Neither of the leading political parties in Britain has proper respect for the natural world, or anything like. Indeed, says Colin Tudge, both are a million miles from what’s needed
The first thing we should ask of any political party and would-be government is that it should state its Goal. What are they – or indeed we, people at large – trying to achieve and why? What is their — or our — vision? What kind of world are we trying to create? What do we really think matters? Or as the Cambridge literary critic F R Leavis put the matter in The Great Tradition in 1948:
“What for — what ultimately for? What, ultimately, do we live by?”
And I have suggested – no doubt pretentiously, but everyone in a democracy has a right to their opinion — that the task for all humanity should be to create:
“Convivial societies, with personal fulfilment, within a flourishing biosphere”.
All three are essential, and all are interdependent, like the legs of a tripod. If any one of the three desiderata is deficient, then the whole structure is compromised.
But no government or would-be government that I know of does spell out its Goal. Elections are won and lost on slogans: “Make America great again”; “Take back control”; etc. Manifestoes are wish-lists, statements of intent, with little or no discussion of the underlying ideals or principles or attitudes. And with the possible exception of the Greens, no party that will fight Britain’s pending general election apparently has any conception of the need to achieve a balance between the needs and demands of individuals, and of society as a whole, and of the natural world.
The Tories in particular have managed in their 14 years in office to achieve what the Canadian economist J K Galbraith called “private wealth and public squalor”. Labour can’t make up its mind where it stands. So it is that Mick Lynch, leader of The National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) has suggested that Labour leader Keir Starmer is really just “a Tory with a different coloured rosette”, while others within the party equate Corbyn with Stalin and live in mortal dread of any perceived drift to the Left. Both the main parties emphasise the need for economic “growth” or indeed as Liz Truss bawled at us as she flitted through Downing Street, for “Growth, growth, growth!”Both the main parties emphasise their big-business friendliness. Neither is suggesting that we should seek to create a more egalitarian economy, which must include taxing the rich.
What is clear, however — all too abundantly — is that (with the possible exception of the Greens) no political party in Britain has proper respect for the biosphere – the natural world. The attitude of the two leading parties is a million miles from what’s needed.
The modern Tories’ record is a disgrace. The degradation of Britain’s seas and lakes and rivers in the interest of shareholders’ profits is wicked. Tougher legislation more assiduously enforced would certainly help but the neglect and wanton spoliation of our green and pleasant land and its waterways is beyond mere crime. It is a sin: a crime against God, or the cosmos.
As for Labour: in 2021 Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves promised to be the UK’s “first green chancellor”. At least, she said, a Labour government would spend £28 billion a year on green technologies including the manufacture of batteries, hydrogen power, offshore wind, tree planting, flood defences and home insulation.
But would-be PM Keir Starmer then reduced that pledge to an “ambition”. Rachel Reeves now tells us that we must get the economy straight first, and reduce debt, before we go squandering good specie on projects to save the natural world. And on February 8 2024 Sir Keir withdrew his party’s pledge altogether – and so rescinded on what that supreme mangler of language and mixer of metaphors Rishi Sunak memorably called a “flagship plank” in Labour’s strategy. Ed Miliband, shadow Secretary of State for Energy Security, though known as a man of principle, supported his leader’s decision. “We’re going to invest in the green economy, and we’re going to do so in a way that is fiscally responsible”, he said. The laws of physics that tell us that the world is overheating, and why, and the galloping mass extinction that is all too obviously upon us, will be held in suspension while the future Labour government, if such there will be, gets its act together. Or so Sir Keir, and Rachel, and Ed, seem to imagine.
Thus for both the big parties, it seems, the natural world is just an add-on, a luxury to be attended to when we can afford luxuries, which will be some time in the future. Perhaps. Of course, the Green Party has a far more enlightened attitude towards the natural world but the Greens will count themselves lucky if they return one or two MPs, out of the 650 seats on offer. In short, the Greens do take the natural world seriously but have no real hope of power, while the two parties that are most likely to take the reins seem to have no deep interest in our fellow creatures and the fabric of the Earth or even in the long-term future of humankind. Instead, in accord with the neoliberal Zeitgeist, both are obsessed with the perceived need to maximize short-term wealth. This obsession, in turn, leads to the production of more and more stuff, generally in partnership with some transnational corporate, most of it designed not to enhance our lives and protect our fellow creatures but to make as much money as possible for whoever controls the means of production and the marketing. And despite the vogue for re-cycling and the commendable drive for green energy, all of it in the end is at the expense of the natural world. So we are invited to choose between vision without power (the Greens) or power without vision (the mainstream). Not exactly encouraging.
In truth, if we seriously care about the natural world then we need to cultivate a quite different attitude towards it; a shift not just in policy that can be reversed as convenient but in mindset. The western world, rooted even in these secular times in Christianity, seems to have taken its lead from Genesis 1:26 which in the King James translation tells us that God gave us:
“… dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth”.
This suggests that the natural world was made for our express benefit and that we therefore have a God-given right to treat the Earth and our fellow creatures as a “resource” which in the neoliberal world can and indeed should be given a cash value and assessed accordingly. To be sure, others have suggested that “dominion” really means “stewardship” – that we have a duty of care. But stewardship still implies “us” and “them”, and that we are superior beings, to whom the rest are beholden.
What we really need is the sense of oneness: the feeling that all living creatures including us are part of a whole – part of what James Lovelock (and the great Alexander von Humboldt in the early 19th century) called “Gaia”. The Eastern religions in general – Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, Shinto – all embrace this concept. So, too, does the African tradition of ubuntu. Christianity, on the whole, does not. Indeed in the eyes of some traditional Christians, to regard our fellow creatures as equals, and ourselves as part of a larger whole, smacks of paganism, which they see as blasphemy. Many a vicar has preached and some perhaps still do that God put us on this Earth to finish His work. Tidy up the loose ends. Turn His pristine Eden into a theme park. Many have suggested that at least one Christian saint, Francis of Assisi, did have a sense of oneness. But according at least to the British scholar Roger D Sorrell, in St Francis of Assisi and Nature (1988), Francis’s attitude to our fellow creatures was chivalric rather than Buddhist. He was of his time and social status and was steeped in the chivalric sense of noblesse oblige. He preached to the birds, but he saw them not as siblings but as wards and pupils. (He talked of “Brother Sun” and “Sister Moon” but I can find no trace of “Brother Horse” or “Sister Oak”. I would, however, be very happy to be corrected on this.)
Labour has abandoned its “flagship plank” because, as Sir Keir and his shadow Chancellor assure us, we just don’t have £28 billion to spare. In truth, though, there’s an easy way to raise it. Above all we must tap into the wealth of the super-rich. In many societies the natural world is sacred. But in modern, secular, neoliberal Britain, the only thing that’s sacrosanct is the incomes of the rich and in particular of the super-rich. More on this later.
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