The environment resuscitated

In the run up to the 2005 general election, the New Statesman led with “how the greens were choked to death” - “why the environment isn’t an election issue”. Lacking vision and leadership, green groups had been compromised and marginalised within Labour’s “big tent” after throwing their lot in with the government in 1997. By 2005, only the Liberal Democrat's had a manifesto presenting green issues as fundamental to their platform - Labour gave the environment only a few paragraphs at the end of its ‘International policy’ and ‘Quality of life’ sections, while for the Conservatives it was buried within ‘Accountability’. But, since then, we have had the Stern Review and a growing acknowledgement of the potential impact of climate change, while the Tories have reinvented themselves as the party of the scribbled tree.

Green issues have accordingly risen in prominence on the major parties’ respective websites. Labour now place ‘Climate change and energy’ fourth on their list of policy areas, while the Lib Dems place the ‘Environment’ fifth. The Tories’ ‘Quality of Life Challenge’, which unlike Labour’s 2005 manifesto namesake is more or less exclusively devoted to environmental concerns, is second in its set of six key policy ‘challenges'. But don’t bank on the environment as a decisive factor in any future general election. As the parties gear up for this years’ polls in Scotland and Wales, the Welsh Conservatives may hope that emphasising ‘Vote Blue, Go Green’ gets them greater representation in the Senedd, but by burying their own track record on the environment the Scottish Labour party clearly doesn’t consider it crucial in determining whether they retain control of Holyrood. All parties want to talk tough on the environment, but none are going to feel particularly inclined to ask too many sacrifices of the electorate. The Conservatives at least seem likely to follow the Lib Dems in sweetening the pill of eco-taxes with tax reductions elsewhere. Labour are currently saying the least about climate change, but, after commisioning the Stern Report, expect Gordon Brown to make important announcements once Tony Blair steps down. 2006 was a year of environmental awakening, and it is hard to imagine a repeat of 2005’s electoral indifference to climate change. The main parties have accepted the prospect of global environmental catastrophe. But none yet seem ready to stake out a daring position to lead the electorate where they don't neccesarily want to go.

Contesting the 'centre ground'

David Cameron celebrates the first anniversary of his election as Conservative leader today, having spent the past week warning of the 'huge mountain' the Tories still have to climb if they are to win back power, but promising 'real grit' to get them there. Yet there is something of a contradiction in his professed strategy of both seeking to appeal to an electorate "crying out for change" and trying to reclaim from Labour the 'centre ground' of British politics. From the perspectivce of traditional Tory voters, changing the Conservatives into Labour-lite offers no real choice of change at all, and Lord Saatchi last month implicitly criticised Cameron's first year in charge by warning of the electorate's potential alienation. "One direct result of this convergence on the centre ground is a super-cynical British electorate and low turnouts at election time", said he. "In Britain, the centre ground has ground the ideology out of politics", and "without ideology, political discourse is reduced to claim and counter claim about actual 'delivery'".

Unsuprisingly for a man of Saatchi's analytical intellect his diagnosis is acurate. Unlike him, however, I do not bemoan the passing of a calcific ideological divide in British politics; that all parties recognise the realities of relative poverty and climate change and are seeking proposals to tackle them is no bad thing. But I do worry that marginalising views beyond the centre is weakening British democracy. The Big Three British parties are obliged to contest the centre ground by a first-past-the-post electoral system which forces them to appeal only to the same 'swing-voters' in key marginal seats; according to the Electoral Reform Society 70% of cast ballots in the 2005 General Election were essentially irrelevant. Only with an element of proportionality in British elections will political parties gain from forging a distinctive position for themselves and giving a voice to voters whose sentiments lie outside the mainstream. Pursuing 'big-tent' politics will always be a sensible electoral strategy, and that the Big Three are fighting and debating over the same ground is not in itself a bad thing. What is lamentable is that it is not the electorate as a whole which gets to define where the political 'centre' truely lies.

Look What My Tory Did!

