A Plant in Government
By George Monbiot
Another deadly tree disease threatens these islands, but the
government will do nothing to keep it out.
The less you care, the better you will do. This has long
been the promise of conservative politics on both sides of the Atlantic. People
who couldn’t give a tinker’s cuss about the consequences of their actions are
elevated to the highest levels of government. Their role is to trash what
lesser mortals value.
This describes the position of almost everyone in Trump’s
cabinet. In the UK, I feel it applies, among others, to Jeremy Hunt at the
department of health, Boris Johnson at the foreign office, Priti Patel at
international development and now Michael Gove at the environment department.
The worst possible candidates are given the most sensitive portfolios.
Gove has attacked the two main pillars of protection for
wildlife and ecosystems in this country, the European habitats and birds
directives. As education secretary, he sought to erase climate change from the
geography curriculum. Now, at a time of great environmental hazard, as the
Brexit talks commence, he has been granted an opportunity to make his dream –
and our nightmare – of destroying public protections come true.
Let me give you an example of how dangerous this appointment
– and the government’s wider agenda – could be. A plant disease called Xylella
fastidiosa, that originated in South America, is leaping across the European
continent. It has now reached Italy, the Balearic Islands, Germany and France.
As well as crops, it threatens many of our forest trees, including oak, elm,
ash, cherry, sycamore and plane. Urban trees seem to be especially susceptible,
perhaps because of the stresses they suffer: in American cities, some streets
have had to be clear-felled. There is no known cure.
Xylella has ripped through olive groves in Italy and
vineyards and fruit farms in the Americas. It is impossible to say how many
species it might affect, how much damage it might do and whether it would
thrive in our climate. But we should hope we never find out.
It is unlikely to stay within the current European infection
sites. Once the disease arrives, in imported plants, it is spread by
sap-sucking insects, which can quickly be blown beyond the exclusion zones the
EU has established. One of the few places that could remain unaffected is the
United Kingdom, whose islands, Shakespeare remarked, are a “fortress built by
Nature for herself against infection”. This blessed plot could become a reserve
for species hammered by invasive diseases elsewhere.
But the government won’t contemplate it. Deaf to the pleas
of foresters, scientists and tree nurseries, the only measure it will apply is
a “plant passport”, certifying that potential hosts of the disease are free
from infection before they are imported. There are 55 plants on its list. But
already, according to the European Food Safety Authority, 359 plant species are
known to carry the disease, in many cases without showing any symptoms. They
range across wildly different families, from magnolias to meadow grass,
hydrangeas to holly, asparagus to aubergines, broad beans to buttercups,
nettles to nightshade and lilac to lemon trees. New hosts are being discovered
all the time. The only safe assumption is that almost any species could be a
potential carrier.
In other words, the entire live plant trade presents a
threat. The freedom with which it can move plants and the soil in which they
are rooted across borders is a classic example of regulatory failure, that has
spread hundreds of invasive species around the world. Unless there is a radical
change of policy, the UK appears likely to repeat its grim experience with Dutch
elm disease and ash dieback, but in this case potentially affecting far more
species.
What this threat appears to demand is a moratorium on the
import of all live plants other than those grown through tissue culture
(propagation in sterile conditions). This would require negotiation with the EU
or (in future) the World Trade Organisation. But while the government has long
been happy to pursue a holy war in such forums on behalf of financiers and
other favoured interests, it is not prepared to request concessions to serve
the wider public good. I hope I am proved wrong, but the notion that Michael
Gove would champion such measures seems preposterous.
He represents, in its extreme form, the neoliberal
fundamentalism that makes such policies unthinkable. His long relationship with
radical lobby groups, such as Policy Exchange in the UK and the American
Enterprise Institute in the US, his characterisation of public servants as “the
Blob” and his battles against public protections ensure that he should be the
last person any responsible government would appoint, at this time of multiple
environmental crises, to defend the living world. But it has been a long time
since we saw a responsible government in this country.
In 2011, David Cameron launched a “one-in, one-out” rule.
Any new regulation could be introduced only if an existing measure, with equal
costs to business, was revoked. In 2013, this escalated to one-in, two-out.
This was the doctrine cited in 2014 by the then Conservative housing minister
to justify his refusal to insist that sprinkler systems be fitted to new
buildings to prevent fires from spreading. In 2015, the government ramped up
the ratio to one-in, three-out, and locked it into law through the small
business, enterprise and employment act. As Christine Berry points out on
openDemocracy, this more or less bans new regulations. It ensures that business
costs are transferred to society, where they remain, under this formula,
uncounted.
It’s the kind of doctrinal absolutism you don’t expect to
encounter in a democracy. But it now informs every aspect of government. It
ensured that repeated warnings about fires in tower blocks were ignored. It
ensures that crises ranging from obesity to air pollution cannot be addressed.
And it will, unless something changes, tear apart what remains of the living
world.
Like the measures that would have saved the lives of people
in Grenfell Tower, the protections required to prevent further disasters for
nature in this country are denounced by the government, the billionaire press
and corporate lobbyists as “red tape”. The purpose of neoliberalism is to free
the rich and powerful from the constraints of democracy. Week after week, we
see what this means.
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