Dangerous times need a united front

If any historians survive the environmental crises to come, they will look back on the political follies of the 2020s with horror.

While the international rise of fascism mirrors many aspects of the 1930s, current economic fantasies are more reminiscent of the 1980s. The financial deregulation of that decade led directly to the 1990 and 2008 crashes, while that decade’s “growth” policies led to deindustrialisation, mass unemployment, inequality and accelerating urban sprawl. They also failed to generate GDP growth which became more sclerotic than even the previous decade’s.

There are plainly strong elements of Margaret Thatcher’s “Great Car Economy” in Rachel Reeves’ current dash for growth.

Will it lead to rapid growth of GDP? Plainly not.

Things like airport expansion, new towns or accelerated car-dependent-sprawl take years and are unlikely to have significant benefits to the economy by the next election. They might, however, bring big bonuses to shareholders of construction and development companies and the oil industry.

Plainly, the environmental movement has a big fight on its hands if senior ministers can get up and moan about tiny, local efforts to protect creatures like bats or newts. Or the quango that’s supposed to protect nature gives public support to a scheme for nature-trashing urban sprawl because of nebulous talk about “at-scale” nature restoration.

So what should the response of our national environmental planning and transport bodies be?

Back in the mid-2000s, central government was busily trashing the very sustainable policies developed by the late John Prescott in New Labour’s first four-year term. Led, of course, by HM Treasury, work was underway to promote urban sprawl and replace plans for sustainable transport with road building and airport expansion.

These were supposed to produce “growth”. Instead, we had the 2008 crash.

Environmental NGOs at the time had responded by discussing collective support for their newly founded joint initiative, Smart Growth UK. It was intended to begin setting out a sustainable alternative to the “sprawl’n’drive” policies coming out of Whitehall. It failed to launch then because the Great Crash hit the NGOs’ finances as hard as everybody else’s. It’s kept going since with some support from the NGOs and many individuals.

Fast forward to 2025 and we have an urgent need for a unified response which meets the Government’s desire for a stable and productive economy, adequate housing (including new homes for those most in need), sustainable transport and development, and protection of nature. All of these without trashing the atmosphere and our land – and the many ecosystem services it provides.

The Government is currently giving “growth” a dirty name, so maybe any such movement would need to move beyond a name like “Smart Growth”? That movement, which began in North America, has been seriously harmed by Trumpian politics, though heroically keeps going and will likely continue to do so in the face of serious opposition. But the name has never achieved traction over here (though perhaps a growth-obsessed Treasury might warm to it?).

Whatever it’s called, this is a shout-out to our transport and planning environmental groups to make common cause behind an agreed and coherent set of sustainable policies.

United we stand, divided we fall.

Jon Reeds