The environment has been "at the heart of government policy-making across the board", the Prime Minister told a meeting of environmentalists and businessmen and women. If that is so, cynics might ask, why has it taken him more than three and a half years to make a speech on the subject? And though the Green Alliance and the Confederation of British Industry - who organised the City of London conference at which he spoke - were probably delighted to be invited to help him push the subject "back up the agenda", some of the old campaigners present might well have been asking themselves who had let it slip so far down in the first place.
Labour's environmental record is not, as it happens, entirely bad. Britain is on target to meet its Kyoto obligations on carbon emissions, and air quality has improved. But even as Blair delivered his speech, his list of boasts juddered to a halt with a bathetic claim that London had the cleanest river of any major European city. It is not that the quietly energetic Michael Meacher, Secretary of State for the Environment, has no other achievements to his credit; it is just that Blair fails to engage with them.
Thus, Labour's performance is mediocre where it needs to be aggressive and courageous. Richard Rogers' urban task force provided the government with a revolutionary blueprint for city planning that could transform our cities, reverse the environmentally damaging flight to the suburbs and halt the gobbling up of greenfield sites for housing. Yet, we are still waiting for the much-delayed urban white paper and are forewarned that it is now a mere shadow of its early self, after the government was blown off-course by the rural lobby. Labour struggles to do the right thing - encouraging renewable energy, discouraging car use, for example - but ends up in a funk when it realises that putting green issues high on the agenda often involves upsetting powerful interests: motorists, farmers or giant biochemical companies.
Telling businesses how to limit or deal with waste, or drivers how often they can drive their cars, or the farming industry how to use pesticides, are just some of the "hard choices" that the Prime Minister's speech claimed the government had to make. The problem is, they smack of the joyless, command economy, old Labour past that it would rather forget. But to have an impact on a wide range of conservationist issues, it must inevitably ruffle a few feathers.
The Prime Minister's speech acknowledges this, and to that extent we should welcome it. He hopes to see business "as part of the answer rather than as the problem", and "to build a business case for the environment, working to harness clean technologies". There are other things to welcome, too, though £50m for wind energy research seems inadequate to the task of achieving a 10 per cent of energy production from renewable resources. But, in openly acknowledging the link between car use and global warming, and committing Britain to the 12.5 per cent reduction in carbon emissions demanded by the Kyoto agreement (and acknowledging that we should be working towards 60 per cent over 50 years), the Prime Minister is at least laying the ground for a tougher line over future fuel protests. He has also committed himself to attending the 2002 Earth Summit in person, which means that, assuming he intends to go as Prime Minister, he will work internationally to encourage other heads of state to attend and make the UN meeting a high-level event, rather than a talking shop.
And yet, despite all this and his engaging references to the sad demise of the house-sparrow and to the need to safeguard a future for his children, his speech lacked conviction. If only (the Prime Minister seemed to be saying) green business could be made as profitable as the new GM biotechnologies. But when he discovers that it cannot, what then? He may claim to be an agnostic on genetically modified crops, waiting only to "evaluate the technology", but if consumers, rightly or wrongly, simply do not want GM technology, will he really find the courage to oppose the giant biotechnology industry and its supporters in his own government?
As Blair himself said: "We must not kid ourselves there are hard choices between idealism and realism." He firmly believes that he is a realist. Yet it is not realistic to think that we can reduce carbon emissions without forcing businesses and individuals to change their attitudes to energy use. It is realistic, though, to point out that if we fail, it will cost the earth.
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