Michael Gove has set out an ambitious green policy in his first major speech as Environment Secretary, with a sharp turn away from the more hardline Right-wing tone he deployed during the EU Referendum.
Gove has not built a pre-environment voting record during his 12 years as an MP, and his former LIberal Democrat coalition partners claim that when he was Education Secretary he tried to remove climate change from the national school curriculum, an accusation that was denied by one of his advisers.
Six weeks after his latest Cabinet appointment he gave a speech with the eye-catching title “The unfrozen moment – delivering a green Brexit”. His tone was conciliatory and moderate, a far cry from the aggressive approach he took during the Brexit debate, when he famously rejected the evidence and arguments of David Cameron’s Remain campaign by saying that “I think people in this country have had enough of experts.”
Green Gove
While fellow Tories such as Boris Johnson and Nigel Lawson have shown a similar disregard for the “expert” opinion on climate change, Gove was quite willing in his new role as Environment Secretary to accept the view of the experts on that issue.
“Across the globe, we’ve seen climate change threaten both fragile natural habitats and developing human societies, we’ve allowed extractive and exploitative political systems to lay waste to natural resources and we’ve placed species of plants and animals in new and mortal danger while gambling with the future health of the whole world,” he said.
“Now, I am an environmentalist first because I care about the fate of fellow animals, and I draw inspiration from nature and I believe that we need beauty in our lives as much as we need food and shelter.”
That opener had it all: a global view, concern for developing countries, blaming politicians (presumably others) and praising “Beauty” as though capitalised by a romantic poet to evoke a higher form of existence. He also likes furry animals now.
Fishing
With that enlightened perspective he was able to hammer home some FYIs about how he has been right all along about Brexit if you care about these aforementioned values.
The link was his trademark sob story about his family’s fish processing business. “My father, grandfather and great-grandfather all made their living from the sea.
My great-grandfather was a fisherman, my grandfather and father fish merchants. My father’s business closed in the 1980s when I was a schoolboy, one of many that closed after this country accepted EU control of our waters through the Common Fisheries Policy.”
The EU is widely recognised as having done a good job protecting fishing stocks but Gove insisted that could be improved.
“Outside the EU, as an independent coastal state, we can be home to world class fishing fleets as well as proving ourselves environmental leaders,” he insisted.
Cameron
Gove is following the political roadmap of the close friend he abandoned during the Brexit referendum campaign.
When David Cameron first become Conservative leader at the end of 2005 he used environmental policy to drastically overhaul the party’s image – quite literally when he changed its logo to a tree.
He even visited the Arctic to see a melting glacier and so he could witness climate change first-hand and be photographed with a husky.
When the Coalition Government was formed in 2010 he said he wanted it to be the greenest government in British history and pledged to cut central government carbon dioxide emissions by 10% in a year.
Many of his own MPs mocked it as “hug a husky” politics but green issues were pivotal to Cameron’s strategy to “de-toxify” the Tory brand.
Trump
One of the biggest issues in climate politics right now is Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement.
While Johnson made headlines for urging Trump to stick to the agreement the UK has little leverage to apply pressure on anything while Theresa May’s Cabinet is desperately trying to line-up a post-Brexit trade deal with the US.
Gove is in a particularly odd position to be trying to assert any pressure on the US Administration. When Theresa May dropped him from Cabinet last year he supplemented his backbencher’s salary by returning to his old employer Rupert Murdoch’s payroll.
Murdoch used his strong personal links with Trump to organise the first British press interview with the new President and it was Michael Gove, of all people, who was graced with this profile-boosting scoop by Trump. he was clearly grateful to receive a favour that Washington correspondents and hundreds of other full-time journalists would have loved
All this maneuvering and repositioning is sure to make many in the UK go green – but not in quite the way Gove would like.
by Stewart Vickers
The post Climate: Great, Gove Tosses Out a Green Brexit? appeared first on Felix Magazine.
No comments:
Post a Comment