What’s the dog that won’t bark, probably, in the forthcoming General Election campaign? Answer: the world we live in. In the welter of arguments and statistics pointing out the Government’s successes and its record on issues like schools, the NHS, pensions and tackling crime, the built environment and green issues are likely to stay in relatively non-partisan sidelines.
Yet environmental challenges are likely to be among the most serious and potentially intractable issues that a Labour Government would face in its second term. Take the arguments about climate change, sharply underlined by the recent flooding and erratic extreme weather in Britain. Or the concern about the potential for isolationist, do-nothing policies on environmental matters coming from the new Bush administration. Then there’s the objectives for integrated transport, rural preservation and urban regeneration. Have we yet got the political will, strategies and detailed policies to address them?
We are starting to get there in Treasury action – but too slowly. Measures in Gordon Brown’s last Budget and his Pre-Budget proposals showed some sense, at last, that the ambitious agenda in Richard Rogers’ plan for urban regeneration, based on renewal of the existing built environment, was being addressed.
But a second term Labour Government needs to wrest control from the pallid hands of the mandarins and vested corporate interests. Let’s fully implement VAT equalisation – it’s a nonsense that new build is zero-rated while repairs and renovation attract 17.5 percent – expand it to all brownfield and conservation sites, try zero business and residential rates in limited pilot renewal areas, and firmly regulate greenfield building.
How do we broaden the coalition of public support? Hypothecation is one way to reassure people, who think environmentally in one part of their brain and grumble about its cost in another, that green taxes really do get directed into green action. We must protect enterprise from over-leaden regulation, but ‘the polluter pays’ must be far more integrated into national – and international – policies on large corporations.
We must keep our nerve on privileging public transport, encouraging alternative energy sources with tax relief and giving seedcorn for local green and conservation initiatives – not least in vehicle design and usage. Only with this, can our love affair with the car be mellowed with the social constraints of an overcrowded and over-suburbanised island. Moreover, green demands – responded to by enterprising start-up companies – can generate employment (much of it flexible) to replace some of that inevitably displaced by the decline of Fordism and assembly-line work. Again, tax incentives would help kick-start them.
Structures do matter. Real power to new regional assemblies in England, building on Scottish and Welsh devolution, would allow sensible strategies to be decided on the ground for planning and the environment. And a new ministry for green issues – the DETR at present is too much a sprawling behemoth to focus on that aspect properly – backed up by a standard green audit on every single item of Government policy and initiative would underpin this.
We need to take as strong a lead on environmentalism internationally as we have over debt relief for the developing world. Ultimately, the global dimension is the crucial battleground – though we should never forget the old Quaker maxim: ‘He who would do good should begin in minute particulars.’ The great looming agenda for the 21st century will be a disenchantment with overly-materialistic consumerism and balancing the freedom to enjoy material things with the freedom to discern and choose meaningfully. As Edina wailed in Absolutely Fabulous: ‘I don’t want more choice, just better things.’
The time has come to revisit Ruskin, the green visionary who thundered against the excesses of Victorian industrialism with the maxim: ‘There is no wealth but life.’