Gordon Brown can build his green legacy on coral reefs

Charles Clover

There we stood, in a quiet fold of the wooded hills above the Severn, waiting for the clatter of birds and the cries of excitement from the beaters. Fathers and sons, relatives and friends were united, some after many years, for the ritual of a family shoot in a magical landscape of white haze, bright sunlight and hard frost.
As I watched my teenage son raise his gun and bring down several pheasants, I suddenly understood why this time of year focuses the mind on renewal — both personal and public. Not so much because of the birds — which will be eaten in 10 days’ time — but because of the handing-on of a deep-rooted country tradition from one generation to the next.
On the public front, renewal is a political inevitability in an election year, of course, but there are still opportunities to be grasped in the dying days of this Labour administration — and not necessarily where people think they are. Gordon Brown, exhausted by, among other things, his efforts to make the epic bungle of Copenhagen a success, may not even be aware of this yet, but there is an opportunity to create a legacy as great as Yellowstone national park or the designation of the Serengeti as a wildlife reserve.
Unknown to most of its citizens, Britain happens to own the world’s largest coral atoll — the reefs that surround 55 tiny islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Only one island of the Chagos Archipelago is inhabited: Diego Garcia, the site of a US naval base. Now conservationists are saying there is a one-off opportunity to designate the Chagos and everything within its 200-mile limit as a marine reserve, creating in the process the largest marine conservation area in the world — bigger than the three areas in the Pacific that were declared national marine monuments by George W Bush just before he left office. The Chagos islands hold half of the remaining healthy coral reefs in the Indian Ocean, so this conservation area would be comparable to the Galapagos or the Great Barrier Reef. But there are difficulties to be overcome before the Foreign Office makes up its mind in April. One is the claim of the Chagossians — coconut farmers descended from Mauritian French stock, who were shamefully evicted by the military in the 1970s. The other is what to do about a tuna fishery that pays the Treasury about £1m a year.
If fishing were banned, it would undoubtedly cost several times that to police the waters around the islands . But this expenditure, which could come from private as well as public funds, would be relatively tiny compared with the enormous conservation gain. The creation of a reserve this large would double the size of the world’s marine protected areas overnight.
It just remains to be seen if Brown and David Miliband, the foreign secretary (who is keen), will pull it off. It is possible, of course, that the election will take place before they can. If so, the proposal would be likely to languish in David Cameron’s in-tray for years. Far higher in his tray will be the budgets to be balanced, the quangos to be axed and what his party sees as wrongs to be righted.
One of these symbolic wrongs, in Conservative eyes, is the fate of hunting. Cameron’s view, which many who understand the countryside will share, is that Labour’s Hunting Act is a bad piece of legislation which has pleased no one and made a mockery of the law.
There is talk of having a free vote on hunting in the Commons within a month of a new Conservative government coming to power, provided there are enough new members of the house. Despite this, I can’t see a new intake enthusiastically voting for abolition of the act without the promise one day of a law that better defines cruelty to animals — such as that proposed by Lord Donoughue and the Middle Way group. The intellectual failure of the Hunting Act, and the woolly-minded folk who voted for it, was that it failed to define the offence that is apparently so morally reprehensible. That is no simple task.
In the second half of 2010 the business of balancing the nation’s budget is likely to dominate the agenda, whoever gets elected. But there will be opportunities there, too. One is to end the misguided attempt to knock down perfectly good Victorian and Edwardian terraced housing in the industrial towns at public expense in the cause of “housing market renewal”. This pernicious, ideological aspect of Labour’s tenure has cost the public purse more than £1 billion to date, blighted large swathes of the Midlands and the north of England and caused misery for those — many of them among the most vulnerable — who were chucked out of their homes. Leaving renewal to the market is an easy option: the environment of our industrial towns can only gain.
All through next year we can expect attempts to revive the process of cutting the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases, which foundered in Copenhagen. If there is a prize to be grasped in Mexico at the end of 2010, it is likely to be for Cameron’s government. That is why Labour should give serious thought now to the Chagos proposal as a way of redeeming its tarnished environmental reputation.