As the former chair of the Sustainable Development Commission, I’m clearly going to be a bit biased about the government’s decision yesterday to get rid of the commission. So I’ve been working really hard to put myself in Ministers’ shoes in terms of the ‘rationale’ they’ve advanced for this reprehensible decision.

They’ve put forward four justifications:

1. It will save money

The SDC costs the taxpayer around £4 million a year, around 50% of which comes from Defra. The rest comes from the Devolved Administrations and other Whitehall Departments – all of which wanted to carry on working with the SDC. As George Monbiot has pointed out, the SDC’s advice on reducing costs through increased efficiency has already saved the Government many, many times that negligible amount, and would have gone on doing so year after year.

2. Sustainable development is now mainstreamed across government

Defra Ministers are now claiming that sustainable development has been embedded in every department. In other words, no specialist capability at the centre is any longer required, simply because the government ‘gets it’.

Like hell it does. To hear Caroline Spelman, Secretary of State in Defra, make such a totally fatuous claim after a few weeks in power is irritating beyond belief. She clearly knows nothing of the constant slog required (of the SDC and many other organisations) to achieve the limited traction that is all that can be laid claim to today.

There’s a rich irony here. The SDC is a UK-wide body. Neither Wales nor Scotland was in favour of getting rid of the commission, no doubt because both countries have done an infinitely better job than Whitehall on ‘mainstreaming’ sustainable development.

3. It will avoid duplication

This is a bit trickier, simply because the SDC does a number of different things. It advises ministers – and there are indeed lots of other people who do that. But rarely if ever from an integrated sustainable development perspective.

It helps countless public sector bodies (from the Audit Commission to the Department of Education, from Local Authorities to Primary Care Trusts in the NHS) to make sense of sustainable development, and no other government body does any of that.

And it scrutinises government performance on a completely independent basis across the whole sustainable development agenda – not just on climate change. And no other body does that.

4. Sustainable development is too important to delegate to an external body

It’s worth recording Caroline Spelman’s actual words here:

“Together with Chris Huhne, I am determined to take the lead role in driving the sustainable agenda across the whole of government, and I’m not willing to delegate this responsibility to an external body.”

Even after nine years working with dozens of government ministers, I’m astonished at such utterly brazen cynicism. The only thing Mrs Spelman has done so far as Secretary of State at Defra is publish a new strategy for the department. This has not one serious reference to sustainable development in it. Such is the depth of her concern.

If Defra’s next step is to get rid of what’s left of its own internal Sustainable Development Unit, then it will have literally no capacity to ‘drive the sustainable agenda’ even within Defra, let alone ‘across the whole of government’. And how can you drive anything if you haven’t the first clue what it actually means? And it just got rid of the only part of the system capable of providing you with a basic primer for beginners?

So let’s not beat around the bush: their justification for getting rid of the SDC is transparently vacuous, if not downright dishonest. This is an ideological decision – in other words, a decision driven by dogma not by evidence-based, rational analysis.

And the only conceivable reason for allowing dogma to dominate in this way is that the government doesn’t want anyone independently auditing its performance on sustainable development – let alone a properly-resourced, indisputably expert body operating as ‘a critical friend’ on an inside track within government.

I don’t suppose the Prime Minister was even consulted about such a footling little matter. But it’s clear that his advisors hadn’t the first idea about the kind of signal this dogma-driven decision sends out, ensuring that his claim that this will be the ‘greenest government ever’ is in deepest jeopardy.

It’s too early to make any definitive judgement about how the green agenda will fare under the coalition. But it’s not encouraging. ‘Greenest ever’ has to mean something substantive. Simply smearing a sickly ideological slime over everything just won’t cut it.

Jonathon Porritt was chair of the Sustainable Development Commission from 2000 to 2009

‘If nature was a bank, it would have been bailed out a long time ago’. I heard that quip in the US last week and it came to mind again during our new Chancellor’s first set-piece speech at the CBI’s annual dinner.

