The Environmental Underclass

New Ground 63
Summer 2002

Who speaks up for the "environmental underclass"? Those people – in Britain and abroad – whose lives are blighted by noise, scarred by pollution, restricted by road danger and threatened by climate change.

In Victorian times, the environmental underclass had its champions. The Factory Acts improved the work-place environment, better drainage and public health schemes cleaned up towns and cities. The early Labour Party regarded an improved environment as important as raising the wages of the working-class or extending the right to vote. There was no division between environment, employment and democracy.

There is little sign that today’s Labour Party is about to champion the environmental underclass of 2002. Of course, the government has taken many welcome initiatives to improve the environment both at home and abroad. But it has not been prepared to take on those oppressing the environmental underclass in the way that Lord Shaftesbury and his friends challenged vested interests over a century ago.

Indeed, some in government seem reluctant to recognise there is an environmental underclass in this country. It doesn’t conform to the way the labour movement has traditionally thought about class. Streams of speeding traffic passing through a picture-postcard village in Gloucestershire can hem in the children of the rich almost as much as a busy main road curtails the activities of poor children in inner Liverpool. Heathrow-bound jets can blight as many lives in Richmond-upon-Thames, one of the UK’s richest boroughs, as in the poorest areas of Brixton and Peckham.

Of course, generally richer people have many more options to improve their quality of life. But my argument is that rich and poor alike are victims of environmental ‘bads’ that the government is reluctant to tackle. To illustrate this I consider, briefly, noise, pollution and climate change.

A recent study from Sheffield University found Britain’s towns and cities have become 10 times noisier in the last decade. Yet, despite the admirable prodding of Environment Minister Michael Meacher, thegovernment is only at the very early stage of producing anything resembling a noise strategy. I suspect this is because, in order to tackle noise, Labour would need to take unpopular decisions about many of the very things it believes so many people value: cars, cheap flights, air conditioning, powerful sound systems.

Air pollution has been the most prominent environmental ‘bad’ in recent years. Perhaps because of that, but also because of its links to global warming, the government has been willing to be more pro-active in tackling it. A carbon tax has been introduced, air quality targets have been set. But it has still shirked most of the really tough decisions: on traffic reduction; on curbing out-of-town development; on fuel prices; on renewables.

Climate change is poised to produce the biggest environmental underclass of all. Global warming threatens to damage beyond repair the environment of some of the poorest people on earth.

Labour seems to understand this latter point, though the suspicion is that it will only move as fast as it feels business will allow. But it is floundering in dealing with the environmental underclass at home. The problem for Labour is that many of the things that create the environmental underclass – cars, holidays abroad – are the very things it believes working people have a right to enjoy. The prime minister, in talking about liveability, appeared to recognise that quality of life consists of more than the acquisition of material goods. But his government has failed to translate this into workable policy. Unless it does so, it will have very little to say to the nation’s growing environmental underclass.

John Stewart is a member of SERA’s Transport Group