04-07-2025
Miliband's eco zealotry is destroying the beauty of rural Britain
The thorny truth of it is that there's nothing natural about the countryside. Rural Britain is a drained and deforested landscape where industrial food production is the order of the day. Iconic species like the turtledove are all but gone and our hedgerows, or what remains of them anyway, will be quieter in decades to come.
And yet, that doesn't mean there's no point in trying to protect the countryside. In spite of it all, this summer has seen extraordinary amounts of fly life and consequently chicks of species like the English partridge are doing relatively well.
In May, I found myself, in a real fury, running down the lane outside my house to ask a tractor driver who had been sent by the council why he was mowing the verge? 'There are birds nesting there', I shouted over the roar of the diesel engine.
He shrugged, in a friendly sort of way, and said he didn't know really – the grass wasn't causing any sort of issue in terms of visibility, but he was seemingly just doing it because he'd been told to. In a sense, fair dos. He was only doing his job but at the same time I find it maddening. The unthinking willingness with which we humans destroy the countryside in pursuit of either 'tidiness' or 'growth' is horrendous.
The news that Ed Miliband is planning to further relax planning rules around new wind turbines in an attempt to double onshore wind generation by 2030 has caused a stir. Some of the turbines will be of the giant and immensely ugly bird of prey and bat-killing sort and others will be smaller turbines that will appear in people's gardens. Planning restrictions, which previously made it difficult to put a turbine up next to that patio of yours, are set to be lifted.
Clearly, the pursuit of energy independence and clean power is a good thing. It's also worth noting that income farmers generate from energy companies putting turbines on their ground is often much needed but are the downsides really being thought about?
It's estimated that turbines kill up to 100,000 birds a year. Often birds of prey, like the hen harrier, are lured in by the carcasses of previously-killed birds and are struck by the blades. It's also believed that the number of bats killed by turbines might be massively underestimated.
Due to being so small the remains don't tend to get found but remarkably, sniffer dogs are now being used to detect little shredded pieces of bat. It is worth noting that if you or I killed a bat, we could be hit with a fine of up to £5,000 pounds.
The drive to send turbines marching across the land is all part of a pattern that the RSPB picked up on when Kevin Austin, their director of policy, noted that: 'the Government's Planning and Infrastructure Bill currently risks weakening existing nature protections.' He went on to say that 'urgent amendments to the Bill are needed to ensure it enables development in a way that does not threaten our most precious habitats and wildlife.'
Part of me worries that Labour's take is that the British landscape is now so degraded and wildlife is doing so badly that it frankly doesn't matter anymore. Why not just tarmac it all? Angela Rayner has explicitly said building must come above all else but where does that end? In the British Isles in 1500 there were just 2.5 million people – we are now at almost 70 million and rising.
Quite a number of species that were flourishing in the 16th century, like the corncrake and the black grouse, are all but gone – our growth and their disappearance are not a coincidence. What is Labour's vision for the future? Are we going to have some of Miliband's turbines on every hill, Rayner's new builds in every meadow, and not a bird or a bat in sight?
Sure, the countryside is a managed and cultivated place. And clean energy really matters, but there is immense value too in the beauty of rural Britain and our desire for growth, be it roads or housing or turbines, will inevitably contribute to the squeezing out of species that are only just hanging on.
