Green Brexit
my talk today is going to be on green
brexit or on
green politics after brexit but what i
want to do today is
offer you three perspectives which
hopefully will
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help us to concentrate our activism on
this issue so i think my
talk it really is going to be less about
the concrete practicalities of how we
can campaign on this there are people
who are better placed to speak about
that
and more to sort of offer these
perspectives from which we can get a
better sense of what needs to be done
what things
need to be monitored where in other
words we need to pay attention
so these three perspectives are as
follows the first
sees brexit as a problem of political
attention
the second sees brexit as a problem of
international cooperation
and the third um goes a bit more into
the nitty-gritty of the uk’s current
policy landscape which again
has been made even more uncertain uh by
covid
and we’ll have time in the q a to
discuss um the talk and
any any other things you want to raise
so i suppose it might be good to think
about when we sort of just
step back a bit and think about december
2019 the um
general election uh i spent a lot of
time going to door to door
in my borough of tower hamlets in london
and
i personally found it very difficult to
persuade voters of the environment’s
relative importance of its importance
most people
you know agreed many agreed that we need
to take urgent
political action to address the climate
crisis
but leave voters especially were given
very few options at the ballot box
labor’s then uh notoriously unclear
brexit stance
was nevertheless softer than the
conservatives
whose manifesto paid comparatively less
attention to the environment as a
strategic priority despite
these kind of ad hoc pledges on plastics
farming subsidies
offshore wind power but the greens and
the lib dems of course were
unequivocally remain parties
and this created a huge problem how are
you supposed to vote if you wanted to
leave the eu but without
potentially compromising environmental
standards
in other words the election produced a
cleavage that didn’t need to be there
and which failed to accurately reflect
public opinion
the campaign group friends of the earth
whose website is worth checking out
if you’re interested in this issue
reported on opinion polls
at the time which showed that whether
you were leave or remain over 80 percent
of the
uk electorate wanted quote the same or
stronger protections for our wildlife
and environment
in a post-brexit britain those findings
were corroborated by
andy jordan professor of environmental
sciences at the university of east
anglia by the wildlife trust
and by the institute for public policy
research
all of these uh separate studies showed
that there is simply no political
appetite
with your leave or remain for lowering
environmental standards after brexit
cast your minds back to january or
february so again before kovid
complicated things still further there
were widespread reports
in the media of brexit fatigue
and i think this is an important issue
brexit’s sort of deep troubled choppy
waters
effectively drowned out other political
issues not just
within westminster in the media but
beyond that in in the eu
as well uh theresa may’s parliament was
among the most
legislatively uh inert in recent british
history
passed very few bills a mainstream news
outlets only
sporadically addressed brexit’s possible
impact on the environment
its effects however are not going to be
confined to these shores
they’re going to cascade outwards to the
eu
as a region and also potentially to the
world beyond
eu leaders hold major summits only four
times a year
and officials and diplomats have
privately complained of brexit’s
disruptiveness
and of the gridlock in which other
priorities are currently stuck
discussions of the eu’s long-term
environmental strategy
which aims to make its member states
carbon neutral by
2050 were repeatedly
marginalized with one diplomat
complaining uh quote
that we can’t make any progress on
climate change until brexit is resolved
one way or another
alexandra maria boxer from the lsc i
hope i’m pronouncing her name right
um wrote an excellent paper on this in
which she argued that brexit
has hijacked the eu agenda and as i said
i want to be really clear about this the
relationship between brexit and green
politics
um is an important one and its effects
will cascade outwards to the region
and will even have um potentially a
global impact
emmanuel macron for example has
repeatedly criticized brexit’s role in
slowing uh the eu’s response to the
paris agreement of 2016 uh whose mission
is to limit global warming uh to two
degrees celsius above
pre-industrial levels so this is my
first point
and this isn’t going to be an important
point for us as ordinary activists and
his citizens
brexit has dominated so much of our
political attention uh since the 2016
referendum
um and we need to sort of really try
hard to uh
keep track of what’s going on despite
all of these sort of complicated
narratives contradictions
uh and the sheer scale of news that’s
being presented um
to us my second perspective and a way of
framing um activism on this issue
um is to think a little bit i don’t want
to spend too much time on this thinking
about the dynamics of international um
cooperation there’s a really really good
book
let me forget its name now uh it’s
called global green politics by
peter newell it’s a relatively recent
book and he talks a little bit about
brexit and green politics
and he makes this really really good
point that because the climate crisis
is global uh green party or green
political manifestos around the world
are often and must be often strongly
internationalist
he also says that one of the
predicaments of contemporary green
politics
is how to deal with the international
system
with the westphalian logic of nation
states
given the unprecedented challenges
global challenges
with which we’re confronted it does seem
reasonable i think to ask whether new
bodies and international structures
are required to produce effective
consistent
long-term multilateral responses to this
global crisis
brexit theoretically at least as a
regional and domestic problem
flies in the face of these requirements
it’s also worth
pointing out that the uk historically
has been a key player in the
eu’s climate policy uh landscape
the passing of the climate change act in
2008 for example
um had a knock-on effect and it spurred
other eu members uh to act
so questions are naturally going to
arise about the balance of power
within the eu after brexit we’ve already
seen some
indications of how this might go but
again i don’t want to try and
sort of say anything too concrete here
and naturally this sort of change in the
balance of power will affect the block’s
environmental policies
