Marine Environment

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Tuesday 14th November 2017 Westminster Hall

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the UK’s role in the degradation of the marine environment.

It is a pleasure to be given the opportunity to lead a debate on this issue. I do not think that I have secured a Westminster Hall debate for two or three months. It is a great pleasure to secure one on this particular subject. I do not know whether anyone in Westminster Hall today thinks I am a latecomer to the subject, but when I was a very young lecturer at Swansea University I had the privilege of listening to a distinguished professor, Ernst Schumacher, just after he published a book called “Small is Beautiful”, and being introduced—as a traditionally trained LSE economist—to the notion of sustainable development and sustainable economies rooted in small, local communities. That started me on a lifetime of social enterprise and a lot of enterprises that were about the environment and sustainability.

Therefore, I am not a latecomer. I have not just read The Times 2 section, which, rather serendipitously, today is all about the plastic found in our marine environment, or just been influenced by that wonderful—what do we call him?—“saint of the environment”, David Attenborough; I saw “Blue Planet II” last night. He has become very much associated not only with such wonderful research but with wise advice, based on the research and good evidence about the dangers to the planet in general and to the marine environment in particular.

So I am not a Johnny-come-lately. Indeed, I was a founding member of Friends of the Earth in the United Kingdom. Many years ago, I started a group called the Socialist Environment and Resources Association, or SERA, a left-wing environmental organisation. On environmental urban mines, we believed that, instead of digging holes in the Earth’s crust and taking out virgin material, we should recycle and reuse material, including the waste that flows from towns and cities. I say that just to prove that I have some interest in and a record over the years of involvement in these subjects, and the desire, as a social entrepreneur, to do something about those issues in communities, both national and local.

The fact is that our marine environment is at risk, in a way that we have not previously thought it was at risk. I woke up to the issue a couple of years ago. I suppose I always knew how bad the marine environment was becoming. We had all heard of these vast islands of floating, semi-submerged plastic, which nobody knew how to deal with or tackle and which were getting bigger. The Environmental Audit Committee has done excellent work recently on microbeads. So I was conscious of the impact of that. I was also interested in recycling, what we did with waste and where waste ended up, as well as sustainability. All that came together, I suppose, when I reread an old favourite of mine by the man who created the term “the dismal science” for economics. Thomas Malthus predicted that, eventually, the population would outgrow the food supply and that we would all perish, unless two wonderful things happened—war or pestilence. That was Malthus’s way of suggesting that there would be a natural ability of the economy and society to renew themselves as we ran out of food.

The old counter-argument to Malthus was that human beings were clever, innovative and creative. They would discover new forms of science, applied science and engineering. Agriculture would become highly sophisticated in how it treated the land and grew crops, and we would become so much more productive.

The critics of Malthus were absolutely right, but the fact is that, although humans are creative, clever and innovative, they are also greedy, careless and exploitative. That is the truth. I said to one of my staff yesterday, “It’s not the sort of thing you run round your constituency saying to your constituents”. I do not pick on the British people particularly, but humans are clever, careless and exploitative, and they are in danger—one species—of destroying this planet through climate change and global warming and what we are doing to the oceans of the world, let alone what we have done to the poor species that we have shot, eaten, killed and driven into extinction.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way; I had asked him before the debate if he would take an intervention. Does he agree that it is not only essential that we preserve and protect our marine environment but that fishermen are not prevented from sustainable fishing in areas that they know? Does he agree that science has proven to be fully capable of handling sensible fishing, as was done through the common fisheries policy? Does he realise that there are many who can sustain a business and that fishing is one of them, and that the environment will not be harmed by it?

[Mr Sheerman]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to bring up the issue of fishing. With your permission, Mr Owen, I will come back to fishing a little later, including that specific point. Of course there are better ways and worse ways of fishing. When we have Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs questions, if anyone mentions bottom-scraping, everyone giggles, but the fact is that there are ships that do scrape the bottom of the ocean, taking everything. That is a savage and unacceptable form of fishing.

[Mr Sheerman]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right; I agree with every word he says. I will also put that issue on the backburner for a moment, because I want to talk about how we move forward. Anyone who saw the last David Attenborough film knows that it offered one little chink of light. Viewers get to the stage where they are feeling quite suicidal about the future of the marine environment, and then suddenly David Attenborough mentions that, actually, there is some possibility of the oceans renewing themselves in some areas, although not as well as we might hope.

