Conservatives will take the axe to cash for environmental protection

[Anarcho-Socialist]

The Independent

18 April 2005

The biggest-ever assault on environmental protection in Britain will be carried out by the Conservatives if they win the general election. Massive cuts will be made to the budgets and staff of Britain's main pollution and wildlife watchdog bodies, in a programme of which no mention at all is made in the Tory election manifesto.

The shadow Environment Secretary, Tim Yeo, is preparing to take the axe to the Environment Agency, which controls pollution from industry, and flood risk, and English Nature, which is responsible for protecting wildlife from increasing threats

(snip)

Green groups similarly lambasted the idea. "The people the Tories are planning to fire are the green equivalent of bobbies on the beat," said Stephen Tindale, executive director of Greenpeace. "The Conservatives claim to be the party of law and order, but when it comes to environmental crime they seem happy for the polluters and despoilers to go unpunished."

(snip)

News of the Tory proposals is likely to provide the first major green clash between the parties in the election debate, where hitherto the environment has been the forgotten issue. Margaret Beckett, the Environment Secretary, said that Mr Yeo's planned cuts were "potentially catastrophic". She said: "This is a good example of the devastation that the Tory economic proposals would cause right across the board."

More at: http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=630558

It seems the U.K. Conservatives are taking cues from their American GOP counterparts.

[jojo54]

1. Join the party, Brits

The U.S. has one up on you, I'm ashamed to say. * has no respect for anything except his back pocket. He doesn't care about the environment 50 years from now...he'll be dead and his grandchildren and greatgrancchildren will be living under Cheyenne mountain.

Pass the popcorn.:popcorn: :popcorn: :popcorn:

[T_i_B]

2. In that case...

...the Conservatives may just have lost the religious vote! Why I hear you ask? Because the Church has been urging voters to look at enviromental issues. Here's what the Archbishop of Canterbury has been saying on the subject!

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/environment/story.jsp?story=630185

http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=630141

It has been said that "the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment". The earth itself is what ultimately controls economic activity because it is the source of the materials upon which economic activity works.

That is why economy and ecology cannot be separated. Ecological fallout from economic development is in no way an "externality" as the economic jargon has it; it is a positive depletion of real wealth, of human and natural capital. To seek to have economy without ecology is to try to manage an environment with no knowledge or concern about how it works in itself - to try to formulate human laws in abstraction from or ignorance of the laws of nature.

It is time to look seriously at the full implications of this. We need to start by recognising that social collapse is a real possibility. When we speak about environmental crisis, we are not to think only of spiralling poverty and mortality, but about brutal and uncontainable conflict. An economics that ignores environmental degradation invites social degradation - in plain terms, violence.

It is no news that access to water is likely to be a major cause of serious conflict in the century just beginning. But this is only one aspect of a steadily darkening situation. Needless to say, it will be the poorest countries that suffer first and most dramatically, but the "developed" world will not be able to escape: the failure to manage the resources we have, has the same consequences wherever we are. In the interim, we can imagine "fortress" strategies (with increasing levels of social control demanded) struggling to keep the growing instability and violence elsewhere at bay and so intensifying its energy.