In Belém, the capital of the Brazilian state of Pará, situated where one of the Amazon River’s web of tributaries drains into the Atlantic, world leaders are gathering for the 30th international trade show for fossil fuel lobbyists – otherwise known as the COP30 climate conference.
Being hosted at Brazil’s gateway to the Amazon basin, one of the highlights of the pre-COP summit of world leaders was the announcement of a new global fund for the protection of tropical forests, the Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF).
Hotspots for terrestrial biodiversity
An initiative being pushed by Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, among others, it is hoping to raise an initial $25bn of investment from national governments followed by a further $100bn from the private sector, to safeguard these crucial ecosystems, which are hotspots for terrestrial biodiversity and which, like other natural ecosystems, are a key tool for sequestering and storing atmospheric carbon.
Keir Starmer decided that we shouldn’t even have to wait for this year’s conference to start in order to feel disappointed and betrayed. He announced at the leaders’ summit that the UK would not be contributing to this TFFF fund, despite this country having hitherto been a leading national funder of forest conservation and having made the prevention of deforestation a UK priority when we hosted COP26 in Glasgow.
The UK’s ditching of this initiative is merely the latest example showcasing the Labour government’s apparent determination to be even worse than the Tories on the vast majority of environmental issues.
Starmer asks Tory peer to write planning bill
In opposition, Starmer reportedly bragged in a Shadow Cabinet meeting about his hatred for ‘tree huggers,’ and since entering government, he and his senior ministers have certainly been proving the point. One of Starmer’s primary missions since taking office has been to tear up planning regulations, and he has recently directed a Tory peer to write a planning bill that will prevent environmental campaigners from seeking judicial reviews of major infrastructure projects.
The efficacy of this bill will rest upon the UK leaving the Aarhus Convention, a European treaty enshrining citizens’ rights in environmental matters. Among other things, the Aarhus Convention grants citizens the right to legally challenge things like infrastructure projects on environmental grounds, and caps the legal fees that the claimants can incur. The government has clearly indicated that it wishes to overturn these rights.
This feverish assault upon planning regulations is likely driven by Britain Remade, an opaque lobby group staffed by former Tory spads, whose head of policy was formerly the head of research at the Adam Smith Institute, one of Tufton Street’s equally opaque neoliberal thinktanks. The government boasted of this group’s support when announcing ‘streamlining’ changes to the planning and infrastructure bill earlier this year, and Britain Remade in turn boasts of its impact on Labour regarding the same bill. Several of Labour’s largest individual donors are also property developers.
Within this general frenzy towards dismantling the planning system, Starmer’s government has seemingly gone out of its way to signal its disdain for even the most banal and minimal of environmental measures.
Labour continue to backtrack on previous commitments
The government is now backtracking on previous commitments to mandate the inclusion of swift bricks into newbuild houses – a total about face from Steve Reed, who voiced enthusiastic support for the measure when he was environment secretary, but since becoming housing secretary has shamelessly refused to support a parliamentary amendment to make it law. Reed has instead taken to strutting around in a MAGA-style hat emblazoned with the cringingly pathetic slogan ‘build baby build!’.
But even more than Reed, it’s the Chancellor Rachel Reeves who has been most extreme in her contempt for any form of life on Earth that might possibly slow down short-term GDP growth. Reeves has made an ugly habit of complaining about protected bats and newts holding up development, despite the government’s own impact assessment of the planning and infrastructure bill earlier this year finding no evidence that nature protections are a significant impediment.
Like Reed, Reeves has also channelled Trump in her wilfully ignorant comments about the little whirlpool ramshorn snail, a rare species now known from just three sites in the UK. The aquatic snail is an indicator species of clean, chalky water, highly vulnerable to pollution, hence its scarcity in Britain’s sewage clogged waterways.
At a meeting of tech executives hosted by JP Morgan – one could hardly imagine a more apt setting for such myopic disregard for the natural world, unless perhaps the conference hall was inside the Death Star – Reeves boasted about how she had unblocked a housing development in Sussex which had been held up by ‘some snails on the site that are a protected species or something,’ describing them as ‘microscopic snails that you cannot even see’.
These snails aren’t microscopic at all, but perhaps Reeves is simply blind to anything that doesn’t have an easily tradeable monetary value. These obnoxious remarks precisely echoed comments made by Trump about environmental impact assessments holding up developments in New York.
I find myself genuinely wondering what’s wrong with such people; what psychological imbalance has so distorted their values? In Trump’s case, he’s a billionaire, and we know that wealth distorts people’s sense of empathy, literally making them more selfish. But that fails to explain the likes of Reeves or Starmer. Could it be the mere promise of proximity to wealth and power, access to corporate conferences and business lunches, that motivate their performative contempt for nature? Are they really that shallow?
And so, by abandoning the TFFF fund on the eve of a climate conference, this Labour government has been disappointingly true to form. Even as the joint intelligence committee warns that the climate crisis threatens national security, our government makes the political choice to sacrifice the living world on the altar of this year’s economic growth.
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