Starmer should put bees before big business

These are splendid aims. We need them to be achieved. But I profoundly hope that this government is going to take its own resolutions seriously in the one place where it has control over its own rules and incentives. Lofty international pledges and lectures are one thing but if they are to mean anything, the protection of nature must begin at home.

It is badly needed. Britain is one of the worst countries in the world for nature loss. The way we build, farm, garden, clean, travel and industrialise steadily undermines our most basic resource. Without a deliberate change of direction it can only get worse. It is not clear that our government, any more than the last, grasps the extent of the problem or is willing to challenge the combination of inertia, custom, cheerful obliviousness and huge commercial interests that keep us on this destructive path.

At this moment the Defra secretary has a key decision waiting on his desk and what he does will be an indication of whether these grand statements have any substance. The multimillion-pound company British Sugar is asking for emergency authorisation to apply a banned bee-killing pesticide to this year’s sugar beet crop. Thiamethoxam, that chemical, is a neonicotinoid, a substance once touted by its manufacturers as a safe pesticide but found by researchers more than a decade ago to be so toxic that a teaspoon could kill one billion bees.

Bees are critical to our survival. They are the world’s chief pollinators, the creatures that fertilise plants, turning them into the food we eat. Three quarters of the world’s crops need pollinating to grow, including most fruits and vegetables. It cannot be done at any scale by hand or machine. We are completely dependent on tiny beings and their instincts to make our ecosystem work. Yet in recent decades their numbers have been declining catastrophically.

Until 2018 neonicotinoids, also known as neonics, were used across Britain. In only 20 years, they had become the most widely used insecticides in the world. That was until dismayed French farmers realised that beehives near treated fields were dying out and dogged researchers discovered that the neonics were killing pollinators — or so poisoning their nervous systems that they couldn’t find their way back to food or their hives — and destroying biodiversity.

Neonics remain in soil for so long that any flowering plants growing three and sometimes ten years later still carry the poison. They wash into streams and rivers where, as the Wildlife Trusts report, they are “extremely toxic to aquatic invertebrates”. Neonics have been described as novichok for butterflies, hoverflies and bees.

Convinced by the evidence, the EU banned their outdoor use in 2018. Britain, then time still in the EU, did the same. When we left, the government at the time promised we would “unquestionably” uphold higher environmental standards outside it than within.

You might think that given the known danger of neocotinoids and the importance of bees, the automatic answer to British Sugar’s request would therefore be no. Unfortunately, for the past four years Defra and the previous Tory government have meekly surrendered to the sugar industry’s annual pleas. They have ignored the fact that in Germany and France growers succeed without neonics. They have ignored the advice of their own expert committee and the Health and Safety Executive, both of which have ruled that the danger to the environment outweighs any benefit to sugar producers.

In opposition, Sir Keir Starmer denounced that decision. So the fact that this year’s application has not been instantly rejected is worrying for all the environmental groups that have campaigned for a ban: Friends of the Earth, Buglife, Greenpeace.

Professor Dave Goulson of the University of Sussex, one of our most eminent entomologists and the man who led the initial research into neonic toxicity, is perturbed by this signal because, he says, over past decades it has proved incredibly difficult for scientists to reach politicians and civil servants, or to get them to grasp the seriousness and immediacy of the environmental threat.

Goulson started writing books for general audiences a few years ago because he realised that scientists’ rigorous research was only addressing a closed circle. He has tried to engage politicians but with almost no success. Five years ago he was invited to the Commons to talk about the threat to bees and was told that 60 MPs had signed up to hear him. Half came — but they stayed only long enough to take selfies with the bee posters, leaving a dozen researchers to take notes.

The only time he has been invited to Defra was ten years ago, to talk about the impacts of neonicotinoids on wildlife. Officials told him how surprising his insights were and he found himself thinking: “But surely you understand all this? You’re the people in charge!” He has not been asked again. Scientists feel bleakly that they are talking to themselves.

There is a pattern here and it is an alarming one. Experts are not being read, heard or listened to; lobbyists are. The short-term interests of consumers, industries and business are winning out against our long-term survival.

There are going to be a thousand difficult decisions ahead for this government, if it is to reverse nature’s downward spiral. “Nature is dying,” Reed warned when he came in. If the government gives way on this decision, we will know it is going to be as bleakly feeble as the last.