Theresa May's Environment Plan Misses a Hugely Important Issue

Theresa May gave a speech on the environment today, in the context of the Conservatives trying to change the fact that young voters see them as people who love to murder foxes for a laugh.

Speaking at London’s Wetland Centre, an "urban oasis for wildlife" in Barnes, she spelled out her approach to saving the planet. It’s one that puts its faith in regulating capitalism, mixed in with the sort of twee British identity you get in spoken-word poetry adverts for tea-bags, what with her talking about the stories of Beatrix Potter, William Wordsworth’s poetry, the landscapes of painters John Constable and Sir Stanley Spencer.

And while that’s all very nice, she also used the slow genocide-by-plastic of marine wildlife as an opportunity to praise the Daily Mail. "While the water in our rivers and beaches are cleaner than ever, around the world 8 million tonnes of plastic makes its way into the oceans each year," she said, adding that she pays "tribute to the Daily Mail for its tireless campaigning on this issue".

This isn’t some glib, Branson-esque point-scoring about the rag we all love to hate; it speaks to the real meaning of Theresa May’s recent green-washing. The Mail campaigned to stop plastic waste, and it was a demand the government was well able to accommodate. Who could really complain about cutting out micro-beads in a bid to stop the killing of super cute baby turtles? Nobody. But that only goes to show how some of the more controversial issues have been rendered invisible.

In 151 pages, the government's "25 Year Environment Plan" manages one glancing reference to "migration". The word "refugee" does not make an appearance. When you consider the prediction that more people will be uprooted by climate change than have fled the war in Syria, it’s about as blind to reality as health minister Philip Dunne responding to the shortage of hospital beds by saying there are "seats available".

Describing the initiative as a "25 Year Plan" was presumably meant to convey a sense of seriousness, with a hint of Stalinist efficiency, but as environmentalists groups line up to call the speech a "missed opportunity", it also looks a bit like a lack of urgency. On plastic packaging, May said, "We will work with [supermarkets] to explore introducing plastic-free aisles, where all the food is sold loose." When I see a major fire, I love to work with the arsonist to explore lighting fewer matches.

The plan contains plenty of perfectly nice-sounding ideas – like the appointing of a "national tree champion" – but these come across as examples of how you can be seen to solve anything by creating some new jobs and titles for the chumocracy. In all the talk of clean and plentiful water, the document contains not a single reference to the word "fracking". Funnily enough, this week, Conservative-run West Sussex County Council gave the go-ahead to fracking firm Caudrilla to give Mother Earth a chemical enema in Balcombe.

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Ultimately, the government sees the environment as a thing that can be enclosed. They use plenty of nice nature-y words, but really, where you or I see a fragile and intricate ecosystem, the government sees "natural capital". Its overall plan is a "natural capital approach", and there are many references to the "Natural Capital Committee", a quango that views the environment as a set of "National Assets" to be enhanced. Seeing things through this lens is how you end up with a speech and a plan for the environment in which Beatrix Potter's Squirrel Nutkin gets a bigger shout-out than a climate refugee. It’s why Michael Gove’s introduction to the speech praises the environmental activism of Zac Goldsmith MP, a man who recently ran a dog-whistle racist mayoral election campaign. We all live on One Planet, man, but there’s nothing wrong with marking out your own little patch and keeping it for yourself.

I was happy as anyone to have my mind blown by the weird alien fish on Blue Planet 2, but there’s something both superficial and sinister in the way that politicians are now namedropping the show in every environmental speech ("public service broadcasting at its finest", said May today). They’ll talk about a widely exported media product fronted by a cosy old national treasure, but they're not so keen to talk about any research on the links between climate change and migration. If I was being cynical, I would ask whether Theresa May – who, as Home Secretary, was obsessed with immigrant bashing – cares more about dolphins than all the people whose livelihoods and homes will become unviable because of global warming.

As pretty much everyone except Donald Trump cares about the environment now, there are bigger questions to tackle than ones raised by a clickbait article about damaging consumer products, important though those may be. Theresa May might be sincere in her desire to save the world for all of us. But the question is: who is "us"?

When you consider that May’s vision of "us" is a narrow, national family where citizens of the world don’t belong, her environmentalism begins to look a little less cuddly.

@SimonChilds13