We often say with pride that ours is a green and pleasant land, but is it really true anymore? Scratch beneath the bucolic image of rolling hills and coursing streams, you soon realise that we are slowly losing that which should forever be England.
Our globally rare temperate rainforests have all but disappeared; our peatlands have dried out; our wildflower meadows have been ploughed up. Our apex predators are gone; invasive species abound; and iconic animals like beavers and red squirrels cling on in isolated havens.
The true conservative should feel the pain of this loss in his very core. To us, protecting the environment is not a Trojan horse for upending capitalism or an excuse to stomp our feet and protest; it is about the preservation of our nation itself. Generations of conservatives, from Edmund Burke to Margaret Thatcher, have espoused the rich conservative tradition of stewarding our land, our country, and our planet to hand them on in a better state to those who will come after us.
As the Conservative Party seeks to rediscover its relevance, it must look to this tradition. And this week sees the launch of a call to arms for all conservatives who care about our natural world. Paradise Regained: The conservative case for restoring English nature by Kitty Thompson is the Conservative Environment Network’s blueprint for doing things differently.
Because our approach to protecting and restoring nature in recent decades has been anything but conservative. Our statute book is crammed with overlapping regulations and designations designed to protect nature from the evils of new development. We have created a feeding frenzy for planning lawyers and consultants, generating reams of environmental impact assessments, and seeking solace in a myriad of new processes but forgetting the outcomes they were supposed to produce.
And what do we have to show for it beyond this complex web of rules? The HS2 bat tunnel and the Hinkley Point fish disco are now as infamous for their absurdity as their cost. They are a grim reminder of our failure as a nation to build necessary infrastructure, but they should also not be seen as some great environmental success.
These white elephants are designed to satisfy the strictures of environmental regulations but will do next to nothing to protect the species they were supposed to safeguard. The culprit for this absurdity is the EU’s Habitats Regulations, which were transposed into UK law after Brexit and remain as yet untouched. The government’s Planning and Infrastructure Bill is a half-hearted attempt to do something about it, but risks failing both nature and development, having caved to the mindset that tinkering with the status quo is the best we can ever do.
Too many on the right now see environmentalism as an impediment to growth
Sadly, too much of the environmental movement is unwilling to countenance these rules being changed, instead viewing them as the last line of defence for nature. This is a woefully unambitious approach that ignores the absurdities that these rules have visited upon us and their failure to recover what we have lost. The Habitats Regulations have become a sort of Schroedinger’s cat for many environmentalists — simultaneously untouchable yet having manifestly failed in their stated aim.
For these understandable enough reasons, too many on the right now see environmentalism as an impediment to growth, more interested in harking back to the not so glory days of Brussels diktats than restoring what was so great about England’s landscapes. But it doesn’t have to be this way. The endeavour to repair our national fabric is in desperate need of a truly conservative mindset, one that enables both the environment and the economy to flourish together, rather than an additional set of rules and regulations.
Paradise Regained sees Brexit for what it always was — not simply a call to tweak our governance arrangements, but a howl of pain from a country that is losing its identity, of which nature is a cornerstone. That means ditching the EU’s Habitats Regulations, which have served both the environment and the economy so poorly, and putting in their place a system of protections for the natural world that is based around the needs of England’s habitats, landscapes, and people. It also means making sure that environmental protections are based on the outcomes we want to see, rather than a tick-box exercise that will only satisfy lawyers and bureaucrats.
Conservatism is ultimately about what we will bequeath to those who come after us. It is the most natural of all human instincts to want to hand on a better life to future generations, yet we risk failing that promise when it comes to the state of English nature. Politicians have a simple choice: they can continue to fiddle around the edges, watching as our nation’s essence continues to fade, or they can grasp the opportunity to do things differently. To restore England’s natural inheritance, it’s time for conservatives to get serious.
