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Stephen Tindale, Greenpeace UK Executive Director on whether the Conservatives will emerge as champions of the environment
Under new leadership, they present a powerful combination of potential and rhetoric. Iain Duncan Smith gave a strong speech on solar power during the leadership contest, and is said to be personally committed. Peter Ainsworth, the Shadow Environment Secretary, appears thoughtful and intelligent, and boasts a record of environmental activity on the backbench.
These men have a strong tradition of Tory environmentalism to follow. Edmund Burke, the great Tory philosopher, wrote eloquently about our obligation as trustees of the natural world. The Tories then championed aesthetic and spiritual values throughout the nineteenth century - against the crass and destructive materialism of Victorian liberalism. During the twentieth century they transformed rhetoric into policy, initiating much of our environmental legislation. The Clean Air Acts, wildlife and countryside protection, the Department for Environment itself - all were Tory creations.
Could Duncan Smith position himself similarly - as a twenty-first century Disraeli, to Blair's latter-day Gladstone? Can his party make progress in opposition, where the last Tory government failed? John Gummer's environmental efforts were notable for their persistence, but also for being continually blocked by the DTI and the Department for Transport. Can Duncan Smith move beyond the environmental gestures made under Hague, when the party picked up genetic modification and incineration as ways of attacking the government, yet failed to develop any coherent agenda?
It's not impossible. But it will take some dramatic shifts. Environmental protection does mean regulating market forces to protect the public interest - a radical breach with Thatcherite orthodoxy. It does require an internationalist commitment; and acceptance that European integration means more than a single market. And it does mean accepting the limits of individualism, most obviously on transport. Crude defense of the motorist will always be inconsistent with any degree of environmental concern.
Recently, the Tories have been campaigning vigorously against the construction of new waste incinerators in the UK. They have pledged to, 'introduce a moratorium on new incinerators until independent British scientific evidence proves they are safe'. Once again, their rhetoric is laudable. But will this stance survive on a local level, as councils up and down the country are forced to make quick decisions about what to do with their waste?
We need more than environmental speeches from the new Tory leader. We need a firm line - on industrial policy, on transport and on Europe - to back his rhetoric up. And the issue of waste incineration looks set to put this to the test.
