As the Greenpeace website notes:
Back in 2021, Labour Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves said she'd be Britain's first “Green Chancellor”. Labour's annual conference that year even had the tagline “A fairer, greener future”.
Reeves proudly announced that a Labour government would invest £28 billion a year in green capital investment, every year, until 2030.
As we know, that £28 billion commitment was abandoned before Labour even got into office.
Now, it looks as though Labour has abandoned every pretence that it ever had that it was committed to environmental reform, or the preservation of the world that we live in. As The Guardian reports this morning:
The nature-friendly farming budget is set to be slashed in the UK spending review, with only small farms allowed to apply, it can be revealed.
Sources at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) have confirmed the post-Brexit farming fund will be severely cut in the review on 11 June.
Labour promised a fund of £5bn over two years, from 2024 to 2026, at the budget, which is being honoured, but in the years following that it will be slashed for all but a few farms.
As they added by way of explanation:
The nature-friendly farming fund is a package of payments that replaced the EU's common agricultural policy and paid land managers for the amount of land in their care, with the aim of paying farmers to look after nature, soil and other public goods, rather than simply for farming and owning land. Many farms rely on these payments to make ends meet.
One of the biggest reasons why people voted for Labour was that nothing worked under the Tories.
No one in their right mind was convinced that Keir Starmer was a visionary.
No one thought that Rachael Reeves was an economic miracle maker.
I doubt that anybody thought that these two could, in any serious way, transform the UK.
But, people did, at the most basic level, hope that they did at least care for the things that matter in life.
What is now glaringly apparent is that they really do not care.
They do not care about children. They do not care about poverty. They do not care about the elderly. They do not care about those with disabilities. They do not care about those with learning difficulties. They do not care about increasing the tax burden on ordinary people. They do not care about law and order. They are abandoning the NHS. And now, as is becoming all too obvious, they are abandoning the environment as well.
Frankly, if Starmer and Reeves now put up a sign in Whitehall saying 'Abandon hope all ye who enter here', I don't think anyone would be surprised, because that is very clearly what they have done. Anything that required them to have conviction as to their purpose has now been abandoned by them, including any belief that they might have had in our planet and the possibility that we might save it for future generations. That has been given up for the sake of balancing Reeves' utterly pointless spreadsheet.
This is, quote literally, a crime against humanity, only it is much bigger than that. It is a crime against our planet.
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They’ve also put up slogan saying ‘Work Makes your Free (even though there is not going to be any or that you might be incapable of doing it).
Reeves version of money management is simply static and what we need instead is dynamism.
Careful….
‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ indeed.
PSR … Really … It says “Work makes you free” ?
Is this from 1984, or does it just sound like it?
All the indications are from briefed newspaper reports that Reeves is going to announce in next month’s Spending Review support for one very large Gigawatt-size reactor at Sizewell C and a fleet of so-called Small Modular nuclear Reactors (SMRs)(tip:they are not really small, they could be the size of the first generation U.K. “Magnox” reactors). Labour ministers like to call nuclear “clean power” and assert nuclear is “carbon-free” or “zero-carbon” or “emission-free”. All of these descriptions are fake news, to borrow a phrase. Nuclear is one of the least green power generation technologies, arguably the least green if the extremely long lived hazard from radioactive waste is considered. Uranium mining also creates vast volumes of radioactive-toxic wastes, usually in indigenous peoples’ land, so health and ecological protection measures are often lax or non existent. Carbon is also emitted all along the uranium fuel production chain, especially during the heavily energy intensive uranium enrichment process.
Reeves looks to have a peculiar acuity in picking losers for the environment
Agreed
The lobbyists are the ones who gain. Carbon capture is an expensive and not very efficient method but generates business for a few big corporations. Renewables and battery networks provide work locally and deliver more quickly.
It may not even work…
It could just be an expensive ruse
I think it is
We already have the most efficient and cost-effective carbon capture and storage devices: the natural world – everything from the sea, to the soil, to all living plants.
The last thing the planet needs is corporate nerds proclaiming that, one day, and at extreme cost, the may have managed to re-invent the tree.
What a distraction from what really needs to be done.
I saw somewhere and I wish I could find the reference but for what it’s worth, warnings about hearsay etc., The SMR approach actually increases the volume and mass of nuclear waste that needs to be disposed of. This slightly perverse fact is due to radioactive contamination of all the ancillary works associated with each nuclear reactor. Since multiple small tractors need multiple smaller pipes, the volume and mass of such pipework increases. As the volume contained within the pipes increase with the cube of the diameter whereas the area increases more slowly with the square. Also for the same flow rate smaller pipes mean higher pressure, so more chance of leaks, so walls need to be thicker and joints more massive. I.e. a lot more containment material is required.
