This dash for growth represents the death of green Toryism
The dash for growth by Kwasi Kwarteng means unshackling City bankers and property developers from the taxes and regulations that prevent them from paving over what’s left of Britain’s green and pleasant land.
The humble concrete mixer will be elevated to exalted status. There will be more executive homes built on greenfield sites. More distribution sheds dotted along busy A-roads. And more urban renewal of the kind that involves tearing down buildings in a plume of dust and carbon emissions to replace them with something not much better, at least not in environmental terms.
At no point in the chancellor’s speech on Friday did he mention the need to reach net zero, or how his plans would help our ailing planet while doling out billions of pounds in tax cuts to richer households and businesses.
Boris Johnson’s administration at least put in place plans for achieving net zero, and Michael Gove considered ways of reversing 70 or more years of severe biodiversity loss.
As Fiona Harvey has documented in the Guardian, Johnson’s premiership brought “more major environmental legislation and arguably greater progress on tackling the climate and nature crises than either of his Conservative predecessors in the past decade”. That’s a low bar when David Cameron and his chancellor George Osborne did their best to kick almost all green initiatives into the long grass, but Johnson did put in place the Agriculture Act, the Fisheries Act, and the Environment Act, coupled with plans to phase out petrol and diesel cars, create a boom in offshore wind, andprotect a third of the UK’s land and seas.
Johnson’s legacy, though, is largely rhetoric and very little action. That’s the message from those who attended committee meetings to put meat on the
Read more on theguardian.com
