As we sip our pints of wine, clutching our blue passports, we could be forgiven for taking a deep breath when told of the benefits of Brexit. Yet this could become increasingly hard to do, as the promise to maintain or even enhance our environment now that we have left the EU is being broken.
While no campaign bus was ever emblazoned with promises of foul rivers and polluted soil, post-Brexit it is becoming clear that the “conserve” in Conservative doesn’t extend to our natural world. European directives previously accounted for 80% of our laws in this area – creating shared standards we helped write to prevent contamination, reduce emissions and preserve habitats. By working collectively, we could also ensure no country was economically harmed because no border can stop pollution.
When we left the EU, ministers repeatedly pledged not to water down environmental policy post-Brexit. Michael Gove assured us that there was “no future for the United Kingdom in trying to lead some sort of race to the bottom”. But these siren words were used to justify giving the government sweeping powers under the Retained EU Law Act, and to do away with any meaningful parliamentary scrutiny of its future regulations.
As we saw with the fight to protect nutrient neutrality laws, the Tories wanted to allow nitrates and phosphates to be pumped into rivers on the basis this would facilitate housebuilding, something no other country abiding by these rules had found to be necessary. Although this was successfully resisted, new research shows how, post-Brexit, we are increasingly falling behind rather than leading the way when it comes to protecting our own habitat.
Air pollution laws are weaker, chemicals prohibited in the EU are being used here and our carbon emissions strategy is leading to leakage of jobs and gas. Against scientific advice, the UK has chosen to allow thiamethoxam to be used here, even though Michael Gove pledged to use his Brexit freedoms to ban all such bee-killing neonicotinoids.
The EU has also banned the release into our sewers or surface water of chemicals that disrupt the hormonal systems in our bodies; the UK regulator decided the risk of harm wasn’t big enough to merit such action. Applications to use chromium trioxide – a carcinogenic chemical known to increase the risk of lung and throat cancer – are now more likely to succeed here, as our health and safety guidelines don’t meet the EU’s common framework. The impact is not just on our natural world or our health but also on jobs and growth. Companies operating in both the UK and the EU face paperwork from two different regimes – as the smaller market, it’s not hard to see why business is going elsewhere.
The government’s act wrote into law that we could not strengthen laws if doing so could “increase the regulatory burden”. When I and colleagues from across the political spectrum – from Conservative peers to the trade unions and charities – warned this would, inevitably, lead to the watering down of our environmental standards, ministers told us we were scaremongering. Now the EU progresses towards stronger protections on sewage, fast fashion, protections of habitats and “forever chemicals”, while our government goes the other way.
The situation in which we now find ourselves was not inevitable. Voting to leave the EU was a decision we made as a country. It has happened and reversing it would involve decades of debates and division that all those now struggling with the damage it has caused don’t have. However, it is an active choice by this government to use Brexit as permission to treat anything involving international collaboration as unjustifiable – whether on employment rights, consumer protection or the environment.
If we want our kids to breathe clean air and our farming and food production to be safe, we need a government that recognises that there is merit in collaboration: the benefits of dynamic alignment of our environmental regulations, cross-border climate crisis action and the north seas energy cooperation to help cut the cost of renewable energy and make reducing emissions a shared priority across the continent. Pints of wine and blue passports will be of no benefit at all if our water is too dirty and our health too poor to enjoy them.
Stella Creasy is the Labour and Cooperative MP for Walthamstow
