Q406 Grant
Shapps: Briefly then, back to the issue of
policy and politics and long-term planning, Jonathan Porritt you were
co-chair of the Green Party from 1980, so it has taken over a quarter of a
century to get some kind of consensus which may well lead to a bill next
month being announced in the Queen’s speech to do something serious about
the problems of CO2.
What does that tell us about long-term strategy and planning in Government?
Jonathan
Porritt: It tells you that patience is a
very fine quality and that one needs an awful lot of it in this business.
It also tells us something which, to be fair – I hope my Green Party
colleagues will not be cross with me for saying this – is that a lot of what
we were saying in the 1970s and 1980s was based largely on instinct and not
on empirical data and the increase in scientific information - I am sure
that David King coming after us will comment on this - the increase in the
data available to Government now is absolutely enormous. Whereas delay and
uncertainty could conceivably have been argued as a reasonable government
response up to the point of course when Mrs Thatcher in her short-lived
green period in 1988, when she declared, to our consternation “We are all
friends of the earth now” up to that moment the lack of hard scientific data
was probably a reasonable justification for not doing as much as should be
done. Now there is absolutely no justification and the contradictions
therefore that you find at the heart of Government when they try to make a
long-term target work in the short term, and I would evidence the aviation
strategy, the Aviation White Paper that this Government have, and the
Government have been told by many bodies including ourselves that they will
not be able to deliver on the Aviation White Paper if they want to deliver
on climate change. These two things are fundamentally and totally
incompatible, but the short-term aviation pressures are deemed to be more
important than moving incrementally towards the long-term 60 per cent
target.
Q407 Grant
Shapps: Now that we are all friends of the
earth, it begs the question whether you do actually require all the parties
to be in agreement before policy actually can move forward. Is that not the
lesson of your quarter of a century battle, that it has taken all this time
to get everyone saying the same thing and therefore this bill is ---
Jonathan
Porritt: Political consensus is very
important and although I do not believe, as was once suggested, that we
could stop the environment being a political football. It is a highly
politicised area of concern and even if all the parties sign up to some
consensus about a long-term target, the means by which we get there will
need to be painstakingly negotiated between different parts of the political
system, different parties and different agents of change in that system. I
do believe that consensus is important, I believe that needs to be based on
good scientific evidence and I have to say that that is now what is
undoubtedly driving this increased readiness and sense of purposefulness
that you see in all the parties.
Q408 Grant
Shapps: I think what you are saying is
that actually the parties would have been wrong to … No, your hunch was
correct, they would have been right to, but it would not have been based on
scientific evidence if they had listened to you in 1980, for example, so you
are almost conceding they were right to delay the decision.
Jonathan
Porritt: They obviously were not right, as
history now tells us, but they were justified in not having as incisive and
strategic a set of commitment as is now required. From 1988 onwards, when
my predecessor body informed the Conservative Government that this was no
longer an issue of vague hypothesis but was a real phenomenon unfolding in
real time in our lives, from that point on Government’s delay and
prevarication have been completely unjustifiable and in my opinion wilfully
neglecting their responsibilities to this and future generations.
Professor
Owens: May I add a small comment and that
is that it takes many different things to make policy change and if it had
not been for the sorts of pressures that were emerging 25 years ago, it
probably would not have been on the agenda and therefore we would not now
have the kind of scientific information and scientific input that we do
have. It is a process where many different threads come together and it
does take a lot of time..
