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First the “badgers moved the goalposts”. Now environment secretary, Owen Paterson, has been shown the red card in a cabinet reshuffle.
The environmental views of Paterson's replacement, Liz Truss, are little known, but the former Shell employee is a free market enthusiast who backed the doomed sell-off of public forests. That suggests someone who – like Paterson – sees environmental protection as so much red tape to cut.
Elsewhere in the reshuffle, the departure of foreign secretary, William Hague, who clearly recognised climate change as the global strategic threat it is, and irrepressible green cheerleader Greg Barker as energy minister, removes two of a rare breed: strong green Tory voices in government.
Only time will reveal Truss's views but the absolute minimum required is that – unlike Paterson – she accepts global warming as a manmade danger. It was fundamentally ridiculous to have a climate change sceptic leading the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and damaging too. Paterson slashed the funding for adapting to climate change by 40%, just as the warnings of rising risks becoming deafening.
But in fact many of the crises – floods, horsemeat, badger culling – that paved the way to Paterson's sacking pre-dated his arrival at Defra in September 2012. The controversial badger cull policy had already been in place by his predecessor Caroline Spelman. As the culls limped towards their predictable failure, another environment secretary might have dumped them – and Truss should. But the obsessed Paterson waded in ever deeper. No10 wanted to bury the bad news of the cull along with the badgers. Instead, the controversy worsened.
The floods that devastated many parts of Britain last winter were the worst kind of bad news for Paterson: uncontrollable. But his defences against criticism had huge holes in them thanks to heavy budget cuts in flood protection implemented by Spelman. Paterson actually won increased flood defence spending from Treasury, even before the winter deluge, and was praised by Environment Agency chair Lord Chris Smith for his hard work during the floods crisis even when a detached retina confined him to a hospital bed.
Farmers and landowners will miss the “true blue countryman” (the headline of a supposedly harsh profile I wrote of Paterson which he told me was in fact “very fair”). Paterson gave them virtually everything they wanted, including vociferous but doomed opposition to an EU ban on bee-harming pesticides. He also oversaw a new phase of the vast subsidy hand-out that is the Common Agricultural Policy, where his loathing of big government did lead him to curb the demands of farmers a little.
One of the few policies clearly identified with Paterson is biodiversity offsetting, which allows developers to destroy green spaces if they create new areas elsewhere. But even this is unlikely to provide a legacy: I am told No10 are unconvinced and happy for it fade away unimplemented.
Paterson was charming, hard-working and utterly blinkered. Defra governs so many parts of our lives – air, water, land, food – that its new boss must work with the scientific advice that informs effective policy, not rail against inconvenient truths.
The massive Defra cuts Spelman blithely accepted in the heady new days of the coalition in 2010 – the biggest of any major department in Whitehall – made the department a disaster waiting to happen. Paterson's many blind spots – climate change the biggest of all – ensured that, like Spelman, he was soon dumped back onto the back benches.
The reshuffle has also seen energy and climate change minister, Greg Barker, resign.
Barker was one of a few true Tory greens, who saw the danger of global warming and the opportunity of the fast-growing green economy. But even his greatest supporters would find it difficult to deny that the biggest policy he oversaw – the green deal energy efficiency scheme – has been a catastrophe, with insulation rates plummeting. The other energy minister Michael Fallon, an ungreen ying to Barker's yang, is also going. But he is promoted to the cabinet as defence secretary.
The replacements for Paterson, Barker, Fallon and Hague may yet surprise us, but as it stands the Conservative Party are set to go into the next election with a very different position on the environment than the “vote blue, go green” of 2010. They have got rid of the “green crap”.
