David Levy – Christmas Observational Blog, 2023 – Jan 24

From my environmental campaigning, I have started to understand how bureaucracy has designed the current practice of consultation to give the impression of public involvement.

What consultation is really about is bureaucracy doing everything in its power to negate any influence which people might actually have in solving problems, and to frustrate solutions which the public are trying to flag up.

My tutor in this understanding came in the form of a lady, let’s call her Margo (as in the Good Life). This lady was convinced that if she followed the rules and did everything asked of her, she would triumph in the end. What in fact happened was that she ran out of drive, ambition and sheer energy, and not one jot of her effort affected the issue she was involved in.

It’s been during the course of this year that I’ve also noticed that many in the environmental forum are just there for the salary and kudos, with many CEOs often moving sideways to take up similar posts in other NGOs. They are either promoted under Peters Law (to their own level of incompetence), or they fulfill the necessity to occupy a post without there being any chance of them delivering the mission statements of their organisation. That is what I call a ‘Government Place Person’. I have noticed many times this year how the Government has successfully recycled these CEOs and their lower echelons.

I have mentioned in earlier blogs that few opportunities present themselves where an individual’s efforts can lead to change in environmental matters.

That is not to say this was always so, but Government are fast learners. They have quickly neutered opposition from the environmental arena by purchasing these people, and by getting the organisations they lead to take charitable status. Once an environmental organisation has become a charity, then it has effectively cut its ability to effect change to a very narrow field, that of education.

Government has continually protected private enterprise from the ‘burden of progress’ imposed upon it by new environmental laws, whether the new law has came from Europe or from our home grown Acts of Parliament. Also, the area of ‘secondary legislation’ is something most people ignorant of, yet this little legislative trick is the reason why many laws are passed but not actually implemented, and sometimes as long as a decade after enactment.

Yet to me I feel the private sector, given encouragement and support, could deliver better environmental outcomes. However they need financial investment, cooperation from other industries, and a Government that recognises the problems they face and so gives its backing to solutions.

I hope 2024 will be a new dawn for the water industry, bringing real-time solutions that come together so that our rivers regain sound ecological status before, I fear, they become the source of a major plague of illness and disease in this country.

David Levy