THere’s a trivia question I often ask British people interested in the living world: Can you name the Environment Secretary? I don’t intend to show them: they’re not what I’m testing. I see an eyebrow knit, a finger go up, a mouth open and close. “It’s, you know, the one that … no, they went, didn’t they? That other …” It’s been like that for seven years.
Why? Because throughout this period, we did not have an environment secretary. We have portals through which corporate lobbies can pass. The last person to represent the wider public interest (and I can hardly bring myself to type those words) was Michael Gove. In his other roles, he is widely remembered with disdain and disdain. Outside the office, he continues to poison public life, as editor of the Spectator. But in this role, to general surprise, he placed the public good above special interests.
In contrast, standard operating procedure is exemplified by the final actions of the outgoing secretary, whose name, to put you out of your misery, is Emma Reynolds. To give just one example – which can be seen as the embodiment of everything that goes wrong here – he spent his last weeks in the post trying to remove the brakes on industrial chicken farming.
Before a parliamentary committee this month, he railed against planning restrictions to stop more large chicken factories (let’s call them farms). If only those barriers were removed, she thought, “there’s a huge investment waiting to happen … I want to lower those barriers as much as you do”. He said he has spoken to other departments to ensure that it is easier to get permission for new chicken factories.
Neither he nor the MPs who questioned him gave any indication as to why these buildings were in difficulty in the planning system. In fact, none of the problems caused by the factories were mentioned at all: the MPs’ only apparent interest was in what industry wanted. What is the use of MPs if they only give in to corporate demands? But these factories are killing some of our most beautiful rivers. They produce more dung than the surrounding fields can absorb. The surplus flows downstream to the nearest stream.
The only decision that counts is the planning decision. As soon as the chicken unit is allowed for, the local tributary, and possibly the main stem of the river into which it flows, is as good as dead. It’s not even that these factories support jobs and growth: by killing rivers, they help destroy local economies.
I thought we were going to win this argument. But the argument, it seems, is no match for economic power. Reynolds’ loyalties were not to the ecosystems he was supposed to protect, but to the lobbyists threatening him. Perhaps this should come as no surprise: before joining Keir Starmer’s government, she worked as a lobbyist representing the financial sector.
Worryingly, acting as Reynolds’ deputy was the new environment secretary, Angela Eagle, who called for “planning reform” on behalf of the poultry industry, telling chicken lobbyists that “planning should enable ambition, not stifle it”. Will she now take Burnham’s “circuit breaker” promise seriously, and reject this euphemism for one of our most destructive industries?
At a recent farming festival, Reynolds claimed that boosting the poultry sector would increase our food security. I don’t know how many times we need to point this out, but isn’t it obvious that it backfires? Poultry maintained in these factories must either be imported or raised on land that would otherwise directly provide food to people. Chicken may contain more soy than tofu: According to one report, 109 grams of soy are needed to make 100 grams of chicken breast. Yet it is one of the many components of their diet.
The chicken business in Britain is also controlled by a handful of large companies: another security red light. If food security were the goal, the government would encourage us to eat less chicken and other animals and more plants. But in Parliament, Reynolds also proudly announced that she was ignoring targets set by the government’s Climate Change Committee to reduce livestock numbers. I keep asking myself: “Are they? is trying To harm this country?
To advance their pessimistic agenda, Reynolds and Eagle set up something called the Farming and Food Partnership Board. It aims to encourage “closer cooperation between agriculture, industry and government”. How close can it be? The Department for the Environment, Defra, is a wholly owned subsidiary of the farming industry. The only members of this new board are government ministers and corporate representatives and lobbyists. One of its objectives is the “Poultry Sector Development Plan”, which aims to address the problem of “planning constraints”.
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This chickening out is one of many examples of how, by working for special interests, the Department of the Environment has harmed the ecosystems and people it is supposed to protect. Another is the government’s “delivery plan” for nature restoration, released just before Reynolds left office. It’s not a plan, and it won’t deliver: just a catalog of vague hopes and quibbles. This can be summed up as “Do nothing for fear of upsetting the landlords”. Far from meeting its pledge to protect and restore 30% of land in England by 2030, Reynolds’ department has presided over continued cuts. This is his legacy: less nature, less resilience, less protection.
Worse is planned: the Starmer government proposed a “Regulation for Development Bill”, the text of which we have yet to see, but which looks set to threaten even greater attacks on nature conservation. That could include one of his government’s most dangerous proposals: creating a system that could be described as a pop-up freeport, in which companies across the country would be able to operate in a temporary “sandbox” where normal rules don’t apply. We should see this as the key test of Burnham’s promise to end neoliberalism: Will he abandon the nonsense?
I will keep asking the question, regardless of who is in that office: Do you know the name of the Secretary of the Environment? The answer likely depends on one factor: whether they are willing to break the grip of corporate power, and defend us and the rest of the living world. Whether, in other words, they want to do their job.
