ZAC GOLDSMITH: Labour’s self-righteous posturing over the setting is nothing however sizzling air. In reality it is Conservatives who’re one of the best custodians of Planet Earth

Amid all its controversial tax rises, last week’s Budget also contained an element of political madness when it came to Labour’s approach to environmental policy.

By saddling drivers of electric vehicles (EVs) with a new 3p-a-mile levy from 2028, the Government has just torpedoed one of its own flagship green policies.

The Government will undoubtedly struggle to encourage people to buy EVs if they are more expensive to run.

But this contradiction is hardly unique. Labour warns repeatedly of the destruction of the English countryside while throwing out protections for our under-siege nature in a drive to build more houses.

But a starker and far more serious example can be seen in Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s two-faced stance at the recent COP30 summit in Brazil.

He joined world leaders in Belem, on the edge of the mighty Amazon rainforest, where minds were understandably focused on the perils of deforestation.

For good reason. Earth’s great forests are its lungs. They are home to 80 per cent of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity, regulate our climate systems, provide clean air and water, and underpin the livelihoods of more than one billion people.

The Congo Basin generates much, if not most, of the rainfall that makes agriculture possible on the African continent.

There’s no technological substitute for these complex ecological systems, and we don’t need experts to tell us how grave the implications would be if they were destroyed.

Tragically, such devastation is occurring at a terrifying rate. In the short time it will take you to read this article, we’ll have lost the equivalent of around 450 football pitches of forest.

This needs to stop. But that can’t and won’t happen when the markets value the wood and cleared land of a felled forest far more than a living one.

The financial incentives to destroy forests and harvest the wood are around 40 times greater than the incentives to protect them.

The Brazilians know this better than anyone, so to save the world’s remaining tropical forests, at COP30 their government announced the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF).

It is a fund to reward states that preserve their forests, and will be financed at first by governments and then by private investors.

Given the Labour Government’s eagerness to trumpet its green credentials, you’d expect the UK to be leading the diplomatic charge for the TFFF.

Sadly not. Having strung along the Brazilians into believing that the UK was full-square behind the fund and would be one of its initial donors, the Government bailed at the last minute.

While the summit announced hefty TFFF contributions from the likes of Norway, Germany, Brazil, Indonesia, France and the Netherlands, the UK was not among them.

Even worse, there are reports – denied by London – that the Treasury actively lobbied Berlin and Paris to walk away, so as not to be alone in snubbing Brazil.

The international community has been left deeply confused by Britain’s quixotic approach to environmental protection.

Four years ago, the then-Conservative government legislated to prevent our biggest businesses importing ‘forest risk commodities’, such as soya, cocoa or palm oil produced on illegally cleared land.

But the law cannot be activated until this Government introduces secondary legislation. It is a formality, and yet this supposedly green Labour administration continues to sit on it.

And it’s not just forests. In 2023, after years of hard work led by British negotiators, a landmark new treaty was agreed to protect the High Seas – those parts of the ocean beyond any national jurisdiction. Yet Labour has yet to ratify the treaty.

Domestically, things aren’t much better. Earlier this year, Sir David Attenborough hosted a special screening of his film, Ocean, to show government ministers some horrifying footage of highly destructive fishing practices, such as bottom trawling in UK waters that are supposed to be ‘protected’.

The Prime Minister solemnly pledged that Labour would sort out the scandal.

But after months of inaction, all that emerged was a promise merely to consider banning the practice in some of our protected areas.

In the same vein, the Government recently blocked my simple amendment to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill to require housebuilders to add a ‘swift brick’ to new homes – this is a hollow brick designed to provide shelter for cavity-nesting birds like swifts.

It requires no expertise to install, costs virtually nothing to buy and requires no maintenance.

But it seems the Government’s priorities are elsewhere. To me, Labour’s one-dimensional and mathematical obsession with the Net Zero target has made it blinkered to the natural world. Why? Because carbon counting can be far more lucrative than preserving green spaces – think of all the punitive taxes that can be imposed on citizens and businesses if they continue to emit CO2.

And getting to the promised land of Net Zero is a great cover for more regulation, scratching that other socialist itch.

It makes no sense, of course, because it is natural ecosystems like the great forests that regulate our climate, and any Net Zero plan that ignores nature is absurd.

But this has long been the flaw in the Left’s approach to the environment.

Its partisan, self-righteous attitude leads it to caricature Conservatives as predatory capitalists while it extols its own eco virtue by referencing mountains of carbon data.

Yet, in truth, it is the Conservative mindset that is often most keenly attuned to the custodianship of Planet Earth.

As Margaret Thatcher said: ‘The core of Tory philosophy and the case for protecting the environment are the same. No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy – with a full repairing lease.’

As prime minister, she brought in the Wildlife and Countryside Act, the Environmental Protection Act and was largely responsible for engineering the Montreal Protocol, designed to protect the ozone layer.

During Boris Johnson’s premiership, I was frequently amazed at the number of green campaigners who would denounce him in public and then in private praise his commitment to the environmental cause.

He insisted, for example, that when the international climate finance budget was set, at least a third of the money would be spent on protecting and restoring nature.

Yet it now appears that, under Labour, that guarantee will be dropped, just as last month Downing Street pulled a seminal report by the Joint Intelligence Committee on the threats to UK security from the collapse of global ecosystems. It warned the felling of tropical rainforests would push up food prices in Britain. Yet rather than encourage debate, No 10 wants to conceal the forecasts of danger.

The public should not put up with this. Ministers should be challenged about their indifference to nature, for the future of our planet is at stake.

Lord Goldsmith was Minister of State for Overseas Territories, Commonwealth, Energy, Climate and Environment from September 2022 to June 2023.