‘I’m shedding tears of rage!’ How the Tories’ ‘war on nature’ outraged everyone from the RSPB to farmers

Over several surreal days in late September, as the ill-fated Kwasi Kwarteng launched his short-lived mini-budget, the government announced a bewildering range of measures to reach its holy grail of economic growth. These appeared to be aimed squarely at trashing the environment. Ministers proposed to remove all environmental laws inherited from the EU; review (ie, weaken) post-Brexit farm subsidies that were designed to improve soils, alleviate flooding and boost biodiversity; create investment zones with minimal planning regulations; remove rules about river pollution; start fracking, and drill for more oil and gas in the North Sea.

We have since witnessed a series of U-turns and political obituaries but, so far, the government has not performed a handbrake turn on what outraged wildlife charities call an “attack on nature”. Planetary health appears bottom of the government’s overwhelming to-do list. When green-minded Conservatives tell me they have been shedding “tears of rage” at Liz Truss’s proposed bonfire of environmental regulations, you know something’s afoot.

Nature charities are sometimes chastised for their timidity, but this time the fury was quick to rise. Within hours of the “Kamikwasi budget”, the RSPB tweeted: “Make no mistake, we are angry. This government has today launched an attack on nature … We are entering uncharted territory.”

That uncharted territory includes an unusually unified response from nature charities. For the first time ever, the chief executives of the National Trust, the RSPB and the Wildlife Trusts, with a combined membership of 8 million people, appeared together on BBC News, calling on their membership – many of whom vote Conservative – to oppose the measures and protest to MPs. The Woodland Trust, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Bat Conservation Trust and the Ramblers, among others, are on board, too. Since then, more than 100,000 furious RSPB members have emailed their elected representatives, and petitions defending nature have attracted more than 330,000 signatures.

“I was slightly amazed by how much it was taken up in that first weekend, but all the polling indicates that people hold nature very close and the pandemic has helped with that,” says Beccy Speight, the chief executive of the RSPB. “A lot of people became closer to the nature on their doorstep.”

Protesters have since taken to the streets, with constituency-focused #AttackOnNature actions planned and Chris Packham leading efforts to arrange a second “walk for wildlife” – the first was in 2018 – in London on 26 November. Packham is heartened by surging popular awareness of environmental travesties such as water companies discharging sewage into the rivers. “Sewage impacts on so many people – children paddling, wild swimming, surfing, angling, wildlife, farming … it touched so many people that it became a very significant issue very quickly,” he says. “There’s an opportunity here. I’m rather hoping that something symbolic like a walk for wildlife will galvanise people and bring about change. There will be a turning point where the environment is up there with the economy because people’s homes will be underwater, fires will be licking at the windows, and the price of food will have gone through the roof, and the tragic number of people crossing the Channel in rubber boats will be nothing compared with the mass migration of people moving around the planet as the water runs out.”

The current government is widely derided by nature lovers, and sorely lacking environmental credentials. One wildlife ranger has a grim memory of Truss’s visit to their national nature reserve seven years ago, when she was environment secretary. “So tell me truthfully,” she reportedly asked the ranger, surveying marshland filled with rare plants and a sky full of wading birds, “is there more biodiversity in your nature reserve than on a potato field?” Recalling this experience, the ranger is genuinely baffled by her ignorance, exclaiming: “Where do they get these people?”

“These people” in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), alongside the new secretary of state, Ranil Jayawardena, now include minister Mark Spencer, a farmer, of whom former environment minister Zac Goldsmith tweeted in the summer: “Mark was the biggest blocker of measures to protect nature, biodiversity, animal welfare. He will be our very own little Bolsonaro.” Unsurprisingly, environmental expert Goldsmith was moved out of Defra when Spencer was appointed by Truss.

Yet partly what’s at stake is good environmental work undertaken by recent Conservative administrations. The Cameron government’s husky- and tree-hugging was widely mocked, but it wasn’t all simply imagemaking, according to Julian Glover, a former government adviser who led an influential but still-to-be-implemented review of national parks. The Cameron government got offshore wind going, but even bigger changes came under Theresa May when Michael Gove was made environment secretary in 2017. The arrival of the scourge of the teaching unions was greeted with dismay by many environmentalists – but Gove surprised them. When he was appointed, Glover gave him a list of books to read (including Our Place by the Guardian’s country diarist Mark Cocker). “He actually bought them all and read them,” says Glover.

Environmental reforms under Gove included bans on microplastics and bee-harming neonicotinoids, a target to phase out new petrol and diesel vehicle sales by 2040 (now brought forward to 2030), and a range of measures to reduce cruelty to animals, including bans on the ivory trade and wild animals in circuses.

The most important Gove reform was to set targets for nature recovery (enshrined in law by Boris Johnson’s government) and devise a new post-Brexit plan for farm subsidies. Rather than simply pay farmers for the land they farm (area-based payments the EU remains wedded to), Gove established a new principle of “public money for public goods”. Taxpayers’ money would be spent only if farmers improved soils, prevented floods and boosted wild populations of, for instance, invertebrates on which pollination and food security ultimately depends.

Gove moved on in 2019 but his reforms are still in play. The old area-based payments to farmers are being phased out, and are scheduled to be replaced by the “public money for public goods” payments of various environmental land management (ELM) schemes. One of Gove’s many unexpectedly radical moves was to appoint the former Friends of the Earth campaigner Tony Juniper as chair of Natural England, the government’s conservation watchdog. Last week, Juniper, still in post, wrote to Jayawardena to warn him that the government’s legally binding commitment to halt biodiversity decline by 2030 was not possible without ELMs.

