It’s straight from the Trump playbook: Labour is tearing up the machinery of government | George Monbiot

7 hours ago 3

This might sound astonishing, but the UK government’s core programme now appears to be the same as Donald Trump’s: dismantling the administrative state. There’s less theatre, but the results could prove harder to contest. Absurd? Consider the evidence.

Take the government’s brutal expulsion of the chair of the Competition and Markets Authority, Marcus Bokkerink. His crime, it seems, was to take his role seriously, seeking to prevent the formation of corporate monopolies. He has been replaced with the former manager of Amazon UK, a company widely accused of monopolistic practices. This is pure Trump: kick out the regulator and insert someone from a company they were seeking to regulate.

Or take the culture war against public protections launched last month by Keir Starmer and the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, who variously described them – using ever more violent language – as “weeds” that needed to be “cleared out”, or barriers that should be “ripped up”, “torn down” and “kicked down”. Rather than obsessing about risk (which is what they exist to do), the regulators’ role should be to “deliver growth”. Deliberately echoing Trump’s language as he promised to assault the planning system, Starmer said he will “build, baby, build”. He issued a general statement on regulation: “This government will sweep it away.”

His mission, Starmer says, is inspired by his “conversations with leading CEOs”, who complain that their schemes are impeded by citizens’ objections, legal challenges and the need for consultation with regulators. Welcome to capital’s age-old struggle with that infuriating concept, democracy. Amazingly, he stated that he was modelling his assault on the democratic state on Margaret Thatcher’s deregulation of finance capital, whose eventual result, in 2007, was the first run on a British bank in 140 years, helping to trigger the global financial crisis.

While Trump might collide with a Congress in which he has a fragile majority, and various constitutional obstacles, this government is currently unassailable. It faces no opposition from the Tories: it’s what they wanted to do, had they dared.

Though the prime minister seeks to appease corporate and oligarchic power, his attack on regulation has results he might find less helpful. When he pulls a lever, he could discover that, without a robust administrative state, nothing happens. Then the good stuff as well as the bad fails to materialise.

The good stuff includes the land use consultation that the government launched last month. Its proposals could and should be revolutionary. It sets out, for the first time in England, a rational policy for deciding which land should be used for what. Where farming produces almost nothing (as in the sheepwrecked uplands), the new paper suggests the land could be better used for reviving ecosystems. As 85% of the UK’s agricultural area is managed for livestock feed and production, it looks at how we might meet our demand for food more efficiently. It calls for restoring peatlands, woodlands and coastal habitats and for “renaturalising our water bodies and making space for water”. It wants our national parks and other “protected” landscapes to become “greener, wilder and more accessible”.

A housing development next to agricultural land in Felixstowe, Suffolk.

There are some bizarre contradictions. The main paper laments the fact that England is “one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world”. But its analytical annexe, published separately, suggests the government intends to stick to the risible Tory target of improving the abundance of wild species no sooner than 2042. The plans are further undermined by using a completely inappropriate standard called “tree growth potential” to determine where trees should be allowed to return. While this is useful in planning timber plantations, it makes no sense for ecological restoration. There is nowhere too high for trees to establish in England, and hunched and gnarled woods in the hills are no less valuable habitats than straight stands of timber in the lowlands. The result, as the annexe shows, will be to exclude new woods from the uplands while causing conflict in the productive lowlands between forest restoration and food production.

More positively, the consultation also proposes a community right to buy land and buildings, like Scotland’s; and better and more accessible data and updated maps on the condition and fertility of land, which are essential for good planning.

All these proposals require two things: a commitment that won’t falter in the face of lobbying by incumbent powers, led by the National Farmers’ Union and the Country Land and Business Association; and strong, confident, well-financed government agencies. But after 15 years of defunding, demoralisation and demonisation, these bodies, such as Natural England, the Environment Agency and the Rural Payments Agency, are scarcely breathing. The government, through further budget cuts, seems determined to finish them off. Last month, it launched a Trumpian culture war against the regulators. A week later, it launched a huge and complex strategy that is entirely reliant on them.

Local authorities are also crucial for delivering the land use plans, but they too are incapacitated by systemic defunding. Like the dire state of the regulators, this issue goes unmentioned in the consultation. The new paper states that “investors, farmers and other businesses want certainty” about government policy, and “a more joined-up, strategic approach to land use strategy and planning”. Yes: to make long-term plans, land managers need a solid regulatory framework. Instead, they get deregulatory chaos.

Far from addressing these issues, the government will rely on “private nature markets”. The timing could scarcely be worse, coinciding with a global collapse of confidence in these markets, and the carbon and nature “credits” they sell, as a result of fraud, malpractice, wishful thinking and false accounting. These issues seem intrinsic to an industry selling future promises for cash today. Even if these markets somehow worked, they would still need to operate within strong regulatory controls, enforced by tough public authorities.

Farmers can justifiably complain that they’re being asked to make environmental improvements while the government swings its wrecking ball of airport expansion and new trunk roads, says to hell with the newts and bats, has announced a massive liquefied fossil gas project under the guise of “carbon capture and storage” and seeks support for the approval of the Rosebank oilfield. If your aim is to generate furious resistance, try blatant double standards.

How is the government failing to understand these things: that you can’t implement an ambitious programme of change without robust government bodies? And that you can’t simultaneously appease corporate lobbyists, the Daily Mail, the Times and the Telegraph and deliver effective and beneficial policy? How is it that politicians who are neither felons, frauds, sexual assaulters nor coup plotters nevertheless mirror the agenda of the orange tyrant?