Theresa May has never struck me as much of a joker. But was it with a secret snigger that she offered former banker Andrea Leadsom the cabinet seat of environment secretary last year? Leadsom, you will remember, sparked a short-lived but almighty row, and handed May the premiership, when she told an interviewer that she thought motherhood made her a stronger candidate for the Tory leadership.
“I have children who are going to have children who will be a part of what happens next. I am sure Theresa will be really sad she doesn’t have children, so I don’t want this to be ‘Andrea has children, Theresa hasn’t’, because I think that would be really horrible,” Leadsom was recorded saying in an interview with the Times. But “genuinely I feel that being a mum means you have a real stake in the future of our country, a tangible stake”.
Could May have smilingly alluded to this stake when she offered Leadsom her promotion? “Andrea, I know you feel very strongly about the future,” might the new PM have said? “I realise you must be disappointed not to have my job but I believe I have found the perfect role for you. Now I’ve abolished the Department of Energy and Climate Change there is no area of government in which we think more about the health of future generations than the Department of the Environment. Please will you take back control of air, water and food?”
Ten months on, Leadsom has achieved extremely little – apart from the deaths of 10,000 badgers – which is her own fault because she voted for the current Brexit-induced paralysis of the policy-making process. She wants to bring back fox hunting, build an “anti-litter culture” and abolish EU “red tape”, including the three-crop rule on big farms that environmentalists believe aids biodiversity.
But now is Leadsom’s big chance. In the next few days the government will publish its draft clean air strategy, after it admitted defeat in a long-running battle with environmentalist lawyers ClientEarth last week, when a judge said it could not delay publication until after the general election. Air pollution, most of it from diesel traffic emissions, kills around 40,000 people a year in the UK, and increases the risk of stroke and heart attack as well as asthma and other respiratory illnesses – a fact that makes lots of people want to scream, but mysteriously doesn’t seem to bother some others all that much, I think basically because they have been brainwashed by car culture.
A diesel scrappage scheme and expanded clean-air zones are among possible measures, but with hints that the government may seek to loosen all manner of environmental regulations post-Brexit, the messages are mixed and the delaying tactics ominous. Leadsom has called the situation “an urgent concern”, but the question is how urgent? There are 2,000 British schools close to roads with illegal pollution levels, but how much will their pupils’ right to breathe count when weighed against adult voters’ wish to drive?
Leadsom was an idiot, as well as spectacularly unsisterly, to tell a journalist that “being a mum” meant she would make a better leader than May. Parenthood doesn’t make people wiser or less selfish – Donald Trump is a father of five. But she wasn’t wrong to say that motherhood is important to her personally, or that having children altered the way she thought about the world. Pregnancy, childbirth, becoming a full-time carer for an infant, as well as the postnatal depression Leadsom suffered, can all be life-changing experiences.
But you can’t advertise yourself as someone with a special concern about the world our grandchildren will inherit and then build a bonfire of the regulations designed to protect it. It is arguably in environmental legislation that the future weighs more heavily than in any other domain of politics (apart, perhaps, from defence, with the nightmare prospect of nuclear war once again being discussed). Certainly it is the government department in which the campaigners and lobbyists you encounter are most likely to challenge you with regard to the state of the planet 100 or 200 years hence, and with the fates of people not yet born. Do our grandchildren have the right to expect to see their grandchildren grow up in a world that is not too dirty and hot to be safe? Is Leadsom, a longstanding champion of special services for new mothers and babies, not disturbed by the latest expert advice to strap small children into prams, behind plastic covers, to protect them from toxic fumes?
Does the secretary of state believe the health, and specifically the growing lungs, of the next generation are worth fighting for? I’m not holding my breath. But let’s give her a chance: come on, Andrea, show the world that in Brexit Britain it’s time to stop poisoning babies.