Close your eyes and it could have been our Prime Minister talking – lots of mentions of small government, big society, enterprise, blah blah.  Oh and the need to urgently tackle our massive deficit. I’ll say one thing for the new chaps in charge – they do appear to be a team, and they are consistent in their messages, which, whether or not you buy the content, is probably a good thing.

Chancellor George Osborne finished with a triumphant flourish, stating that ‘Britain is open for Business’. Excellent news. One small niggle though. He made no mention of the other balance sheet we need to sort out – the one that belongs to nature.

We are not only out of cash, we are nearly out of the other resources which both the UK and the global economy are totally reliant upon. From water to oil, we are getting very close to the bottom of the barrel. But Mr Osborne didn’t mention this other, more pressing resource crisis. His vision is of Britain selling stuff to the emerging middle classes of the developing economies as a road to growth.

This vision is fundamentally flawed. It totally misses the point that economic growth based on existing energy sources and existing manufacturing processes will speed up our descent to a world where there are not enough vital resources to go round, a world where climate change has started to disrupt significantly the very economy Mr Osborne is trying to resuscitate.

This is where the Dame comes in. Last night we also heard from Dame Ellen MacArthur. She told us the story of her grit, determination, bravery and courage in breaking the world record for the fastest navigation round the world. She also gave the best analysis of the current resource crisis we face, and ways to deal with it, that I have heard for a very long time.

Being alone on her boat opened her eyes to the reality of the utter dependence we humans have on the resources around us. Running out of oil in the middle of circumnavigating the globe just wasn’t an option for Ellen. It would have meant the end of her journey. In the same way, running out of resources will spell the end for our collective journey. And according to lots of real-time data, we are on that trajectory.

Ellen has given up sailing to try and do her bit to open the eyes of the world to the crisis we face – and to offer her take on the solutions. Her answer is not tinkering around the edges, or creeping incrementalism, but totally rethinking how we do things. In her view, nothing short of radical innovation will cut it. She’s absolutely right.

George Osborne talked convincingly about the need for ‘a sustainable path back to fiscal growth’. But based on what I heard last night, apart from one measly mention of renewable energy, I wonder if the new Chancellor has a full grasp of what true sustainability is. 

Mr Osborne – learn from the Dame - take the path to smart growth and new, sustainable business models, not the path to any old growth, because that path will very quickly lead to a dead end.

Environment policy didn’t break the surface during the UK election campaign.  How will it fare in a coalition of parties at opposite ends of the political spectrum?

Amongst the many surprises was the near absence of environment from the parties’ campaigns and the first ever prime-ministerial debates.  Does it mean the British care less about the environment than in previous years?  Apparently not: the share of the green vote held up and the Green party won its first ever seat in the British Parliament (Caroline Lucas, Leader of the party and long time Member of the European Parliament, taking Brighton from Labour).

But with the parties fairly close to each other on much of environment policy, there were more points to be scored by talking about social policy (we are bracing ourselves for Conservative leader David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’, whatever that means) and of course, dealing with the deficit where we are up there with the European basket cases like Greece, Spain and Portugal.

Having torn lumps out of each other for months on these and other issues, our identikit party leaders now find themselves round the table in Britain’s first true coalition government in 65 years. I’ll spare you the constitutional niceties of how that came about. Suffice to say that political commentators, having had to speculate wildly for several days about what the outcome of the election might be, now find themselves, along with the new government in largely uncharted waters.  In a cabinet of 23, Liberal Democrats hold five posts,  including the responsibility for Energy and Climate Change, which has gone to Chris Huhne, millionaire businessman and one time contestant for the party leadership.   

This appointment throws into sharp relief the strategic and tactical questions this coalition raises for the future programme of the government, not least on environmental policy.  Despite substantial areas of common ground – on the need to cut emissions, boost renewable energy generation, and create a ‘green bank’ for investment in cleantech  for example - the Lib Dems have long been opposed to the replacement of Britain’s ageing fleet of nuclear reactors, whilst the Tories see nuclear as the mainstay of both emissions reduction and future energy security in the UK.  

