COMMENT THE POLITICAL BIRDER
the opportunity to do better and nowhere to
hide if we do worse than when in the EU. We
currently spend £3bn a year badly in
handouts and grants to landowners. My
proposition would be to cut that sum to £2bn
(and give the other billion quid to the NHS,
the education system or even natural history
authors) and give more of the cake to
better-designed grants and less to poorly
targeted subsidies. Gove isn’t a million miles
away from this in his emphasis on shifting the
whole system to delivering environmental
protection. And I agree with his hint that
more of this money should be spent in the
hills and less in the lowlands.
Words are cheap, but once said or written
they tether you to a viewpoint and actions. It
is di cult to trust politicians, and Mr Gove
has quite a few episodes to live down, but
while he speaks like this we should welcome
his words and expect him to act on them. If
he does, we should praise him – and I will. ■❝
I have no
intention of
weakening the
environmental
protections that
we have put in
place while in
the European
Union
❞
I
n late July, Michael Gove made the best
speech of any Environment Secretary for
about 25 years. His audience of
conservationists at the World Wide Fund
for Nature’s (WWF) headquarters left the
event feeling a mixture of elation at its
content and confusion about whether they
believed any of it. It was a masterful speech
by a consummate politician.
After Truss and Leadsom had demonstrated
little interest in their jobs and not said a single
interesting thing about the environment, and
Owen Paterson named environmentalists as
the ‘green blob’, Gove only had to string a
few words together and be polite to improve
on his immediate predecessors, but he did
much better than that. His speech, The
Unfrozen Moment – Delivering a Green Brexit, was
cultured, erudite and intelligent; read it online
at bit.ly/2vqC2CS.
Gove arrived at DEFRA as a Brexiteer who
had criticised protection of heathland
habitats in his own constituency, given the
impression that he was unconvinced by the
science of climate change, and with that
remark about not needing experts hanging
around his neck. The speech dealt with all
these issues. He talked about the importance
of climate change and had a swipe at
President Trump in doing so; he set out the
need for an evidence-based approach and
even praised the conservation NGOs (naming
RSPB, the Wildlife Trusts, Friends of the
Earth, Greenpeace and WWF) for their
‘campaigning energy and idealism’.Making Brexit work
As a Leave supporter in charge of a
department which has helped shape EU
environmental policy and then implemented
those policies domestically, and which has also
been the conduit for Common Agricultural
Policies and payments, Gove needs to make
Brexit work.
On EU environmental protection, he said:
“I have no intention of weakening the
environmental protections that we have put in
place while in the European Union.” This is
both welcome and unexpected. Delivering
this promise is now a test of Gove’s ability
and honesty.
Reforming agricultural support will be
DEFRA’s greatest test. Brexit both gives usMARK AVERY
Does Gove mean it?
New Environment Secretary Michael Gove made a speech that encouraged
conservationists, and we should all welcome his words – and hold him to them.Do this in October
If your MP is Conservative please write to them
and say you liked Mr Gove’s Unfrozen Moment
speech, and that you expect him to live up to^
what he promised.IfIfIf your MP is Conservative please write to them your MP is Conservative please write to them✔
Could Conservative MP Michael
Gove turn out to be a secret
environmentalist? We can only
hope ...CHRIS MCANDREW (COMMONS.WIKIMEDIA.ORG)http://www.birdguides.com/birdwatch Birdwatch•October 2017 31
1710 p31 Mark Avery FIN.indd 31 14/09/2017 15:32:20