um and attitudes a group of researchers
from
the university of sheffield pointed out
that climate change denying governments
in central and eastern europe poland
hungary for example
may become emboldened um by the uk’s uh
withdrawal
again these dynamics are hard to assess
and predict but it’s reasonable i think
to
anticipate some negative blowback
brexit then naturally raises questions
about the importance of multilateral
mechanisms and international cooperation
as neil puts it very succinctly the
debate
about europe and brexit in the united
kingdom is revealing of the dilemmas
greens face
in navigating this difficult space
between internationalism on the one hand
the need for a coordinated international
response
and localism on the other as i said my
campaigning on this very much falls
within the latter um
focusing on green issues within my
borough
wild brexit doesn’t necessarily signal
uh the uk’s retreat into itself
uh the concert and if you remember the
conservatives uh
had this disingenuous and not to mention
ambiguous
slogan of global britain with which they
tried to counteract this fear
but brexit certainly does make stat sort
of divergence
possible with a clear knock-on effect
for regional politics
it is really conceivable that those
divergences
um will negatively affect the uk’s
environmental policies but it might also
give us room to improve them
you know and it’s worth thinking about
that it’s worth pointing out that greens
and green activists have repeatedly
criticized what they see is the eu’s
environmentally costly and negligent
neo-liberalism
and there is a long history of green
descent within europe uh
sweden in the early to mid 1990s
is a good example of this
this brings me to my sort of third um
and final perspective um with which to
frame
uh green activism after brexit and
that’s the nitty-gritty of uk policy
brexit must be seen in a regional
european context in a global context but
it is
also perhaps even fundamentally a
domestic phenomenon
its environmental impact will be
determined almost exclusively i think
by our political leaders and their
appetites whose equivocations
make it difficult to know where to
concentrate our activism
uh house of laws committee concluded i
think this is from 2017
quite definitively that the eu is the
source of and a vehicle for
most of our environmental legislation
and protection
that goes from things like regulatory
standards to governance structures
to enforcement while alyssa gilbert and
maria carvalho from
the grantham foundation at lse have
anticipated what they say is
going to be a lack of sanctions and
enforcement of environmental regulation
once the uk leaves the eu the current
government of course
insists otherwise its latest update from
january 2020
again covert has sort of slowed the rate
of response on this
uh claims that the uk government and the
devolved administrations
are firmly committed to carbon pricing
as an effective tool
for achieving our carbon emissions
reductions targets for net zero
any future system they say will be at
least as ambitious
as the european union emissions trading
system
and that leaving the eu will not affect
our statutory commitments under the uk’s
climate change act which is after all
domestic
legislation the government also insists
that
the uk will remain a party to
international climate change agreements
including the paris agreement and that
its commitment to those agreements will
remain as strong as ever and will be
unaffected by leaving
the eu but observe as much
uh sort of more sharply uh much sharper
and more experienced than i have pointed
out that there are some
conspicuous silences in the government’s
um statements
the climate change act aside there are
currently no safeguards legal or
political for over 150 eu directives and
1
100 pieces of legislation which address
amongst other things things like water
quality
animal welfare emissions trading waste
disposal
many eu rules have not been translated
yet into british law and this
as we’re beginning to realize is a vast
and complex undertaking and it’s going
to happen at such speed
that it’s going to be very difficult for
us to effectively scrutinize them
the government really promises and
promises there are no guarantees that
the uk will maintain its environmental
standards let alone increase them
precisely because we’ll soon be outside
the eu emissions trading system
the fuel quality directive the renewable
energy directive to name just a few it
also remains to be seen how the fierce
competition for trade deals
uh not to mention the final form of
brexit uh perhaps the greatest variables
of all
it remains to be seen how these would
affect standards over time
michael gove who is a useful person to
talk about here because he’s an
ex-environment minister
and minister ex-minister for no deal
preparation
gov wants us to believe that our
standards will increase under this
proposed office
for environmental protection which at
any rate won’t open for a significant
while and covid again has delayed that
but it is sort of difficult to seriously
believe him
uh he’s been a long-standing critic of
the eu’s environmental standards
and the current environment uh secretary
george eustis
has shown in the way he’s voted that
it’s not easy to pursue a free trade
deal with trump’s america
whilst protecting food standards the
political appetite
for protecting standards i just don’t
think it’s there at the moment
one last thing then i’m done before we
can move on to the q a if you’re really
looking for
something to sort of hold on to here i
want to know more and i want to sort of
keep track of this keep track on the
government’s website
and in the media there are various
outlets reporting on this on the current
environment bill
that’s before parliament it’s a huge
piece of legislation um
it’s the most important piece of
legislation we could talk about
um its committee um has been suspended
until i think september because of kovid
but the bill is important because it’s
intended to effectively replace the
directives i i rattled off earlier
but on closer inspection it does no such
thing the new standards on air for
example which really affects my borrower
in particular and this is something i’m
really passionate about
won’t come into effect until 2022 and
there’ll be plenty of opportunities to
backslide before then the standards are
also demonstrably lower than the eu’s
as the environmental journalist fiona
harvey pointed out clause 81 of the bill
gives the secretary of state powers to
weaken targets for the chemical status
of water
and this is just one example of the
bill’s constructive or rather
destructive ambiguity
and i think the real challenge of
activists will be to keep track of this
bill
to unpack that constructive destructive
ambiguity
and to form coordinated responses uh
consistently over time