This issue is such a clear divide, that in the formal agreement about the coalition the issue is dealt with directly, with a bizarre result.   The government (i.e. Huhne) will bring forward a ‘national planning statement’ which would give permission for new nuclear to be built, but then Lib Dems (including Huhne) would be allowed to abstain from the vote bringing it into force.  This in effect means that the Conservatives can push it through on their own, whilst the Lib Dems have (just about) a path of dignity in opposing it and allowing it.

What Green supporters who voted Lib Dem for their anti-nuclear stance will make of this is anyone’s guess.  In any case, both parties are agreed that there should be no public money for nuclear power, and since no nuclear power plant has been built, ever, without such subsidy, it will be interesting to see if any of the utility companies that were lining up to build the new capacity will still find it so appealing.   Lib Dems are presumably hoping not. 

Elsewhere the picture seems a bit clearer, and generally positive for the environment.  Campaigners are elated at the scrapping of Labour’s plans for a third runway at Heathrow.  The coalition agreement makes positive noises about a new high speed rail network – though it’s hard to see how that will be paid for any time soon. Though there’s no new target on the proportion of energy from renewables, investment in marine power and anaerobic digestion also gets a mention, as does a smart grid to link it all up, smart meters to make us all more frugal in using it, and other measures to boost energy efficiency in the home. And along with the promise of public investment in carbon capture and storage and a floor price for carbon comes an undertaking to prevent new coal-fired power without sufficient CCS to meet a demanding emissions standard.  

Some cynics have suggested that Lib Dems have been given jobs that are either so marginal to the Conservative project that they don’t matter, or require them to dip their hands in the blood of ‘dealing with the deficit’ and so alienate their supporter base.   A more nuanced view is that the coalition has enabled Cameron to do what he could not have done with a majority, giving him a reason to be more positive about the environment and Europe and move his party further onto the centre ground.  If he succeeds in finally decontaminating the Tory brand in this way, they argue, he will have laid the foundation for successive Conservative governments for many years to come.

Whatever the motivation, the new team have started with a bang.  Cameron swiftly announced that the government will cut its own emissions by 10% in the next 12 months.  Speaking to staff at the Department for Energy and Climate Change he said ‘I want this to be the greenest government ever’.  Meanwhile Huhne took up the reins at DECC, promising to put energy security ‘at the heart of the UK’s national security strategy’ and to ‘fundamentally change how we supply and use energy in Britain'.  Amen to that.

This blog first appeared in Grist

As the negotiations continue to form our next government, what are we to make of an election process where nothing was what it seemed – except that the exit polls were pretty accurate and correctly forecast the first Green Party seat in Westminster?

 The message the electorate sent to the body politic, and to the mindlessly partisan media, was ‘we deserve better’.   Better system, better choice of candidates, better commentariat to help us think through the choices that really matter – e.g. defending the (still) defenceless economy from the barbarian hoards of currency speculators, and working out how to radically cut greenhouse gas emissions in a way that increases rather than slashes and burns the resilience and conviviality of our communities. 

In a pre-election debate on the relative merits of the party manifestos, the students on the Forum’s Leadership for Sustainable Development Masters came to the same conclusion.  They were asked to fillet the party promises from a sustainability perspective and to discuss the political process in general.  Here is a flavour of an energetic and thoughtful discussion.

How many people would read the manifestos with the care the students were asked to do?   Of the 30 million voters probably only a handful, so why are they so long and detailed?  How many policies would be put into action?  Some, but wasn’t the point of the manifestos to give a flavour of the partiess’ approach to policy, rather than write out a full prescription for government?   A lot of the policy detail was similar, while the ideologies behind them were different and not always explicit. Students found the manifestos to be defensively and cleverly written to cloak potentially controversial ideas from detailed scrutiny by voters, other parties and the media.   Wasn’t this a bad habit, brought forward from the days when manifestos appeared in print only and were discontinued and biodegraded long before the government ran its term? In these digital days every word is a couple of clicks away for anyone wanting to check it out, making a virtue of blandness and necessity of using all the key words. 

