For a man most often described as clean-cut, Ben Bradshaw is not afraid of
getting his hands dirty. He rummaged enthusiastically with us through the
nation’s rubbish bins, from the death of plastic bags to waste taxes,
pausing en route to advise us not to eat British tomatoes in winter, and,
for good measure, gave church leaders a very angry and personal trashing
over the gay adoption row.
The second-in-command Environment Minister may have suffered over the years
the obverse to the John Prescott effect: too much the catalogue model, too
smiley, to be taken seriously. “Ah, the good-looking one,” people said when
we told them whom we were meeting. But he was more than willing to say the
politically, and personally, risky thing: a characteristic endearing him to
David Miliband, his equally puppyish boss at the Department for Environment,
Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), who quietly promoted him before Christmas.
A few months ago, for instance, Mr Bradshaw dismayed supermarkets by urging
customers to ditch excess pack-aging at the till (he does this himself, and
for the most greener-than-thou reason: to squeeze his shopping into his bike
panniers). His call to direct action led to a particularly unsavoury tabloid
sting: his rubbish bag was nicked from outside his home and the contents
were photographed for the nation to see, right down to his last chocolate
wrapper.
It has not deterred him: Mr Bradshaw has two ideas that he hopes will change
the way we shop for ever. The first will be announced in a matter of weeks:
he is “on the brink of an agreement” to get all the high street retailers to
promise to cut the use of disposable bags by more than a fifth in two years.
What this will mean is a shift back towards the shopping ethic of our
grandparents: bring your own bag or pay up.
Although some retailers were a bit more resistant to the idea than others, all
the biggest chains are signed up and just haggling over how much they have
to cut back. The target will have to include all disposable bags, “plastic
bags are no worse than paper or biodegradable ones, because of the energy
that is used in their production”.
The size of the problem is in the figures: British supermarkets give away 17.5
billion plastic bags a year and the average shopper takes home seven each
week. The plastic bag is used for an average of 20 minutes but survives,
often as litter, for the next thousand years.
“We are not going to dictate to the retailers how they achieve the target — I
am sure they will have their own ideas,” he said. “There are a number of
very obvious, commonsense ways in which they can do it. It will hopefully
mean that they will train their staff not to thrust a plastic bag or any
other disposable bag automatically in your face, which unbelievably still
happens in far too many shops. They put it in a bag for you, before you have
even had the chance to say, ‘No, thank you’.”
The problem he has come across is not that shops are against eco-initia-tives
— “they are falling over themselves, daily, in an attempt to prove their
green credentials” — but that they are all afraid of following rather than
leading.
“They almost seem to be going out of their way to do different things, because
they don’t want to do what their competitor is. It is often about marketing,
‘I’ll be zero-waste’ or ‘I’ll be zero-carbon’ or ‘I’ll be plastic bags’, and
I think this is where government has a role to advise them as to what the
really important things are.”
Such as: all supermarket food should be graded with an “eco” label, the
Government’s next bright idea. Food may be stamped with a “traffic light”
system, disclosing the damage that its production has caused to the
environment. The research work, to be finished this year, will throw up some
surprising results.
“We are in the process of doing a very in-depth study — I don’t think any
other government in the world has done this — that will enable people to
make a real informed choice about the climate-change impact of the food that
they buy,” Mr Bradshaw said.
It is not just about carbon, but gases such as methane, which are 20 times
more potent.
“We need to look at the confusion around food miles. There is this simplistic
notion out there, which is encouraged, I am afraid to say, by David Cameron,
that if we buy local it will all be fine.
“An infinitesimal proportion of the emissions associated with our food
industry are as a result of goods being imported here by air — it is
something like 3 per cent. Something like 60 per cent of it is people stuck
in traffic jams driving to the supermarket in this country.”
He said that we were being unfairly damned for buying foreign food. What, for
instance, of the poor farmer in the developing country if we all stopped
buying his goods?
“It could be, and probably is, better, to eat tomatoes imported from the
Mediterranean rather than tomatoes grown out of season in a heated and
lighted greenhouse in this country.
“Or, it is probably better for the environment, in climate-change terms, to
eat wild rather than farmed salmon, because farmed salmon is
energy-intensive.
“The boats have to go out and fish the fish that are then fed to the salmon.
In overall environmental terms, wild salmon are depleted. There are no easy
decisions.”
The problem with being “in charge” of the environment is that you cannot
actually make anything happen on your own: you have to take others — the
Treasury, local government ministers, the European Union, the United States,
G8 — with you. Take the example of paying lower council tax if you chuck
less rubbish: the Environment Secretary thinks it a good idea, Mr Bradshaw
thinks it a good idea. Why not do it, then?
“It is being actively considered,” he said. “The Government has not yet
reached a collective view, I think is the officialese way of putting it.”
In other words, someone does not like it. It could penalise larger families,
although, Mr Bradshaw said, for most of us its impact would be only £50-£100
a year. “Of course, as with a lot of Defra’s policies, we own the policy but
we don’t necessarily have the levers.”
