The General Election's Big Issues: Climate Change
KF - Writer
In this series of short articles, writers for InTuition will be looking at the biggest issues political parties need to deal with in the upcoming general election. In this article Keziah Flack looks at the issue of Climate Change.
For me it’s easy to say the most pressing issue I’ll be looking for at the next general is the environment. There is a trend forming with every general election as -during the runup- every party makes grandiose and impressively vague commitments to the environment… and then conveniently forgets about them as soon as the last ballot is cast. If the point of Brexit is to improve the lives of British citizens then surely the environment must take top priority for whoever will guide us through the changeover. Back in 2016 the UK was proclaimed to be one of the least biologically diverse countries in the world due to centuries of large-scale deforestation (Johnston, 2016).
On a global scale we have long past the point of being able to simply push the looming environmental deadline back. If we leave the EU on 31st October, then every single party must make firm plans to bind the UK to sustainable targets for fishing and forestry among the hundreds of other environmental regulations which the EU currently enforce and (perhaps more importantly) do much of the leg work for.
The environment and the economy are intrinsically connected to one another, we cannot have one without the other. The Conservative government released ‘A Green Future: Our 25 Year Plan to Improve the Environment’ in January 2018 and admittedly have been somewhat busy since then, even so not much tangible progress appears to have been made. Generalised sweeping statements such as ‘reversing the loss of marine biodiversity’ are littered throughout but the report seems lacking in any specifics whatsoever.
This kind of vague box ticking needs to be stamped out in the next general election and far more detailed, concrete plans offered to protect and improve our environment or we simply won’t have anything left to argue about.
Read the previous article in this series on funding for the NHS here.
In this series of short articles, writers for InTuition will be looking at the biggest issues political parties need to deal with in the upcoming general election. In this article Keziah Flack looks at the issue of Climate Change.
For me it’s easy to say the most pressing issue I’ll be looking for at the next general is the environment. There is a trend forming with every general election as -during the runup- every party makes grandiose and impressively vague commitments to the environment… and then conveniently forgets about them as soon as the last ballot is cast. If the point of Brexit is to improve the lives of British citizens then surely the environment must take top priority for whoever will guide us through the changeover. Back in 2016 the UK was proclaimed to be one of the least biologically diverse countries in the world due to centuries of large-scale deforestation (Johnston, 2016).
On a global scale we have long past the point of being able to simply push the looming environmental deadline back. If we leave the EU on 31st October, then every single party must make firm plans to bind the UK to sustainable targets for fishing and forestry among the hundreds of other environmental regulations which the EU currently enforce and (perhaps more importantly) do much of the leg work for.
The environment and the economy are intrinsically connected to one another, we cannot have one without the other. The Conservative government released ‘A Green Future: Our 25 Year Plan to Improve the Environment’ in January 2018 and admittedly have been somewhat busy since then, even so not much tangible progress appears to have been made. Generalised sweeping statements such as ‘reversing the loss of marine biodiversity’ are littered throughout but the report seems lacking in any specifics whatsoever.
This kind of vague box ticking needs to be stamped out in the next general election and far more detailed, concrete plans offered to protect and improve our environment or we simply won’t have anything left to argue about.
Read the previous article in this series on funding for the NHS here.
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