Let me talk about the purpose of this debate. There has been a slow awakening to the peril the marine environment is in, but now is the time that we must act. David Attenborough says that we have 50 years to save ourselves, but I think that he is being generous. I think that we have to act much more quickly and decisively, and have the right kind of organisations. I am afraid that the only political things that I will be saying today are about what I believe to be the real strengths of the European Union over a number of years in helping us to co-operate across nations to tackle some of the great problems of the environment.

I remember meeting Surfers Against Sewage in my early days in the House. Mr Owen, you will remember what the seas around Swansea were like a few years ago. They were full of sewage—dreadful conditions. So many of our coastal towns used to pump sewage, in a pipe, out into the sea and, of course, back it would come. There has been a remarkable change because of European regulation on discharge to the sea. We rapidly cleaned up our seas and beaches, and also those right across Europe, so that when holidaying there we would know how clean the environment was; there is a standard and a system of flags.

I also remember the tiny amount of recycling that was done in our country in my early days in the House. Local authorities were at 14% recycling. The rates across the country have since zoomed up. Why? Because we took on board European regulations that meant the payment of a levy on any waste that was put in a hole in the ground. What a society we used to be, not long ago, putting all our waste product in holes in the ground. It is still there—a great treachery, a misspent youth. For 150 years, going back to the Victorians, we threw everything we had finished with into holes in the ground. That was a disgrace, and it was only European regulation and landfill tax that turned it around. We now have a much better—but not perfect—situation. Funnily enough, only recently I asked how much each local authority in Britain pays in landfill tax. I have not yet had a reply; the Government are very reluctant to give me the information, saying, “It is so difficult to collect. Inland Revenue cannot provide it”. It is, however, a very good indicator of how effective the authorities are in their recycling.

[Jim Shannon]

The hon. Gentleman is very gracious in giving way a second time. It is the new generation of young people who are very much into recycling; the older generation must learn to get into it. Does he agree that, when it comes to educating and thinking ahead, it needs to be at primary and secondary school levels, so that the next generation coming through can continue what has been and even do it better?

[Mr Sheerman]

I hope we are not going to agree on everything here, but again, the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. He will know that I was the Chairman of what is now the Education Committee for years and I am chairman of the John Clare Trust, which, in the name of our great English poet, who lived between 1793 and 1864—probably our greatest poet of the environment, in my opinion—has a centre where we specialise in getting young people to come to the countryside to learn about the rural environment, and so to love it. If young people in our towns and cities do not visit the countryside, we will not get them to love it at all.

We have expanded that work into my constituency. My hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) will know that we have a charity called Greenstreams, through which we try to clean up the rivers and streams in our part of Yorkshire. In the industrial revolution, the rivers were terribly polluted and the fish were killed; the colours of the dyestuffs would flow into the rivers and make them red, blue, whatever—very patriotic—killing everything. Now the water is clean again and we take children down there to show them that if they lift a stone they will see wiggly things that the trout eat, which are then eaten by the kingfishers—the cycle of life. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) is very much on the ball. We must start in schools, and the earlier the better.

I want to cover four things: plastics, overfishing, oil and petrol, and then come back to the big picture of climate change. We are sometimes too polite, aren’t we? If we look back over 400 years, we in Britain, as the earliest industrialised nation, with the greatest sea power, have not been good at keeping the global environment clean. I think we chopped down most of our trees to build warships. The biggest problem today is that as China is the most polluted country, followed by India, and then the United States, if we do not work with those large countries, everything we do in the United Kingdom will be of much less value. We need international co-operation, but not in a colonial way, pitching up in any country—even in Russia, which is a great polluter—and saying, “You should do what we do”. They would point to us and say, “Well you don’t have a very good record. You’re a late convert”. We are late converts, but we know a great deal now about how to change the environment in which we live and make it more sustainable.

Let us quickly look at one of the inspirations of recent years: the United Nations sustainable development goals. Goal 14 is about conserving oceans and protecting them from the adverse impacts of climate change, overfishing, acidification, pollution and eutrophication. At United Nations level, it is very important that every country sign up to the goals and make them happen.

My other interest as a Back Bencher is transport safety. Many years ago I introduced seatbelt legislation and my first private Member’s Bill was on children in cars. I have just recently been elected chairman of the Global Network for Road Safety Legislators. That relates to a different United Nations sustainable development goal, but that package of measures, globally driven by the United Nations, is, at the end of the day, what we must look to—international co-operation.

I was on a ship recently, and its environmental officer explained to me just how tight the fleet’s regulations were, and how stringent its rules were, on recycling, including dropping off metal at one port and plastic at another. Her fiancé, however, worked for a commercial firm in Alaska, where they basically threw everything overboard—no rules, no regulation and, it seems, no conscience.