Mr Bradshaw, a former BBC political reporter, switched to politics in 1997,
was elected as MP for Exeter against an aggressively homophobic Conservative
candidate who described him as “a media man, homosexual, he likes Europe, he
studied German, he rides a bike. He is everything about society which is
wrong.”
The man dubbed “Bent Ben” responded by taking the previously Conservative seat
with a whopping 12,000 majority.
Although he protested that he did not come into politics to fight for
equality, sometimes he has little choice.
His father was a canon at Norwich Cathedral, his mother a primary school
teacher, and Mr Bradshaw remains a churchgoing Anglican. Last summer he and
his partner, Neal Dal-gleish, a BBC producer, formed a civil partnership and
he complained publicly that a vicar was not allowed by Church of England
rules to conduct a blessing.
He came alive with anger over the present row between Church and State (and
among ministers) on gay adoption, banging his hands on the table as he
spoke: “I do not think the leadership of our Church is currently reflecting
the view of very many decent tolerant people in this country, who are people
of faith.
“There are many, many lesbian and gay people who are members of congregations,
who are in the priesthood, whose voices are not heard and who are drowned
out by unrepresentative and narrow-minded spokes-people,” he said. “And I
feel very sad about that. They [the church leaders] allow themselves to be
portrayed as being obsessed with what private adults do in the privacy of
their own bedrooms.
“And when you have a senior Catholic bishop admitting on Newsnight
that the Roman Catholic adoption agencies are perfectly happy to place
children with a single gay person or a single lesbian, yet they would refuse
absolutely to place a child with a loving, stable gay or lesbian couple: to
me, that just shows what a terrible muddle they are in.”
He and his partner had considered adopting. “We even went so far as to have a
meeting with social services. But I think we realised then that . . . we
both have an awful lot of children in our lives. I have got nine nephews and
nieces, ten godchildren, Neil has got about five godchildren, and they are
in and out of our lives all the time.
“We both have very demanding jobs, working long hours, and we basi-cally
realised that if we were going to be serious about this one of us would have
to give up work.
“And we kind of thought that was not the right decision for us at the time,
and that what we have got to give to children we can give to our friends’
children and to our nephews and nieces.”
This, we suggested, was perhaps a more responsible discussion than many
heterosexual couples have before embarking on parenthood. “One of the
ironies of this whole debate is that gay couples who adopt or foster tend to
get quite challenging and older children, because the younger children and
the babies tend to go to heterosexuals. And if you get more challenging
children, it is not feasible for you not to be with them full time.”
He has made his case in a letter to Tony Blair, and “made the point to
colleagues”, but insists that for ministers such as himself, or Ruth Kelly,
or Mr Blair, who are committed Christians, there should be no more conflict
of interest than for any collective government policy with which an MP
privately disagrees.
For the record, he thinks that Ms Kelly, the Cabinet minister believed to be
most concerned by gay adoption, “has a very strong commitment to equality”.
But could he remain in a government that did compromise on such an important
point of principle to him? “I would have to have a look at any compromise
that was reached and make a judgment at the time. But I am still pretty
confident that the Government will do the right thing.”
The optimism is typical, whether about his own ability to make a change
through the Environment brief, or about the power each of us has to change
through small daily decisions, such as the bags we take to the shops or the
food we buy when we get there.
When we asked him, a little frivolously, for some environmentally sustainable
fish recipes (he is also in charge of fishing policy) he responded
instantly: mackerel, “the secret is it must be fresh. Fillet and fry it, or
bake it in foil, with butter and a bit of rosemary or whatever herbs you’ve
got about.
“Do you want more?” Yes please.
The whole bag of tricks
— Last June Ikea promised to reduce the number of plastic bags handed out at
its British shops from 32 million a year to 12 million by charging 10p a bag
and hiding bags from view. Since then bag usage has fallen by 95 per cent.
An estimated 1.6 million bags will have been handed out by June this year
— Tesco promised in August last year to reduce the number of free
carriers it gives away by 25 per cent over two years, equivalent to a
billion a year, encouraging shoppers to reuse bags by offering one Clubcard
point (worth 1p) for every carrier bag they do not use. They have also
introduced biodegradable bags
— The discount chains Aldi and Lidl charge for bags, although they say
that they do this to make their costs more transparent Sainsbury’s
scrapped a scheme to give shoppers 1p for every bag they reused because
take-up was low, but its new orange bags are made from 33 per cent recycled
plastic and it has a target to reduce bags by 5 per cent a year
— The Irish Government introduced a 15c tax on plastic bags in 2002.
This cut bag use by 93 per cent and bags now account for only 0.2 per cent
of litter, compared with 5 per cent before the levy was introduced
— Eight billion bags are sent to landfill every year. An estimated
100,000 tonnes of plastic bags, the same weight as 70,000 cars, are thrown
away in Britain each year. A Marine Conservation Society survey found an
average of one plastic bag littering every 25m (80ft) of British coast
