The Conservative Party should be the natural party for the environment. It is, after all, a party which values the countryside and all its traditions and pursuits.  The environment is one of the issues younger people are most engaged with. If the Conservative Party wishes to connect with young people, it must therefore begin to think seriously about this issue.  And beyond all this, the importance of protecting the environment is far greater than party politics and electioneering: our health, our livelihoods and our future depend upon it.

There is a great deal of debate on what the content of environmental policy ought to be, and for good reasons that debate is moving up the domestic and global political agendas.  It is vital to get that content right.  However, it is essential to recognise also that our domestic environmental policy will be of insignificant impact as long as billions of people across the world are denied their civil and political rights.

Over 2 billion people live in China and India alone, and currently the vast majority of these people are powerless to resist threats to, and degradation of, the environment in which they live; they do not have the voice, organisations or opportunities to hold polluters and developers to account, and nor to exert their influence on the political authorities.

When factories pour toxins into streams, killing the fish and poisoning fields and land, thus destroying the livelihoods of nearby villagers, then it is extremely unlikely that the poor will have their views recognised by officials within corrupt systems.

Most governments are fiercely determined to increase their industrial output, for their economies to grow, and so very often the environment is neglected in the drive for growth at any cost.  On a national level this means that the developing world is only just beginning to pollute in a way which the West mastered 150 years ago, and there is no end in sight to the frightening growth of this pollution.

Given the sheer numbers of people in the developing world, it is clear that unless their rate of increase of pollution falls, then the domestic environmental policies of European countries will be quite irrelevant.  No matter how environmentally responsible our own behaviour is, we will not be able to withstand pollution and climatic changes caused elsewhere but which recognise no national borders.

However, it is not only politically impossible for us to impose environmental policies on other countries, it would be quite repugnant for us to try, and hypocritical given our own terrible record of polluting.  We need to get our own house in order before we think about lecturing others.  Yet we should not abandon the goal of a clean world.

This whole pamphlet argues that we should adopt a foreign policy that promotes civil rights, freedom and the rule of law.  We argue that it is always in Britain’s best interests that populations abroad should be emancipated from oppression, that they should be empowered to determine the direction and conditions of their lives.  The value of this approach is clear when considering the environment.  Although we have no place or ability to prevent, say, China from polluting, we can be sure that if China were a free and democratic country, then the Chinese people themselves would make every effort to keep their country just as clean as we aspire to keep ours.  The key to capping pollution in the developing world is not through imposing limits on other countries, but it is by setting people free from powers and authorities which exploit and ravage both them and their environments.  And it is precisely in that freedom that we are able to develop ever cleaner technologies.

Population pressures
Many people are afraid that the world has become severely overpopulated, and that this is causing an unbearable strain on the environment.  Others argue that in fact the world has bountiful resources but we have not yet learnt how to share these or distribute them fairly.  In any case, the fact is that in countries where people enjoy prosperity, education and good health-care, population growth is stabilised or even falling.

It should be obvious to us that the very best way to avoid pressures of over-population, and the poverty and environmental strains this can cause, is to promote development.  This in turn is dependent upon freedom and civil rights.  And this approach to demographics shows far more respect for the individual than policies of forced sterilisation and infanticide.

Indeed what a terrible violation of freedom and privacy it is when governments and international agencies dictate how many children people may have.  Yet this is exactly what the agenda of the United Nations Family Planning Agency (UNFPA), funded by the taxpayer, involves. What can be more fascist than the UN and some Non-Governmental Organisations, supposedly in the name of “development”, coercing people into not having children and even killing unborn babies?  It is an attitude which seems to say: “we don’t want to share the world’s resources with you, so we don’t want you to breed” – and it is wrong.