Truss’s anti-environmentalism has awakened the sleeping green giant of British politics

We stand at a moment of existential peril for nature in Britain. In the space of less than a week, Liz Truss’s new government has announced the biggest assault on nature and environmental protections in a generation. But in doing so, her administration may have haplessly stumbled into a fight it cannot hope to win: a fight with the very soul of modern Britain.

The assault was long anticipated by anyone who has observed Truss’s brand of free-market politics, but its swiftness was still surprising. It began last Thursday with Jacob Rees-Mogg’s announcement of a Bill to expunge all remaining EU-derived regulations from the UK statute book by the end of 2023. In one fell swoop, that will remove a vast array of carefully-crafted environmental protections: most notably the Habitats Regulations, which seek to preserve the country’s endangered species and remaining fragments of wild nature.

The government’s attack on nature continued on Friday with Kwasi Kwarteng’s budget-in-all-but-name, which announced a swathe of so-called ‘Investment Zones’ in which taxes will be cut, planning rules relaxed and environmental regulations ripped up. Any of the 38 councils understood to be considering drinking from this poisoned chalice may as well put up signs saying: ‘Welcome to the Ambridge Investment Zone – where we kill bats, squash newts and pour ever more shit into our rivers!’

Not content with this environmental vandalism, rumours emerged over the weekend that Truss’s new Ministers may even ditch the long-awaited environmental reforms to farm subsidies. Moving away from the EU’s retrograde Common Agricultural Policy was one of the few upsides to Brexit. Instead of paying landowners according to the sheer area of land they farmed – a vast subsidy to wealthy aristocrats and city bankers, with few strings attached – we could now redirect that £3bn in annual taxpayer subsidies to pay farmers for public goods, like restoring nature. During his reforming tenure as Environment Secretary, Michael Gove fired the starting gun on this transition to new Environmental Land Management schemes (‘ELMs’). But with Mark Spencer taking over the farming brief at DEFRA (“our very own little Bolsonaro”, according to former DEFRA Minister Lord Goldsmith), all this is now in jeopardy.

Yet in embarking down this road, Truss has set herself on a collision course with the most venerable of British institutions: the conservation sector. They have responded to the onslaught with rare fury. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) tweeted: “Make no mistake, we are angry. This government has today launched an attack on nature”. Craig Bennett, head of the Wildlife Trusts, called it “utter madness”. And in an unusually strong statement, the National Trust wrote: “Rather than ramp up action to support our environment, this Government appears however to be heading in the opposite direction. Environmental protections are dismissed as 'burdens'… The new Investment Zones represent a free-for-all for nature and heritage”. These groups represent a vast slice of the British public, dwarfing the memberships of every political party put together: the Wildlife Trusts have 870,000 members, the RSPB a million, whilst almost one in ten Brits are paid-up members of the National Trust. Politicians, however, have perhaps got used to seeing these organisations as large but gentle beasts, seldom moved to take political action. But with the RSPB now vowing “a mass mobilisation of our members”, that is about to change.

The former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook used to call environmentalism “the sleeping giant of British politics”. During my lifetime, that green giant has awoken on several occasions. It stirred during the first major phase of climate activism in 2006-2009, when Climate Camp shut down Kingsnorth coal power station and New Labour oversaw the creation of the Climate Change Act. It awoke again to thwart David Cameron’s proposed sell-off of the public forest estate, and most recently rose with a roar in response to the impassioned warnings of David Attenborough, Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion. That last uprising, cut short by Covid, has permanently shifted public concern about the environment onto a whole new level: around a quarter of the British public now regularly cite it to be the most important issue facing the country. But the giant that Truss has awakened is even larger.

Truss’s disregard for any environmental limits to economic growth offends not just the millions of Brits who are bird watchers and botanists, ramblers and animal lovers – but also the way that the British, and particularly the English, conceive of themselves. A much wiser Conservative prime minister than Truss, Stanley Baldwin, wrote nearly a century ago: “England is the country, and the country is England“. By this, he meant that the quintessence of England is the countryside, the bucolic idyll: William Blake’s green and pleasant land.

Truss seems to have no conception of this truth. She may once, long ago, have dallied with student environmental activism; but she now inhabits an airless realm of neoliberal think tanks and free-market economists, for whom any constraints on unbridled economic growth are an annoyance to be done away with. Truss’s Britain is now the laboratory of the Tufton Street mafia, the plaything of dead-eyed economists who think nothing of crashing the pound and destroying whole industries, to say nothing of wiping out the living world. Matthew Sinclair, the PM’s chief economic advisor and former head of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, once wrote blithely that “equatorial regions might suffer” from the effects of climate change, “but it is entirely possible that this will be balanced out by areas like Greenland, which might become green again.” Yet this anti-environmentalist mutation of Conservatism has no electoral constituency in Britain.

If Liz Truss wants to discover instead the conservatism that epitomises Middle England, she should look to Middle Earth. Truss attended Merton College in Oxford, where the author J.R.R. Tolkien taught in the 1940s. Though Tolkien’s epics, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, were primarily works of fantasy, they also encapsulated his ‘green Tory’ worldview. To Tolkien, an arch-conservative who venerated trees and hated industrial capitalism, his heroic hobbits represented Edmund Burke’s ‘little platoons’ – everyday folk standing up to defend their bucolic home of the Shire. When the hobbits Merry and Pippin foresee the destruction of the Shire by the “fires of industry” unleashed by the evil wizard Saruman, they join forces with the Ents – animated trees symbolising the forces of nature – to overthrow him. Nostalgic and idealised though Tolkien’s fantasies may have been, they have also proven enormously and enduringly popular with the British public. “This is Tolkien’s world,” argues conservative historian Dominic Sandbrook: “He remains a guide for our time”.

In picking a fight with Britain’s nature conservation groups, whose millions of members contain plenty of ‘Shire Tories’, Liz Truss has unwittingly cast herself as Saruman, her only supporters a rabble of neoliberal Orcs. The forthcoming battle for Middle England’s green and pleasant land will resemble Tolkien’s battle for Middle Earth: and we all know how that turned out.