"But Never Mind: Let's Melt Human Life & The Natural World Down Into Money" - Monbiot On UK Labor's Big Green Farce

I can scarcely believe I’m writing this, but it’s hard to dodge the conclusion. After 14 years of environmental vandalism, it might have seemed impossible for Labour to offer anything but improvement. But on green issues, this government is worse than the Tories. The last prime minister to insist that growth should override every other consideration, and to fling insults at anyone who disagreed, was Liz Truss. She called those of us seeking to defend the living world an “anti-growth coalition”, “voices of decline” and “enemies of enterprise” who “don’t understand aspiration”.

Now Keir Starmer has picked up her theme and run with it. Those who challenge government policies that might promote GDP growth, however destructive and irrational, such as the planned expansion of Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton and Doncaster Sheffield airports, are “time-wasting nimbys”, “zealots” and “blockers”, engaged in “self-righteous virtue-signalling”. After all, these are the kind of people who might send “congratulations to the climate campaigners” whose legal challenge stopped plans to build a third Heathrow runway at the court of appeal. Or who insist that Heathrow expansion should be blocked because “there is no more important challenge than the climate emergency”. Oh, hang on, that was Starmer, writing in 2020. You know, the one you voted for, not the new model, channelling the worst Tory prime minister of modern times.

EDIT

But no – everything must be sacrificed to the god of GDP. For example, though chicken factories (huge steel sheds containing tens of thousands of birds) are killing the Wye and many other rivers, Steve Reed, the environment secretary, insists that planning permission for them should become easier to obtain. Planning is the only effective point of intervention: once the factories are built, the nitrates and phosphates they produce inevitably wreck nearby rivers. They are also likely to kill far more economic value than they create, as they ravage local economies built on tourism and block more benign developments as a result of nutrient overload. In this and other respects, the government is pre-empting its own water commission, which some of us see as one of the few signs of environmental progress since the Conservatives.

EDIT

The government’s attack on regulators goes even further than Truss’s. As bodies such as the Environment Agency, Natural England, the Health and Safety Executive and the chemicals agency UK Reach crumple through a lethal combination of underbudgeting and political hostility, Reeves insists that the job of regulators is to “drive growth”. But that is not their role. They exist to protect us, regardless of the demands of capital. After 15 years of deregulation through budget cuts and ministerial nudges, the results include the death of our rivers, the degradation of our soil, a catastrophic loss of wildlife, air pollution and noise exceeding safe levels, and a toxic load whose impacts on human health we can only begin to guess at. How does any of this improve our lives? But never mind, let’s melt human life and the natural world down into money. GDP, a number which incorporates great harms as well as benefits, must trump all else. Then the government will have some numbers to boast about, even if they represent a decline in our wellbeing – our genuine prosperity.

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/30/labour-environmental-vandalism-rivers-wildlife-air-government-gdp