Jelly on a plate

I had a wobble the other day. A sanity one that is. I went for my usual walk, or at least that’s what I intended to do. Down the lane, round the road, up and down another lane, up and back down a road then retrace my steps home. All on tarmac, albeit Bucks’ tarmac – pockmarked worse than a teenager’s worst nightmare.

Not this time. I started off down the lane but, instead of walking past a field opening, I swivelled right and yomped along a farm track, then along a field margin, a few of those actually, until I realised I didn’t know where I was or where I was going. And neither did anyone else.

Which got me thinking: if I wanted to disappear à la John Stonehouse MP (showing my age now), how would I do it? The secret, I mused, is to hide in plain sight. Stay one step ahead. Use only cash and public transport or yomp. Dye and straighten my hair. Change my accent depending where I am at any one time: Bucks in Bucks, Yorkshire in the Dales, ‘Marra’ in West Cumbria, Pakistani in Rotherham.

I love these mind games.

I think I embarked on this one partly because I thought I was having a wobble in my loyalty towards the environment. This week, the Government announced changes to nutrient neutrality rules to allow the building of 100,000 homes to go ahead, despite such construction undoubtedly worsening the health of some protected waterways.

Initially, I was as outraged as the next man/woman/there are no other genders. The Tory Government was siding with the development industry once again because the latter funds the former, big time. If building homes worsens the environment, then those who build the homes, not the general taxpayer, should pay for mitigation. Seems like a simple premise to me. I mean, what is the Biodiversity Net Gain scheme if not to offset harm to habitats? Why doesn’t it apply for Nutrient Neutrality? I tried to find out and came across something called nutrient credits that sounded like a BNG scheme specifically for protected waterways. So if there’s a scheme in place already …

Perplexed, I kept googling and found a recent webinar on YouTube, posted by a bunch of water and environmental professionals, including engineers (CIWEM), not political activists of any description, as unbiased as you can get these days. I won’t bore you with the details, partly because there are a lot of them, and partly because the issue is hellishly complicated. Even though I have a science degree and understand the water industry better than most commentators (Fearful Sharkface especially), I didn’t get totally to grips with all the facets and nuances on first viewing. Even after a second try, I still don’t feel sufficiently confident to decide for definite or comment publicly on just how bad the relaxation of the NN rules is. In one respect, if the new regime works how it’s intended, our protected waterways will improve more without than with the rules. On the other hand, the immediate green card for 100,000 new homes is bound to be bad for other aspects of the environment.

Then there’s the political angle. The Government must have known that relaxing the rules would attract another backlash they could well do without. Surely they could have fobbed off the Barratts of this world until after the general election. 

Maybe the problem is a legal one. I’ve read that Natural England’s autocratic oversight of the NN rules could be challenged in the courts, meaning the Government would have had to back down anyway, so why not back down with an alternative environmental protection mechanism in place, albeit an imperfect one?

For the time being, therefore, I shall remain open-mindingly critical of the Government’s relaxation of the NN rules without condemning them outright, because I don’t as yet have sufficient information or understanding. Having thought it through in this blog, I've concluded that I’m not being disloyal to the environment. I’m being thoughtful, realistic and reasonable. Whereas, the eco-activists’ echo chamber have once again viewed an issue as being black and white and tried to shoehorn their square worldview into a free-form movable feast. 

RSPB? Packham? Sharkey? Greens? Lib Dems? Marxists of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your dignity. Woops, too late.

STOP PRESS: See my follow-up post here.