When Andrea Leadsom became Minister of State for Energy and Climate Change last year, serving under Secretary of State Amber Rudd, she recalled asking her new department two crucial questions. In her own words:
‘When I first came to this job one of my two questions was ‘Is climate change real?’ and the other was ‘Is hydraulic fracturing safe?’ And on both of those questions I am now completely persuaded.’
Of course in Britain we hardly expect our politicians to have any concept of the department which they are sent to manage. Academic rigour is too time consuming, prior learning is looked down upon as elitist, and the only area in which any politician ever professes experience is business, where crooks and idiots run amok.
So the fact that Andrea Leadsom was given a post in the department for climate change without knowing anything at all about climate change is unsurprising, hardly cause for anyone to get upset. And now that she has been made Environment Secretary in Theresa May’s new cabinet, Leadsom will in have to concern herself even less with the state of the climate, because the climate change brief is passing into the hands of Greg Clark at an expanded Department of Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy. The old Department of Energy and Climate Change is henceforth obsolete.
It is Clark who will attempt to steer Britain’s course on climate change, while Leadsom will deal with issues like farming, fishing, land management, and flood defences. But when it comes to land management and the English countryside, two contradictory Conservative impulses come to a head in Leadsom’s person.
In 2011 the coalition government proposed getting rid of the 258,000 hectares of English woodland managed by the Forestry Commission. At a late stage a little under a third was designated ‘heritage’ land, to be handed over to trusts in the name of the national interest. The rest was to be sold off at commercial prices, some offered to charities, trusts, and community groups, but with the expectation that private companies would swoop in and snatch the best sites for development.
Leadsom supported the government’s measure, which was ultimately withdrawn in the face of political uncertainty and public protest. Curiously she also supports repealing the ban on fox hunting, and recently made this one of her key pledges as she sought to lure traditional Conservatives to her failed leadership campaign.
Foxes are highly adaptable, but they like the sort of cover which woodlands provide. When they are not roaming through urban areas they are fond of hiding or hunting in hedgerows, and by turn England’s woodlands are the prime venue for those who would wish to engage in fox hunting. Some pro-fox hunting campaigners have even argued that the practices around hunting encourage woodland biodiversity.
Presumably Leadsom thinks that if the forests were sold off, the best ones pertaining to her interests would remain and the rest of us would get to enjoy the golf clubs, leisure centres, and other-people’s-houses likely to spring up in their place. Or else she might be envisioned streaking through a naked landscape, out to quash the pesky native fox for once and forever.