Were the leader debates a good thing?  Well, yes and no, the students concluded.  Yes, because the campaign was galvanised, and made it more interesting.  No because it became an electoral reality show with an edge of cruelty.  Who would slip up and show their vulnerability to the sword of another? Where were the women?  What is it about the process that is so unappealing to them?  Or, indeed, to many men?  Was the rise and stall of Cleggomania a fabrication of the media – desperate for a different story to fill multiple pages for several days?  When the students in turn ‘defended’ each manifesto for its sustainability content, they found that, once in role, it was easy to regress into cheap debating points rather than argue content and logic, to be theatrical and to lie when in a corner.   Does that mean a certain type of person is attracted to politics, perpetuating the truism widely shared but never overcome, that what you have to say to be elected is different from what you have to do once in power?

With such a tight focus on the party leaders, what does that mean for our form of representative democracy?  Wouldn’t many voters be confused to find the names Clegg, Brown and Cameron absent from their ballot papers, with many largely unknown people competing to represent the voters’ interests in each constituency?   How clear are we about the difference between a representative democracy and a participatory one?  Have the boundaries been fudged by the perpetual recourse of all parties to opinion polls, focus groups and other means of feeling the national pulse between elections? Doesn’t this interfere with the relationship between the elected member of parliament and their constituents?   What is stopping politicians exercising their wise judgement on behalf of constituents they know well?  

There were many views on this last point, ranging from the debate-strangling use of the party whip on parliamentary votes to the undue influence of the media, corporate interests, and the money markets on the democratic process.  We contemplated the fact that we seem to have the worst of all worlds – our democracy is neither representative nor participatory, but rather monitory, in that everyone is monitoring everyone else, by poll, by social media, by targets, by their behaviour. Monitoring for a slip up, a missed target, a failure, a weakness, a scandal.  Gordon Brown’s gaffe with Mrs Duffy was an exemplar of a monitory black hole, when everyone was monitoring what everyone was saying and doing as a result.  Our attention is atomised and drawn to storms in teacups while financial barbarians gather at the gate and global warming is ignored. 

The session ended optimistically, imagining that, this time, there would be a real chance to reform our democratic system.  In early June we regroup to consider the implications for sustainability – and our democracy – of the election outcome.

So it’s happened: the Green Party has its first MP.

The look on Caroline Lucas’s face as her result in Brighton Pavilion was announced pretty much said it all: elation, exhaustion and huge relief all rolled into one.  She’d been talking during the count of feeling “sick and nervous with the weight of so many people’s expectation on me”.

For me, it’s just the elation without the exhaustion. Thirty-one years after I first stood as a Green Party (or Ecology Party, as it then was!) candidate, the near-insurmountable barrier of our first past the post electoral system has been shoved aside by a wonderful, utterly dedicated and very inspiring politician. 

But I don’t imagine Caroline has any illusions about the electoral implications of this breakthrough for the Green Party.  Without a move to proportional representation, Green Party candidates will continue to be the victims of a deep-seated ‘wasted vote’ phenomenon which this general election, like every general election before it, has demonstrated all over again.

Today just has to be the day when the Green Party breakthrough the UK’s wretched first-past-the-post electoral system.

There are four possible candidates who might be able to do that: Caroline Lucas in Brighton Pavilion; Adrian Ramsay in Norwich South; Darren Johnson in Lewisham; and, as an extreme outsider, Tony Juniper in Cambridge. Realistically, however, I think it’s Caroline whose got the best chance of achieving that breakthrough.

