Let me show you a global conspiracy magic trick

A guest blog by Bryan Hopkins

Hands up if you would like clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, clean seawater to swim in or a climate which is not too hot, not too cold, not too dry, not too wet. That seems like something reasonable to ask for. So why has the environment become such a political football?

We might trace the beginnings of significant environmental concern back to the 1960s when issues such as pesticide poisoning and acid rain in Scandinavia started to be talked about. However, as problems like these started to catch public attention, a backlash started led by individuals and institutions who realised that if people really started to worry about these problems and demand action this would create serious problems for them, for the profits being made by corporations and for the individual wealth being accrued by a small number of powerful individuals.

This was now the age of Thatcherism and the arrival of neoliberal economics. Neoliberalism is a theory originally developed by the Austrian Friedrich Hayek in the 1950s as a response to the centralised control economics of the Soviet Union with its associated crushing of individual freedom. His proposal was that governments should not control economies but leave economic decision-making to the marketplace, where private enterprise would make all the decisions. Anticipating that this might not work out perfectly for everyone in society, Hayek did see an important role for governments in maintaining security to stop protests against problems caused by neoliberalism. Margaret Thatcher saw that the United Kingdom was an ideal place to experiment with neoliberalism because British people have no tradition violet protest or revolution against their governments.

Neoliberalism emphasises the importance of free markets, free trade and the importance of globalisation for business. This was why we saw the demise of the steel industry in Sheffield and most manufacturing employment across the whole of Britain north of Watford.

The political right worships at the shrine of neoliberalism, but what has it achieved? If we look at a range of social and economic indicators since the 1950s what we actually see is that life improved most rapidly for people in this country up until the 1980s, but at that point, improvements started to tail off dramatically. Overall, the country became wealthier but this was because inequality increased: a small minority of people started to become extremely rich and the vast majority of people saw their incomes stagnate and fail to keep pace with rising prices.

The significance of this for environmental protection is that protection will only happen when private enterprise finds that it is profitable to provide the protection. Without government regulation, private enterprise pours contaminated water into rivers and spews noxious fumes into the atmosphere. Those who lived in Sheffield in the early 1990s when the bus network was deregulated will remember the ancient buses brought back into service, belching black smoke onto our streets — because they were profitable.

There is a strong argument to be made that the environmental crisis we are now facing is a consequence of the neoliberal economics that we have seen in the last 40 years. Globalisation has shifted industrial production to countries where labour is cheap and regulations are low so that we in the West can enjoy cheap consumer products and forget that China is building large numbers of coal-fired power stations so that it can make these consumer products for us. This is why the United Kingdom’s greenhouse gas emissions have decreased in recent years — we are getting other countries to emit these gases for us.

As the crisis is deepening there is a greater public consensus that governments need to do more to protect our environment and that they need to bring railways, energy and water companies back under some form of public control. And that, to the neoliberal economist, is totally unacceptable.

This is why we now see right-wing networks such as the Conservative Party’s Net Zero Scrutiny Group and other more secretive organisations such as the Global Warming Policy Foundation and the United States’ Heartland Institute encouraging the spread of conspiracy theories, that the green movement is part of a secret global network that wants to crush individual freedom through punishing motorists, imprisoning honest people in Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, and so on.

I am reminded here of the art of the magician. The secret of performing magic tricks is to make your audience look in your left hand when you are doing something in your right hand. This is exactly what is happening here with the reaction against green ideas. Wealthy industrialists and the politicians that they control know that there really is an environmental disaster coming down the road and that this will mean greater regulation and public investment — an end to a system which has brought them untold individual wealth. So they are now persuading small but persistent groups of others to look away from the damage that they are doing and to concentrate instead on criticising and denigrating green extremists.

Yes, folks, there is a global conspiracy but it is operating in plain sight, and the United Kingdom government is a key player in it.

Caroline Lucas MP speaking at a protest outside Tufton Street earlier this year.