Guest election blog – Labour by Indy Kiemel Greene

I am an 18 year old conservationist and naturalist. I studied countryside management at Nottingham Trent University.

This will be my first election where I am eligible to vote. Wildlife and the environment are high on my list of priorities. They will be a contributing factor when I place my vote in the Mansfield constituency. 

This is my review and thoughts about the environmental implications of the Labour party election manifesto.  

Things I like: 

• Green prosperity plan: Labour’s desire to invest in clean power is paramount in my view, as is investing in home insulation upgrades. A combined public and private sector collaboration, working to utilise the huge coastal benefits the UK has to offer in the way of producing green energy is a good outlook.

• A wish not to issue licences for new gas and oil fields. No new coal licences as well as fracking being banned for good. Loopholes being closed in the windfall tax on gas and oil companies. I believe these are all highly important symbolic moves. 

• Create nine new national river walks and establish three new national forests. Increase nature rich habitats including wetlands and peat bogs. Giving land back to wildlife and creating areas for families to explore. Any actions which can give back to nature have to be welcomed and applauded. 

• As regards our water companies, Labour will impose automatic fines of companies involved in wrongdoing. Independent monitoring of every water outlet. Stop bonuses to polluting executives. Not before time, the state of our rivers is an absolute travesty.

• Farming: introduce a land-use framework. Environment land management schemes to enhance the partnership between nature and farmers. End the ineffective badger cull by working with farmers and scientists on methods to eliminate bovine TB. The extensive and seemingly endless killing of badgers has been abhorrent in my view.

• Animal welfare: ban trail hunting and snare traps and the import of hunting trophies. Engage with scientists and industry and civil society with the intention to eradicate animal testing. All of the above should have been eradicated years ago or at least adapted to increase animal welfare. 

Things I don’t like:

• I still see an over reliance on oil and gas production in the North Sea. Working these fields for the entirety of their lifespan, which could equate to decades more damage. They also have a desire to focus on more expensive nuclear power stations. As with all parties, their thinking is not nearly bold enough. Wind and solar ultimately need to be the way forward. It’s cheaper to build and run wind and solar energy than it is gas.

• Animal welfare seems to be glossed over, although mentioned in some form. I feel there are processes within factory farming which have to be addressed. Too many bad practices are allowed to continue in many areas of farming. Animal welfare in some instances is not taken into consideration.

• The wish to continue to further carve up the countryside with development of new road systems. The party states a desire to do this but doesn’t exactly explain the reasoning behind this decision.

Things that appear to be missing: 

• There is no mention of protecting our waters from overfishing. Considering a quarter of UK fish populations have been reduced to a critically low population, action has to be taken.

• I would also have liked to see a mention of the banning of certain pesticides used in farming. Neonicotinoids, banned in 2018, were for the fourth year in a row given emergency authorisation to be used in sugar beet by the government. Neonicotinoids can have devastating effects on insect populations.

• I would have liked to have seen joined-up thinking when considering their climate policy. Scientific knowledge has to come first when it comes to devising a policy on climate. I read little to convince me of science being at the forefront.

Overall assessment:

I believe as regards to our natural world, this is the most important election in the UK’s history. Labour’s manifesto states “the climate and nature crisis is the greatest long-term global challenge that we face”. 

One of Labour’s missions is to make Britain “a clean energy superpower”, with an aim to produce “zero-carbon electricity by 2030”. Can they deliver? Some may say with brave forward-thinking their targets may be achievable, others will say it’s just not possible to achieve clean power by 2030.

In parts I find Labour’s climate policy to be ambitious – certainly more than the Conservative’s policies disclosed in their manifesto. Labour’s GB energy venture is certainly an interesting proposal.

I like their commitment not to issue new fossil fuel licences, but their desire to continue with existing and newly approved fields I find deeply disappointing. I also find alarming the parties’ wish to immediately embrace carbon capture and storage, with much uncertainty surrounding whether this method is effective or not.

I certainly feel Labour needed to spend time explaining what it would do regarding our failing public transport system, instead of suddenly building more roads. There is also no mention of a threat to our ocean’s plastic pollution crisis.

As with all manifestos, the devil is in the detail and there is certainly a significant amount of detail absent in many of the climate and environmental proposals outlined. 

Would I vote for these environmental policies?: In places bold, in other places blah blah blah. If climate and environment policies lifts you out of your armchair to vote, then go look at the Green party manifesto. 

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.

If you think you could produce a review of one of the 2024 general election manifestos then we would need to receive it as soon as possible, but in any case before 26 June, in a similar format to that above, as a word file and with a .jpg or .png image of yourself, the author. Send any potential texts to admin@wildjustice.org.uk and we will look at them. We’ll let you know if we want to publish your piece and we may be able to pay you a small amount for it.