Guest election blog – Labour by Dominic Woodfield

I write this manifesto review from both a personal and professional perspective, being an ecologist by profession, a conservationist by heart, and a practitioner operating for thirty years in that tricky zone where environmental protection and economic growth interface and often collide through the prism of planning policy and decisions, and environmental regulation.

 In past general elections I have variously voted Labour, Green and (on one occasion) Lib Dem, largely depending on where either my heart or tactical expedience led me. On July 4^th I expect it will be one of those three again, albeit as I seem to be in a pretty safe Labour seat, the urge to place my cross somewhere other than merely ‘less worse’ might prove tempting.

I’ve chosen to review the Labour party election manifesto as the one that seems most likely to be put into some sort of practice come July 5^th. I find it striking in its careful casting of tackling the climate crisis as less something that is existential for humanity, but more an economic opportunity, and in saying little more about the nature crisis than ‘we will obey the law’ and ‘we will create some new River Walks’. While the manifesto does state that “the climate and nature crisis is the greatest long-term global challenge that we face” you can’t help hear the emphasis on ‘long-term’, and the manifesto then rapidly pivots to the economic opportunities of the energy transition. Economic opportunities there are indeed – big ones – but let’s not forget the bigger reasons why it is important, and why it demands action now. 

Anyway, down to business:

Things I like:

• No-one is going to argue with reduced NHS waiting times, more teachers, reducing crime/anti-social behaviour and economic stability. But there’s a failure to recognise that the current woes in these areas are symptoms of malaise, not causes. I want Government to go after the root causes, but I don’t see much to convince me that Labour is not going to continue to attach sticking plasters in the same manner that they accuse the Conservatives of doing. Perhaps they’ll be bigger, with pictures on or something. Corporate greed, corporate corruption, the hegemony of the elite and the cumulative effects of this (regulatory capture, societal imbalance, lack of accountability) are not in the cross-hairs of this manifesto (it would be a huge risk to Labour for them to be, I know).
• I can completely get behind bringing energy back into public ownership, albeit in the absence of anything to tell me otherwise, Great British Energy appears likely to be just another player, rather than a step-change. Can we do it for water and public transport too please?
• A commitment to end the “ineffective” badger cull. It’s really good to see that word being used to describe the cull in a manifesto. I would like to also have seen a related commitment to end the slide within the public sector to base science on policy (rather than formulate policies based on good science). Ending the pointless, wasteful and backward badger cull is long, long overdue, but after July 4^th how much pressure will we see exerted on the new incumbents by the beef and cattle industries and their civil servant sympathisers to deflect attention away from poor cattle husbandry and epidemiologically disastrous farming practices?

Things I don’t like

• The fixation on the planning system as being ‘the’ problem, rather than failure to properly resource regulators and planning authorities so they can level the field and make the system work better for all. This is all very Boris and a return to the hopelessly misguided planning White Paper of a few years back.
• The guff about protecting nature is just that – guff. It’s evidently not been written by anyone with even a passing knowledge of the biodiversity crisis and the causes of it, and nor can any other such person have reviewed or sense-checked it. Labour are as much to blame for the depletion of UK nature as the Conservatives, and trying to score political points out of the parlous state of our wildlife reveals a failure to accept that some issues are bigger than the electoral cycle. The sparse comments about the nature crisis and countryside policy generally don’t bode well for our prospects of getting a Meacher, rather than (please, no) a Paterson or a Coffey.
• The thing I don’t like most of all? The sense that I’m reading an exercise in spin, redolent of the Blair days when the term ‘spin doctor’ was coined, and which conjures up the angry opening chords of The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again”.

Things that appear to be missing

• Detail
• Costings
• Plans
• Conviction
• Credibility

Overall assessment

Reading this manifesto has actually made me less likely to vote Labour than before. Perhaps that’s a luxury I can afford, being in a (reputedly) safe Labour seat. But why should I give a party my support when its manifesto gives me no sense that, in Government, they would be really serious about going after the root causes of our environmental and social ills, or being the catalyst for fundamental change that is needed to tackle the existential threats we face. I am left with the sense that Starmer’s Labour Party does not appear to want to challenge the powerful and unaccountable factions at the top of our society which act as a leaden weight against vital environmental, economic and societal change. If that’s because they’re scared of their influence and power, that may be understandable, but I’d have more respect for them if they just said so, rather than offer me loose words and phrases that I have no confidence will prove anything other than empty in a year or two’s time.

This is one of a series of opinion pieces on the political parties’ 2024 general election manifestos. We invited them to share their thoughts on one or two manifestos of their choice. We didn’t tell people what to write and we haven’t edited what they wrote (except to squeeze things into a common format, to correct minor grammatical and spelling errors and typos). The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Wild Justice.