative government has been slow to act on the universal despoiling of our rivers, although its own rivers policy says nothing more than the current government policy (Ofwat has recently been given powers to strip bonuses from water company bosses who break the law). It is excellent that Labour has promised to implement fully the new environmental frameworks put in place by the previous government, but the party has yet to guarantee the Environmental Land Management budget even in cash terms (which in itself is already woefully inadequate to the scale of the challenge); and Labour pledges to plant millions of trees and three new forests are meaningless without some kind of funding replacement for the Nature for Climate Fund, on which we’ve heard nothing yet.

While the detail from Labour remains short, as undoubtedly will be the money, sincere promises have been made. Meanwhile the Greens, usually the best bet for voters who place environmental concerns above all else, have spent what should have been their opportunity years fighting among themselves over gender and other social issues which seem remote to most voters, as well as trumpeting hardline positions on important but certainly not green matters such as Covid and Gaza, while calling for the kind of uncontrolled mass migration that frightens voters of both left and right. The Greens are distracted exactly when we need them.

Whatever happens in this election, the time is long gone when nature ranked in the psyche of politicians alongside stamp-collecting and Morris dancing as a niche interest. There is no going back. The public is finally awake; and we can see, hear, smell and feel the change that is already coming to our country.

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.