There is an unusual buzz surrounding the Green Party as it gathers for its annual conference in Bournemouth. The tribe has a new leader, Zack Polanski, resoundingly elected on a radical platform which the media has dubbed “eco-populism”. It has gained thousands of new members, is polling a healthy 10%, and looks set to continue chipping away at the Left flank of the unpopular Labour government. But if you think that this bodes well for issues of climate and ecology in Britain, you would be mistaken. In truth, Polanski’s Green Party is a symptom of the failure of environmental politics, not its success.
Two decades of consensus on green policy, shared by Britain’s governing classes and to some extent its public, is currently unravelling. A recent YouGov survey found flagging support for Net Zero, the government’s commitment to decarbonise the British economy by 2050 or sooner, with a quarter of voters now saying that the dangers of climate change have been overstated. It may be, as Labour’s zealous energy secretary Ed Miliband argues, that Britain’s climate debate is being polarised along American lines; but it clearly matters that material sacrifices demanded by green measures, which were long a question of principle, are now starting to be felt in people’s lives. At any rate, the Reform Party, who will potentially form the next government, are determined to scrap what its deputy leader Richard Tice calls “net stupid zero”, and the Conservatives are now following suit, with Kemi Badenoch this week pledging to repeal the Climate Change Act.
Even Labour is wavering. Miliband’s green policies are beginning to look like a political liability. The party faces pressure from its trade union supporters over job losses at closed oil and gas facilities, while energy costs for both homes and businesses remain painfully high. All the while, anger continues to mount at the difficulty of building anything under exacting environmental regulations.
The rest of the world has shown scant regard for Britain’s delusional bid at “climate leadership”. America and China continue to burn fossil fuels on a scale that dwarfs anything in our own industrial past. Donald Trump is dismantling the Biden climate agenda and railing against Europe’s green policies. In August, a proposed treaty to limit global plastic production failed to materialise, and now a draft report by the International Energy Agency suggests that, far from reaching “peak oil” this decade as previously hoped, the current trajectory will see global oil and gas demand still rising in 2050. The apparent futility of Britain’s climate mission must also be sapping the public’s support.
These developments have barely registered in Polanski’s publicity drive since becoming leader. Instead, the former Lib Dem council candidate has established himself as a darling of the Corbynite Left. One of his first moves was to support the police for sending five armed officers to arrest Irish comedian Graham Linehan for his comments about “trans-identified males”. In interviews and on his own podcast, “climate emergency” is merely one ill-defined theme in a familiar repertoire of wealth taxes, colonialism, and the looming threat of fascism. Among the issues occupying the Greens in the lead up to their conference are legal action and protest by former members who say they were purged their gender-critical views.
The Green Party, in other words, has ceased to be an organisation dedicated to environmental campaigning and policy, at precisely the time when such an organisation is needed most. In fact, just 16% of those who would consider voting Green see the environment as the top issue facing the country.
How did we get here? The root of the problem is that, during this century, environmental politics has split into two parts: an establishment strand, and a protest strand. The establishment strand is comprised of the methods by which governments and large firms have tried to mitigate environmental damage. It is a bureaucratic affair, focusing on carbon budgets, regulations, and the allocation of capital to green technologies and energy sources. The protest strand, by contrast, is just what it sounds like: direct action demanding that governments go harder and faster to save the planet, whether in the form of climate marches or guerrilla campaigns by groups such as Just Stop Oil.
The result of this division is that, while environmentalism has maintained a high public profile, its political base has eroded. Neither strand has really bothered to involve a broader public in debating the goals and means of green policies. Nor have they properly considered the resentment those policies invite, whether through growing energy bills or the constant creep of restrictive rules. Environmental politics ought to help us keep sight of one of the most profound questions a modern society faces: how can we prevent our way of life from ruining the world we are handing on to future generations — its landscapes, waterways, and fast-diminishing wealth of natural life? Instead, it has become a byword for stifling bureaucracy on the one hand, and for a facile politics of gesture on the other.
“It has become a byword for stifling bureaucracy on the one hand, and for a facile politics of gesture on the other.”
Unmoored from the lives of its citizens, the environmentalism of Britain’s establishment has drifted into a realm of fantasy targets and unworkable edicts. Nothing shows this better than the adoption of Net Zero goals in 2019. As Professor Helen Thompson has noted, the legislation passed through parliament with “little contest in the dying days of Theresa May’s government, when the country was still politically consumed with the question of whether the UK would actually leave the EU”. Our political system was paralysed, our politicians unable to agree about anything, yet they still committed to “reinventing modern civilisation… within less than three decades”. There was neither the technology existent to realise these ambitions, nor a plausible route to the green industrial boom promised by May, by Boris Johnson, and now by Miliband.
Instead, Net Zero policy has contributed to the on-going deindustrialisation of the country through exceptionally high electricity prices. Moreover, a rush to install wind and solar before the grid has been updated means that we have problems not just with inconsistent supply, but with oversupply, so that we will pay an estimated £1 billion this year to prevent windfarms from generating too much electricity. This strategy, or lack thereof, risks discrediting the entire project of decarbonisation, as does the failure to explain why Britain must shoulder these costs when other countries do not. It is becoming apparent that an additive approach — building up renewable sources as well as some domestic oil and gas — will be more politically sustainable, and may be more effective as well. Energy is so important to a modern economy that, with more of it, we could develop our own cleaner industries, rather than relying on dirty ones overseas, and could ultimately invest more in green tech and infrastructure.
The unpalatable nature of such compromises has helped to push the environmental movement, and the Green Party specifically, onto the more comfortable terrain of protest. As one Green member recently tried to remind his leadership, the party has grown over the years through patient advocacy and attention to local issues. Yet the “hyperpolitics” of the past decade, with its online activism and public demonstrations, has taken its toll. Greta Thunberg’s graduation from climate heroine to Palestine campaigner is emblematic of how green politics has been submerged in a wider protest agenda. Now an exodus of progressives from the post-Corbyn Labour party, combined with the longing for a charismatic populism on the Left to match Nigel Farage, is creating a party that is green only as an afterthought. But if the cause is too diffuse, its appeal is too narrow. Research into the Green membership has found that it is concentrated in London and the southeast of England, that 88% are Remainers, and that almost all identify as Left-wing.
Obviously an environmental movement can be based in a critique of society, and even a spirit of revolt — love of the natural world usually involves some degree of disillusionment with modernity — but in the past, this has taken diverse and colourful forms. During the Twenties and Thirties, the so-called “muck and mystery” movement, led by reactionary and fascist-sympathising British landowners, combined organic agriculture with Morris dancing and festivals celebrating an imagined ancient English culture. In the Seventies and Eighties, meanwhile, New Age hippies dabbled in Tipi communes, Native American cultural practices, and pagan ceremonies at Stonehenge — culminating in a brutal clash with police at the 1985 “Battle of Beanfield”.
Such mysticism, while it inevitably veers into the ridiculous, represents something that would serve today’s green movement better than an emotive attachment to politics: a sense of wonder at, and direct connection with, the natural world. Focusing on nature not just in an abstract global sense, but in a concrete, local one, can paradoxically appeal to a much broader base of people, of different temperaments and outlooks.
This may sit uneasily with the practical purview of environmental politics, which demands a careful understanding of economic webs spanning the world, as well as the mundane technical systems which make our societies function. But that is precisely what makes this problem so difficult. An effective environmental movement must be at once romantic and rational, global and local, radical and conservative, and above all, capable of incorporating many types of people. With that in mind, and looking again at the Greens today, we might conclude that political parties are probably the wrong mechanism for this challenge altogether.
