Earth to Ming

Do the Liberal Democrats' beloved green principles really hold up to scrutiny, or are they increasingly threadbare?

While they're often painted as the greenest of the major political parties, up and down the country the Liberal Democrats have been supporting climate-wrecking projects and opposing climate-friendly ones. So it was pretty ironic when Chris Huhne, the Lib Dem environment spokesman, this week lamented "Labour's rotten record on climate change". It's about time he took a look at his own party's record.

Take flying: Huhne said, "The growth of aviation is unsustainable in environmental terms ... Liberal Democrats have long advocated that action needs to be taken to control aviation." Oh, really? Then why does the Lib Dem leader, Sir Ming Campbell, sit on the board of The Air League - an industry lobby group that peddles misleading information about global warming and campaigns for airport expansion and against green taxation? In a recent Air League newsletter, they say they "do not accept that sustainable growth in UK aviation is somehow too difficult to achieve" and promote a third runway at Heathrow to "allow UK links to the regions to be strengthened and extended". In other words, they deny the science (without offering any evidence to back them up) and are actively promoting the most unnecessary flights - the ones to British destinations already served by public transport.

Ming isn't the only high-profile Lib Dem aviation enthusiast. Lembit Opik, who repeatedly makes the false claim that "aviation doesn't represent a significant problem", helped create a parliamentary aviation group to support the air industry. Given this kind of leadership, perhaps it's not surprising that Lib Dem councillors in Norwich, Liverpool, Manchester and Exeter have been at the forefront of pushing through plans for airport expansion. Lib Dem councillors elsewhere have been campaigning to secure the future of other unnecessary, short-haul airports such as Sheffield and Aberdeen. Is this the sort of "action to control aviation" Mr Huhne had in mind?

It's not just on the issue of flying that the Lib Dems are setting the conditions for unsustainable growth in emissions. They've also been backing traffic-generating road schemes too. The Lib Dems' leader in Scotland, Nicol Stephen, ignored an independent public enquiry and threw his weight behind the extension of the M74 motorway, something Friends of the Earth branded "probably the worst environmental decision ever taken by the Scottish Executive". Lib Dem councillors from Cumbria to Lancashire to Essex have been supporting a host of other road-building projects. It looks as though, despite all the spin, little has changed since the days when the Lib Dems were championing the Newbury bypass.

Congestion charging, so successful in London it's now being adopted in New York, was blocked by the Lib Dems in Edinburgh, Manchester and York. Wind farms, the most visible symbols of clean energy, are being opposed by Lib Dems across Britain. Welsh assembly Lib Dems went so far as to oppose an offshore wind farm, Scarweather Sands, which is expected to provide green electricity for the equivalent of 79,000 homes.

Ming Campbell said today that the local elections will be "a choice between fashion and principle," and that "standing by your principles means speaking up for them when they are not fashionable. It means years of fighting for the environment..." Yet far from using the power they've been granted to fight for the environment, Lib Dems have consistently taken the wrong decisions whenever they were theirs to take. They boast of a "green thread" running through all their policies. But give that thread a tug, and Ming's threadbare cardigan quickly unravels.

This was first published on commentisfree.co.uk on April 27th 2007