After recent moves to reposition themselves on the issue of poverty, it is hard to see what the latest Conservative online gimmick Sort-It, following on from the infamous WebCameron, is supposed to achieve. Describing the impulse to spend on credit as 'the tosser inside' manages to offend both traditional Conservative supporters who find the language repulsive, and younger voters to whom the message is supposed to appeal and persuade. They may have had considerable success in beginning to shake off the image of being the 'nasty' party, but they still have much further to go before their advice, which indeed addresses a very important issue in contemporary British society, looks anything other than opportunistic and patronising. Employing a Silvio Berlusconi look-alike to prance about in garish garb does not 'do something about' the problem of debt as Conservative Leader David Cameron claims - it is hard to see nearly enough young people first finding www.sort-it.co.uk and then being persuaded by it to make anything but the tiniest of dents in the short-term debt which holds them back - but rather succeeds in recasting the Tories in the image of paternalistic 19th Century politicians lecturing the working classes on the evils of drink.

The third postulate of special relativity

As expected, Conservative Leader David Cameron today highlighted the Tories' shifting attitude to poverty - now seen as relative rather than merely absolute - and even suggested some of the potential outlines for the relevant eventual Tory policies. Cameron argued that the Conservatives needed to 'stop treating poverty as an issue for government, and start treating it as an issue for society'. Borrowing the traditional language of Labour, he called for 'an element of redistribution' in economic policy, but his main emphasis was on tackling the issue at its supposed roots, such as mental health problems and drug addiction. This heralded the latest in a trend across the political spectrum to call on the 'Third Sector' - voluntary organisations and social enterprises which comprise that part of society which neither falls within the 'public' or 'private' sectors (and are supposedly better placed than either to meet some of society's needs) - to play a greater role in addressing these factors. But of course, the wait continues for what exactly such Tory policies will entail.

Compassionate conservatism's finest hour

Just read today's Guardian, which leads with Conservative MP Greg Clark's calls to modernise the Tories' 'Churchillian' approach to the Welfare state. In a policy paper set to be endorsed by Tory Leader David Cameron on Friday, Clark, a shadow minister focusing on poverty within the Conservatives' comprehensive policy review, labels increases in relative poverty in the 1980s a 'terrible mistake'. By the early 1990s Britain's Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality, stood at a record high of over 35%, having risen from under 28% in 1984. This mooted shift in Tory social policy is the latest attempt of the reinvigorated Conservative Party under Cameron to claim at least the language of the centre ground, following celebrated posturings as champions of the environment and the NHS.

Do such manoeuvrings merely signal the continued convergence of the main British political parties towards a supposed 'centre-ground'? If one looks at the purported goals of the parties, than perhaps the answer is yes - but that is no bad thing. For as Greg Clark himself said, 'poverty is too important an issue to leave to the Labour Party', and the same could be said of the environment or indeed the nation's health. That there is substantial agreement on what the goals of politics should be facilitates rather than hinders an active debate on how to achieve them. For now the Tories have woken up to the areas of social policy which left them looking an aloof elite, we can for the first time hear how an instictively small-government party would approach traditionally big-government topics. After all, the Gini coefficient rose during the present Labour government's first term in office before its recent fall. The appetite for concrete Conservative policy is whetted more than ever.

Consider the Lilley...

Went to a talk by the Rt Hon Peter Lilley MP (Hitchin & Harpenden; Con) last night in the Latimer Room, Clare College, entitled 'Why isn't poverty history (after $1 trillion of aid)?' As the recently appointed Chairman of the Conservative Party’s 'Globalisation and Global Poverty' policy group, Lilley delivered an informed and stimulating speach, if one which could have been delivered by any member of the Big Three British political parties. It got me thinking at any rate. If 'Making Poverty History' was the moral vogue of 2005, that of the moment, in the wake of the Stern report, seems to be 'Making Climate Change History'. Could these noble causes prove in conflict over the coming years?

The liberal chatterati should beware, because they could. Peter Lilley was keen to see commerce as the cornerstone of development, but I put it to him in subsequent discussion that efforts to increase the volume of trade and tourism between the developed and developing worlds would increasingly rub against a new emphasis on localism in production and a concern with 'food miles' and 'carbon footprints'. Save promising to defend the world's poor against the depradations of his counterpart John Gummer at the Tories' 'Quality of Life' policy group, and mouthing about the potentials of carbon trading, he had little response. Yet thus far, those preaching ecological catastrophe have seemed remarkably blinkered to the wider impact of winding down our imports from developing nations and cuting back our carbon-intensive flights. I am in no way doubting the vital threat of climate change: it is the single greatest challenge of the 21st century. But recognition of the potential conflict between development and environment is thus far an element largely missing from the debate.