CentreRight

Conservatives and the environment – the next step in a long tradition

He was not like Party leaders that came before him. This leader of the Conservative Party was modern, dynamic and forward looking. There were a number of policy priorities that he wanted to push to realise his modernising vision, and the environment was one of them.

Conservatives, he reasoned, were natural stewards of the environment, keen to conserve its vitality and pass its benefits and beauty on to future generations.

He faced grumbles from some and protest from others, but he pressed on, confident that prioritising this issue was not just good for his Party, but good for Britain. 

That was in 1876 and the Conservative Party leader was Benjamin Disraeli. The River Pollution Prevention Act, which his government put into law that year to prevent the dumping of raw sewage into Britain’s rivers, proved seminal, going on to influence environmental legislation well into the 20^th century. 

The greening of the Conservative Party under David Cameron in the 21^st Century is neither a recent conversion nor a simple re-branding exercise. It is a philosophical homecoming. Tories have a long and proud history of environmental preservation, going back to Edmund Burke’s 18^th Century views on generational stewardship.

It was a Conservative government that rid London of pea-soup smog with the Clean Air Act. It was the Tories who introduced the Green Belt across England to preserve our countryside in the 1950s. It was Margaret Thatcher who was the first international leader to speak to the UN General Assembly on the dangers of climate change.

Ensuring Britain’s energy security

By Ben Caldecott & Gavin Dick of the Conservative Environment Network.

Energy security is national security. The provision of reliable, sustainable and affordable energy is of critical importance. The benign energy security situation that has prevailed in Britain – as a result of relatively plentiful North Sea oil and gas supplies, as well as sufficient excess generating capacity – meant that energy security hasn’t been a major concern. Times have changed. The benign energy security situation inherited by the Labour Government in 1997 has steadily become the opposite. We now face a significant energy security challenge.

The situation is getting worse all the time. The retirement of our aging nuclear power stations and the closure of many coal-powered ones due to the EU Large Combustion Plant Directive mean that we face a rapidly growing energy gap. By 2020 between one-third and one-half of our existing electricity generation capacity will need to be replaced.

We now have a situation where Britain is a net energy importer and as North Sea oil and gas decline further, we’re being exposed to high and volatile energy prices. This is a symptom of energy insecurity - whilst our first dash for gas was founded on secure North Sea reserves, the second is reliant on insecure foreign ones. Energy price spikes highlight the problems of Britain’s growing dependence on these foreign energy supplies, as well as our problematic interaction with state dominated energy markets in Europe and most of the rest of the world.