The difference between doing really well (coming second, for instance, with a higher vote for the Green Party than in any preceding General Election) and actually winning is massive. Campaigning down in Brighton last weekend I met a reassuring number of voters who are definitely planning to vote Green today. But I was also taken aback to discover two ‘floating voters’ who’d been so impressed by the ‘Nick Clegg phenomenon’ that they were going to vote Lib Dem for the first time in their lives – despite the fact that in Brighton Pavilion the Lib Dems have no chance whatsoever of coming anywhere other than fourth.

Whatever happens, it’s going to be a very close call.

It won’t be the end of the world for the Green Party if Caroline doesn’t win. Its votes will undoubtedly be up across the country as a whole, and since Caroline became leader, there’s been a new sense of confidence and authority. But the convergence of factors in Brighton Pavilion is quite unique: a constituency that is ‘naturally sympathetic’ to progressive politics; the long-term success of the Green Party across Brighton and Hove in the shape of 13 councillors, ensuring that large numbers of people see Green politics as a normal part of the political mix; and a candidate of compelling quality and integrity (having been voted The Observer’s Ethical Politician of the Year in both 2007 and 2009) at a time when people are looking for distinctively different and honest representation in parliament.

Earlier in the campaign, I would have added another factor: high levels of public concern about climate change and other critical sustainability issues. But I fear that these issues have yet again been moved to the backburner. That really doesn’t help.

So this is a moment of high drama for the party. Green Party sympathisers across the country (which includes a very large number of people who will be voting for another party, often for tactical reasons) will be watching intently to see what happens in Caroline’s constituency.

For me, after nearly 35 years in the Green Party, with my own impressive record of electoral failures back in the 70s and 80s, and having been through the usual mix of hope and despair that all members of minority parties so painfully feel, it will be a quite magical moment.

It’s been amazing to see the vested interests of the right wing media, the City, and the political establishment going into overdrive on the prospective horrors of a hung parliament. One day the world is ticking over on a more or less comfortable basis, with our governance systems bumbling along in their reassuringly inadequate way, and the next (May 7th) the rating agencies have downgraded the status of UK debt to junk bonds, there are riots in the streets, the monarchy is at risk and civilization has collapsed.

There are, of course, some legitimate concerns about the mechanisms of coalition government. We should, of course, be mindful of what happens in countries like Belgium and Italy. There will, of course, be difficulties, frustrations and failures. But in comparison to the deep unfairness inherent in the current utterly dysfunctional system, those problems seem very manageable.

And this just has to be the moment where we make an absolute priority of revitalising our entire democratic system. The idea that this election should be won or lost at the behest of ‘the markets’ just shows how comprehensively our system has imploded.

Labour had such a moment back in 1997 (especially as its manifesto for that election included a crystal-clear commitment to introduce a referendum on electoral reform), but bottled it. Having done devolution for Scotland and Wales (which was brilliant) and part-reform of the House of Lords (which was a good start, but looks pathetically inadequate 13 years on), everything else got dumped.

And it’s all about so much more than electoral reform. One of the most inspiring initiatives running along in the background during the election period has been the Vote for Democracy campaign organised by Unlock Democracy – an organisation I once knew as Charter 88.

Their main report A Vote for Democracy?, analyzes the manifestos of all the major parties (as well as the Greens, Plaid Cymru, SNP, UKIP, Respect and the BNP) and scores them against five principal areas of interest:

• Fair, free and honest elections
• Rights, freedoms and written constitution
• Stronger parliament and accountable government
• Bringing power closer to the people
• A culture of informed political interest and responsibility

The headline scores emerging from that are as follows: Lib Dems 81 out of 100, Greens 80.5, SNP 57, Conservatives 46, and Labour 45.5. The rest are not really in it.

For various reasons, I haven’t been able to watch any of the three TV debates. I saw the endless playback snippets on the news the day after each debate (which quickly got exceptionally tedious) but had no total immersion in any of the live sessions.

