Green Alliance’s 35th Birthday Reception last week was an eye-opener not just for the speeches or the erudite eco conversation but for the event itself.
As lifelong supporter Oliver Letwin said in his speech he imagined it would be three people in cardigans with a bottle of elderflower wine. But the fancy venue was packed with many more knights and dames and champions of business and industry than your average CBI reception.
This shows how, thanks to Green Alliance, environment is now fully mainstream. ‘The Environment’ is not an abstract, nor it is not a single issue campaign, it is where we all live and work and play it is our habitat and we are part of it.
Ed Miliband, always better live than via the media, gave a passionate speech which stressed the importance of the environment to all our lives and made the link between social justice and environmental justice. Likewise Letwin summed up the issue perfectly, saying “nature sustains us all”.
There are wider lessons for utilities in the evolution of the definition of environment and the maturing of the environmental movement, green NGOs and community groups could be key partners in developing innovative approaches for delivering investment programmes and for wider customer engagement, and I urge all utilities to look closely at the new Green Alliance strategy document.
But this political, environmental and business consensus about a shared future and about the mutual benefit of working with the environment rather than against it, threw up a strange paradox for me. This was illustrated by the conservation element of the evening. Green Alliance had invited some examples of a rare species to the event – the Green Tory. I saw at least three of these on the night and they were all articulate, intelligent, and displayed an amazing ability to make the case for linking environment and business through resource efficiency.
It was magnificent to see them in their natural habitat yet alarming to think that this wonderful creature, from which we could learn so much, is on the verge of extinction.
Green Alliance is truly cross-party and apolitical and there were many references at this anniversary event to the work of Prime Minister Thatcher in driving forward the environmental agenda. Yet it was telling that whilst we had the leader of the Opposition n attendance, the Tories were represented by “environmental” MPs.
The green movement has matured and is now about consensus and working with businesses and communities. It is about the wider environment and the issues of place and people and how they interact with the natural world, as Fiona Reynolds, the incoming chair both explained.
But at the same time it seems that politically, the environment is slowly becoming a left-wing agenda, with green Tories being driven or frozen out of the “greenest government ever”.
Conservatives have conservation in the very name of their party and their symbol is an oak, yet the Government agenda seems to be to cut the “green crap” and push forward with culling, fracking and selling.
Environment is not a purely socialist issue. It is the conservation of our natural heritage and the place in which we live. It is the careful stewardship of resources, creating value from natural capital – surely these are core Conservative values?
Environmental organisations like RSPB and The National Trust (yes environmental in the wider sense) have millions of members and I would be very surprised if they were all socialists!
So, the main things I took away from the Green Alliance event were the growing influence of the environmental movement, the excellence of the Green Alliance in continuing to shape the green agenda to encompass ever wider social and local environmental issues and the need for utilities to engage more with the modern environmental movement. But overwhelmingly too, I was alerted to the urgent need for us all to nurture and champion the rare Green Tory.