Public Services: Economic and Climatic Challenges

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, on this debate, and on the ingenuity with which he and others have stretched the description to cover all sorts of subjects. It is turning into a bit of a Rorschach test, whereby we can all read our own preferences into the shape of the topic of the debate. I have not followed the good example set by the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, of looking “resilience” up in the dictionary; I wish I had. I was thinking of that word as meaning a combination of adaptation and sustainability—in other words, the extent to which we can adapt sustainably to changes that are likely to happen.

Over the past three centuries, the UK has probably been one of the most resilient countries on the planet—economically, socially, politically, militarily, scientifically and intellectually. We have been written off again and again, yet we have bounced back rather well. Indeed, yesterday’s unemployment figures suggest that we are bouncing back relatively well at the moment, although admittedly that is in a much shorter-term context.

Why is that? Essentially, it is because of two factors about this country. One is trade; the other is innovation. The fact that we have been connected to the world means that we have been interdependent on the world and we have had mutual support from the world, in various ways, over many centuries. That point was made by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood. History teaches that reliance on trade, far from making countries more vulnerable, actually reduces risk and increases resilience. A good example of that is world trade in food, which means that a bad harvest, such as we had last year, does not result in famine, or even in hunger, because we are able to adjust through the price mechanism throughout the world.

In the 1690s, there was a series of bad harvests in France and 15% of the entire population starved to death, despite a famous victory in which Jean Bart managed to recapture a convoy of 120 grain ships from Norway that had been captured by the Dutch—even that was not enough to prevent mass starvation. There was no such mass starvation in this country, just 25 short miles away. In those days, there was not enough trade to equalise the supply of food around the world.

Resilience means getting access to products, services and ideas wherever they are invented. That is what world trade does for us—and, conversely, it also gets markets for our own ideas, services and products. It is no accident that countries that cut themselves off from trade suffer terrible shortages and famines. We only have to look at North Korea for a contemporary example. Another point that I want to make, which relates to something that the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, said, is that resilience also includes not borrowing vast sums from our grandchildren, if we can help it. That, essentially, is what we have been doing with our deficit spending.

The other element of resilience is that it requires innovation. If we in Britain cease to innovate, we will become far more vulnerable to global problems. There was a good example of that this week, when Paolo Scaroni, the chief executive of Eni, the Italian petrochemical company, said that the shale gas revolution in the US was not just a massive competitive advantage to the US, but,

“a real emergency for Europe”.

By that he meant that, because of the falling price of energy in the United States and the use of gas as a feedstock there, chemical, steel and manufacturing industries are bailing out of Europe and rapidly rebuilding in the United States. That is a real threat to us, unless we can join in by lowering our energy prices here. That is resilience for them, because of their innovation over there.

While I am on the topic of energy—and here I should declare my interest in various forms of fossil fuels and other forms of energy—I want to make the point that resilience in the face of weather means keeping the lights on when the wind blows too strongly. That is a pretty obvious point, which the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, made. But it also means keeping the lights on when the wind does not blow at all—and that, of course, is a risk we are running by trying to rely too much on windmills for electricity. That is the very opposite of resilience, and puts us at the mercy of the weather as we were in the Middle Ages.

By the way, it is weather, not climate, that we are dealing with this winter. There is no need to take my word for that; a paper published this week by 17 international scientists from five different countries in the Hydrological Sciences Journal, entitled “Flood risk and climate change: global and regional perspectives”, says:

“It has not been possible to attribute rain-generated peak streamflow trends to anthropogenic climate change over the past several decades … Blaming climate change for flood losses makes flood losses a global issue that appears to be out of the control of regional or national institutions. The scientific community needs to emphasize that the problem of flood losses is mostly about what we do on or to the landscape and that will be the case for decades to come”.

So what we are doing with drainage and development is far more significant in terms of the effect on flooding.

It is worth pointing out that blaming climate change when there is a weather disaster has become rather an itch for politicians. We saw this with superstorm Sandy in the United States, when Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Christie were able to cover up what was perhaps a lack of preparedness by saying, “Well, it’s all to do with climate change.” I congratulate not only the Prime Minister but my right honourable kinsman-in-law the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs for not doing that in connection with the recent floods.

In November 1703, 400 people died in a bad storm that flooded the Somerset Levels. That week, 700 ships were smashed in the Pool of London, 1,500 sailors died when 13 men-of-war went down, the lead was torn off the roof of Westminster Abbey, and the Bishop of Bath and Wells was killed in his bed by a falling chimney. That is less resilient. We can survive storms much better these days because of the adaptations we have made and the sustainable resilience we have added to our society. Globally, someone’s probability of dying as a result of a drought, a flood or a storm is 98% lower than it was in the 1920s. That is not because weather has got less dangerous; it is because globally, people have better transport, better food, better accommodation and better services generally.

While I am on that topic, both here and globally we use about 65% less land to produce as much food as we did 50 years ago, so let us not forget that fossil fuels have made this possible. Without fossil fuels, crop-land would have to increase from about 12% to about 30% of the planet and land transformation—that is to say, the cutting down of forests to provide grazing land and so on—from 43% to 61%. It is fertilisers, pesticides and tractors that have made it possible to keep the resilient wild ecosystems that we so love.

I was at a meeting yesterday where the problems of crop protection were discussed. The wet summer of 2012 was much talked about, where an explosion of fungi and slugs devastated much of the wheat and rape crops—I once again declare an interest as the owner of a ruined harvest in that summer. The chemicals that farmers use to fight these pests and other forms of invasions are getting less and less effective. Resistance is growing rapidly. There is nothing particularly surprising about that; it has happened ever since we developed crop protection systems and is a perennial problem not only in conventional farming but in organic farming. However, today the pipeline of new products is drying up, which was the concern of the speaker yesterday. Innovation in crop protection is failing, and that is making us less resilient. We will face another wet summer at some point when fungicides will not work well enough and the crop will be badly damaged.

Why is this happening? One of the big reasons is because innovators have their hands tied behind their back. The European Commission is causing the withdrawal of about 25% of the currently available active agrochemicals, largely through using really rather feeble excuses about the hazards that those chemicals have. This is causing farmers to go back to older and less effective agrochemicals, and to lose more crop. At the same time safer, more effective and more organic alternatives, such as genetic modification, are being deliberately and directly prevented. I am sorry to sound so uncharacteristically pessimistic. Normally, I am an optimist but I am encouraged because the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, tells me that she will be optimistic today, so I will leave that to her.

The precautionary principle is behind a lot of these problems because, as presently interpreted, particularly in Brussels and Whitehall, it counts the risks of innovation but not the risks of not innovating. Funnily enough, this point was made in the previous debate by the noble Lord, Lord Giddens. He said that not taking a risk is also a risk, which was kind of Rumsfeldian in its pithiness. So globally, we must embrace change in this country if we are to be resilient. The least resilient and most dangerous thing we can do is to stop innovating and leave it to others. The world is a dynamic place: as the philosopher Heraclitus said, you cannot step in the same river twice as nothing endures but change. That is true even if the river comes through your front door. Can my noble friend the Minister please stress that, wherever possible, future resilience depends crucially on innovation?