Thinking about decommissioning is an essential part of great engineering. So I regret for dubious profit motives it seems UK engineering companies are not seeking to be great engineers, but rather run of the mill ones. How have the mighty fallen.
FYI
Nuclear waste from small modular reactors SMRs
Lindsay M. Krall h, Allison M. Macfarlane , and Rodney C. Ewing
May 31, 2022
“Our results show that most small modular reactor designs will actually increase the volume of nuclear waste in need of management and disposal, by factors of 2 to 30 for the reactors in our case study,” said study lead author Lindsay Krall, a former MacArthur Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). “These findings stand in sharp contrast to the cost and waste reduction benefits that advocates have claimed for advanced nuclear technologies.”
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2111833119
Thanks
They will have lost what farmers vote they had forever, and the rest of the rural community. In comparison Gove was a visionary – who could have imagined that!
I think we need to stop focussing on protecting “the environment” and ensuring the future of “the planet”. The planet will be fine. The environment will, as it has in the past, adapt.
The focus needs to be on human civilisation. It’s clear many of the systems (eco, social, technical) that civilisation depends on are at high risk of collapse given the massive change we are forcing on the heat balance of our only planetary home. The heat itself isn’t the big problem, although it is in some areas of the world. But it’s the effects of that heat on myriad other systems that will collapse civilisation. Food, weather, transport, health, finance, etc.
What we should be accusing most of the political leaders of is sabotaging the future of our civilisation. They are propelling us to a future with a radically smaller global population of humans, living nomadic hunter-gatherer lives like the Australian Aboriginals. Which by the way lasted 40,000 years, so empirically much more sustainable than modern industrial societies that have managed only about 1% of that history so far.
Sorry – but I do not agree with your premise
If I care about life on earth – all life on earth, the planet is far from fine
I have said, regularly on this blog that the LINO gov’ are traitors ditto those that own, for example – water companies.
It would seem that some in Wezzie agree.
https://x.com/labourlewis/status/1928023933338476796
Note how Mr Lewis used the word treason to describe the actions of the water companies – it is not a big step to extend that to the LINO gov – enablers of the environmental destruction of the UKs rivers and other eco systems on which we depend.
In my view, we need to keep using these terms, treason and traitors to describe the actions and people within the Starmer gov’.
I like Clive.
We refer to each other as friends.
The planet cant “adapt” to increased radioactive waste that has no safe method of disposal, nor to toxic chemicals, nor to increasiing salination of land with sea levels rise and critically not with increasing temperatures.
Here is the table of the trajectory of global warming:
1. Increase in extreme weather events.
2. Tropical food supply/crop yields decline.
3. More floods, extreme heatwaves, more droughts.
4. Some summers so hot that stepping outside is lethal.
5. High risk of reversing carbon cycle, runaway warming, spiral of droughts and famines, starvation, chaos…
6. Deadly heatwaves every summer, hundreds of drowned cities, ecosystems devastated, more tipping points crossed..
7. Hothouse Earth. Warming incompatible with human civilisation. most planet uninhabitable.
We are probably between stage 3 and 4 now.
Nigel Goddard needs to learn some basic physics, chemistry and biology before commenting on the environment.
@ Bill Hughes,
How this was even considered is far beyond my comprehension:
https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/may/22/revealed-uranium-from-uk-nuclear-fuel-factory-dumped-into-protected-ribble-estuary&ved=2ahUKEwixm_2omMmNAxWnQUEAHfMqBUsQFnoECCMQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2Xs9A-1NV2DJDeYx4nUqQV
Annual limits, yes annual, on radioisotopes that have half-lives in the billions of years; that’s before we consider the other elements in the decay chain. Or that the stable element at the end of the decay chains, of uranium isotopes, is lead.
Yes folks, the ultimate best case scenario is permanent poisoning of the environment with lead – eventually!
I have never understood nuclear.
I mean the planet will survive… if we’re only referring to the continuous planetary body itself.
And life itself will find a way, as it always has.
But obviously, nobody wants the surface to turn to slag populated exclusively by extremophile bacteria, which it very well could with runaway warming.
Climate change is a civilizational threat, yes, but it’s specifically an extinction-level threat.
I think, more generally, there is potential for nuclear technology, particularly with how environmentally destructive attempting to increase energy storage is in terms of the extraction of raw minerals. Pumped water seems like the cleanest solution, but it doesn’t seem like the UK is fit for that, and we certainly shouldn’t be pumping water into old mines, like some people have proposed.
That said, the problem we have doesn’t seem to be a lack of base load, as far as I am aware.
Fink, Thiel and the techbros have promised them shiny trinkets and they lack the nous to consider what the cost will turn out to be.
But then, perhaps they don’t care about the costs, because it won’t be them that pays them, it will be the British public.