Related: Nature is not an impediment to UK economic growth: it’s vital to it | Tony Juniper

“I’m much more concerned about ELMs than anything else,” says Ben Goldsmith, an influential green financier, rewilding enthusiast and brother of Zac. “ELMs is the most important initiative for recovering nature in this country by far and the most vulnerable because they can pull it apart without any legislation.”

Goldsmith, who is willing to join a walk for wildlife, hopes that government wheels will “run into treacle of various kinds – be it legal challenges or the Treasury or NGOs or their own MPs”. Already, however, it seems that the treacle of the wildlife charities might be having an effect – Spencer has been on a charm offensive this week and Defra is hinting that its review will give ELMs a reprieve. The government’s opponents are still sceptical and fear that ELMs will be stripped of its ambitious “landscape recovery” schemes.

What do farmers think? The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) favours a return to area-based payments, but many are more ambivalent. Ben Taylor, who farms the 1,200-hectare (3,000-acre) Ilford Estate near Lewes, east Sussex, is planning radical changes on the farm he manages, taking 800 hectares of marginal (unproductive) farmland out of production and into “nature recovery”, creating new meadows, woods and scrub in the South Downs national park, and raising water levels on the floodplain to help wading birds. Now it’s all in jeopardy because ELMs – and money for such landscape recovery – is under review. “I’m really excited about nature recovery. I just want to get on and do it and I could do it tomorrow. It’s not the doing it that’s difficult – it’s the paying for it.”

But Taylor says he understands the NFU’s concern for basic payments being phased out before adequate alternatives, such as ELMs, are in place. “Uncertainty is never helpful. There’s been a lot of muddying of the waters over the last month. I don’t know who is right and who is wrong but I don’t think anything has been said other than the government will look at farm subsidies. I’ll withhold judgment until they have looked at it.”

Rebecca Mayhew, who runs a smaller family farm in Norfolk with a dairy, native rare-breed beef cattle, chickens, pigs and a vineyard, is more critical. “With the conflict in Ukraine, it feels like the moment after the second world war where the authorities are saying: ‘Grow more, grow more’ at any cost. That’s just wrong. We must not go down that path again. It’s all reductionist thinking. There’s no holistic planning. There’s some good people in Defra but they are not allowed to make decisions.” Mayhew’s farm is regenerative, which means she is restoring soil health and reducing chemical and fertiliser inputs. Where she was in a tiny minority three years ago, she estimates about 15% of farmers are now following a similar path – restoring nature regardless of whether they are helped by government.

Craig Bennett, the chief executive of the Wildlife Trusts, lists a decade of Conservative attacks on environmental regulations, which he says have erroneously been viewed as impeding economic growth. For Bennett, the most dangerous part of the current #AttackOnNature is the repeal of retained EU laws, as championed by Jacob Rees-Mogg. About three-quarters of Britain’s environmental legislation originated in the EU. A new bill proposes that all EU-derived legislation – incorporated into British law after Brexit – will simply cease to exist by 2024.

“This is a cataclysmic torching of environmental protections,” says Bennett. “We’re getting bland reassurances from ministers – ‘Don’t worry, we’ll put in something better’ – but if we believe that, they would have to pass 570 pieces of environmental legislation in the next 13 months. It’s absurd and no one is buying it.”

Bennett, who met Rees-Mogg this week, urges fellow environmentalists not to settle for a technocratic discussion of policy detail. He wants to challenge the #AttackOnNature’s wider dogma, “the framing that regulation is bad for growth. There’s no actual evidence that that’s the case – it’s pure ideology. We should be having a more intelligent debate about growth in this country – some forms of economic activity are good for human and environmental wellbeing and improve the quality of life in the long term, such as investing in renewable energy, and some forms of economic activity are bad for progress.”

Every environmentalist I spoke to says the #AttackOnNature presents Labour with a great opportunity. “Labour is very good on decarbonisation and the green economy, but has historically been really quite rubbish on nature,” says Goldsmith. “You’d hope that Keir Starmer and his strategy team would spot an opportunity to use nature recovery as a way of winning over middle England, but they just don’t talk about it. I don’t hold out a huge amount of hope that we’d be in a much better place under Labour than we are now.”

“Labour needs to build what I’ve never seen it do in the past – an authentic heartfelt Labour narrative about how nature matters,” says Bennett. “The role of nature in physical and mental wellbeing, how important it is around our towns and cities, how the poorest people in society have the least access to nature.” Bennett doesn’t think it’s harder to make nature matter during a cost of living crisis. “At such a time, to celebrate and protect the things that you can get on your doorstep that are good for your physical and mental wellbeing and are free is surely more relevant than ever before.”

Constantly fighting rearguard actions imbues many environmentalists with pessimism – informed by science, of course, such as the latest stat that global wildlife populations have declined by an average of 69% since 1970. But there is hope. Packham sees it in the unified #AttackOnNature campaign. Glover finds it in the Defra civil servants who once wanted to intensify farming and now, he says, completely grasp the climate and ecological emergency. Goldsmith detects it in the fact that businesses are willing to pay for nature restoration without government support. “The market has moved,” he says. “Businesses want to be net zero carbon and net zero nature [no nature loss]. And they are going to do quite a lot via carbon and biodiversity offsets, which will help farmers build new nature-friendly businesses.” And a growing minority of farmers are restoring soils and wildlife before any government demands it.

There’s just one final thing required: politicians have to catch up. “If you’re a politician in the current government, even if you weren’t at all interested in the environment, why have this fight with the public?” says Speight of the RSPB. “It just seems crazy to me.”

“The absolutely inexplicable, bewildering thing is that the public are massively in favour of a better environment,” says Glover. “When you ask people what makes them proud of Britain, the countryside is up there with the NHS and the Queen. And yet in politics it’s still seen as this embarrassing thing, not a grownup issue, and that’s so bizarre. The public are way ahead on this.”