It proved impossible to avoid the debates-debate, with endless pre-debate speculation and post-debate analysis. Listening to all the parties and the broadcasters themselves, it’s clear that nobody anticipated the massive media focus on this innovation, for better or for worse (as Scotland’s Alex Salmond has been pointing out more and more petulantly). The TV debates have become the single most influential aspect of this general election campaign.

Yet it was only a few weeks ago that all the pre-election buzz was about the impact of the social media on the election, with a lot of questionably euphoric commentaries that every conceivable kind of web-enabled initiatives and networks would dominate the election debate.

Much of this was ramped up here in the UK after the huge success of Barack Obama’s election team in mobilising vast numbers of people (and donations!) in the 2008 presidential election.

We haven’t seen quite the same thing here in the UK. But there has been an extraordinary foment of activity going on out there, which is quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before – and could prove to be even more important in the event of a hung Parliament than during the election campaign itself.

One initiative that I’ve been a bit involved with is 38degrees, which has recruited an astonishing 127,000 active members in a remarkably short period of time. Between them, they’ve taken nearly 450,000 actions of one kind or another, covering a very wide range of progressive issues and causes.

Right now, its biggest campaign (coordinated jointly with www.Avaaz.org) is to put an end to the scaremongering in the right-wing, pro-Murdoch) press, about ‘the horrors of a hung parliament’. More on that tomorrow, but do please get involved with this campaign today – while there is still a chance!  www.38degrees.org.uk

It’s certainly a more exciting election than any I can remember for years. But it’s a bit of a nightmare from a sustainability point of view. 

The party manifestos themselves are OK – a considerable improvement on the 2005 manifestos. Out of the three major parties, you’d have to put the Liberal Democrats way out in front (as usual), if only because of the way in which they spread the ‘green content’ through the entire manifesto rather than having the usual ‘green section’ with everything else around it pretty grey and grim.

But beyond the manifestos, there’s been next to nothing on either climate change or wider green issues. The parties had a brief moment set aside to go through their green motions, but without any seriousness of intent whatsoever. Gordon Brown was there to launch a separate Labour green manifesto, but devoted almost all of his entire speech to yet another lacklustre rant against David Cameron. It’s never been his strong suit, as we all know, and Labour’s whole election campaign has made that very clear all over again.

We shouldn’t be too surprised at this, simply because it has always been like this. It could have been different this time around, given all the serious political interest in climate change over the last few years. But then Copenhagen crashed, scientists started messing up all over the place, and our wretched rightwing media seized their moment to intensify their promotion of the near-bonkers babbling of Nigel Lawson, Ian Plimer et al. And all that pretty much blew any prospect of climate change featuring in any serious way in this election.

Happily, beyond the Big Party Circus, there’s an astonishing foment of political activity going on elsewhere, touching on every conceivable aspect of sustainable development territory. I’ll be focusing on one or two of these over the next week or so.

If your principal concern is about policies, instead of personalities and presidential debates, then the Vote for Policies initiative has thrown up some fascinating findings. If you go onto their website you’ll be asked to compare policies in nine main areas without being told which political party they come from – and then you are asked to ‘vote’ for the policy you prefer. The parties those policies belong to are then revealed to you.

It’s highlighted the general popularity of Green Party policies. At the last count, it was ahead on 26%, with Labour on 19%, the Lib Dems on 18%, Conservatives on 16%, and UKIP and BNP bumping along at the bottom.

What’s astonishing me, looking at voters’ preferences, is how well the Green Party did on other policy issues apart from the environment: top on education, health, crime and welfare, and second (behind the Lib Dems) on democracy and the economy.

I’m not sure how much that will help Green Party candidates on the ground – but there could be a few surprises here too. I was in Cambridge on Tuesday, when a local poll put the Green Party’s Tony Juniper ahead of all the other parties! A win for the Greens in Cambridge would be one of the biggest election shocks of all time!

Caroline Lucas, Green Party Leader and candidate in Brighton still has the best overall chance of being the first Green Party candidate to beat our despicable first-past-the-post system. I’ll be down in Brighton on Saturday – so more on this next week!