By Owen Paterson 20 Jul 2014
Every prime minister has the right to choose his team to
take Britain into the general election and I am confident that my able
successor at Defra, Liz Truss, will do an excellent job. It has been a
privilege to take on the challenges of the rural economy and environment.
However, I leave the post with great misgivings about the power and
irresponsibility of – to coin a phrase – the Green Blob.
By this I mean the mutually supportive network of
environmental pressure groups, renewable energy companies and some public
officials who keep each other well supplied with lavish funds, scare stories
and green tape. This tangled triangle of unelected busybodies claims to have
the interests of the planet and the countryside at heart, but it is
increasingly clear that it is focusing on the wrong issues and doing real harm
while profiting handsomely.
Local conservationists on the ground do wonderful work to
protect and improve wild landscapes, as do farmers, rural businesses and
ordinary people. They are a world away from the highly paid globe-trotters of
the Green Blob who besieged me with their self-serving demands, many of which
would have harmed the natural environment.
I soon realised that the greens and their industrial and
bureaucratic allies are used to getting things their own way. I received more
death threats in a few months at Defra than I ever did as secretary of state
for Northern Ireland. My home address was circulated worldwide with an
incitement to trash it; I was burnt in effigy by Greenpeace as I was recovering
from an operation to save my eyesight. But I did not set out to be popular with
lobbyists and I never forgot that they were not the people I was elected to
serve.
Indeed, I am proud that my departure was greeted with
such gloating by spokespeople for the Green Party and Friends of the Earth.
It was not my job to do the bidding of two organisations
that are little more than anti-capitalist agitprop groups most of whose leaders
could not tell a snakeshead fritillary from a silver-washed fritillary. I saw
my task as improving both the environment and the rural economy; many in the
green movement believed in neither.
Their goal was to enhance their own income streams and
influence by myth making and lobbying. Would they have been as determined to
blacken my name if I was not challenging them rather effectively?
When I arrived at Defra I found a department that had
become under successive Labour governments a milch cow for the Green Blob.
Just as Michael Gove set out to refocus education policy
on the needs of children rather than teachers and bureaucrats and Iain Duncan
Smith set out to empower the most vulnerable, so I began to reorganise the
department around four priorities: to grow the rural economy, to improve the
environment, and to safeguard both plant and animal health.
The Green Blob sprouts especially vigorously in Brussels.
The European Commission website reveals that a staggering 150 million euros
(£119
million) was paid to the top nine green NGOs from 2007-13.
European Union officials give generous grants to green
groups so that they will lobby it for regulations that then require large budgets
to enforce. When I attended a council meeting of elected EU ministers on shale
gas in Lithuania last year, we were lectured by a man using largely untrue
clichés about the dangers of shale gas. We discovered that he was from the
European Environment Bureau, an umbrella group for unelected,
taxpayer-subsidised green lobby groups. Speaking of Europe, I remain proud to
have achieved some renegotiations.
The discard ban ends the scandalous practice of throwing
away perfectly edible fish, we broke the council deadlock on GM crops, so
decisions may be repatriated to member countries and we headed off bans on
fracking. Judge me by my opponents.
When I proposed a solution to the dreadful suffering of
cattle, badgers and farmers as a result of the bovine tuberculosis epidemic
that Labour allowed to develop, I was opposed by rich pop stars who had never
been faced with having to cull a pregnant heifer. (Interestingly, very recent
local evidence suggests the decline in TB in the cull area may already have
begun.)
When I spoke up for the landscapes of this beautiful
country against the heavily subsidised industry that wants to spoil them with
wind turbines at vast cost to ordinary people, vast reward to rich landowners
and undetectable effects on carbon dioxide emissions, I was frustrated by
colleagues from the so-called Liberal Democrat Party.
When I encouraged the search for affordable energy from
shale gas to help grow the rural economy and lift people out of fuel poverty, I
was opposed by a dress designer for whom energy bills are trivial concerns.
When I championed brilliant scientists demonstrating
genetic modifications to rice to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of
children in developing countries, I was vilified by a luxury organic chocolate
tycoon uninterested in the demonstrable environmental and humanitarian benefits
of GM crops.
When faced with the flooding of the Somerset Levels I
refused to make the popular and false excuse of blaming it on global warming,
but set out to reverse the policy inherited from a Labour peeress and serial
quangocrat who had expressed the wish to “place a limpet mine on every pumping
station”, while deliberately allowing the silting up of drainage channels.
When I set out to shatter the crippling orthodoxy that
growing the rural economy and improving the environment are mutually exclusive,
I was ridiculed by a public school journalist who thinks the solution to
environmental problems is “an ordered and structured downsizing of the global
economy”. Back to the Stone Age, in other words, but Glastonbury-style.
Yes, I’ve annoyed these people, but they don’t represent
the real countryside of farmers and workers, of birds and butterflies.
Like the nationalised industries and obstructive trade
unions of the 1970s, the Green Blob has become a powerful self-serving caucus;
it is the job of the elected politician to stand up to them. We must have the
courage to tackle it head on, as Tony Abbott in Australia and Stephen Harper in
Canada have done, or the economy and the environment will both continue to
suffer.
* Owen Paterson is a former secretary of state for
environment, food and rural affairs.
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