'Beauty matters' to Letwin

Monday, 6 June 2005 12:00 AM

Conservative Shadow Environment Secretary Oliver Letwin has today called for a new political culture in environmental policy where "beauty matters".

He bemoaned the disappearance of beauty from British politics and argued that discussion of the environment had become too "mechanical" and "technocratic".

In a speech to the Centre for Social Justice, he called for a "new vocabulary that enables politicians to talk about the environment as more than mere mechanism".

"The language of politics needs to reflect the felt experience of the environment as sensations and impressions that are capable of moving us to delight and awe," he said.

Mr Letwin said the disappearance of beauty from the vocabulary of politics was one of the reasons so many people were "turned off" politics.

Yet, he noted that apathy "turns very quickly" into activism when something happened which threatened the look of a particular place or the quality of life of a particular people.

He said the key to healing the breach between personal experience and the green agenda, was reconnecting the local and global environment.

The Shadow Environment Minister contrasted the debate about the environment with the success of the Make Poverty History campaign: "Discussion of the environment has become a discussion about rival technocratic solutions to apparently technocratic problems - a debate about wind and gas, while the poverty debate is a debate about flesh and blood."

He added: "If we talk of the sky and the sea, the mountains and the rivers, the soaring spires and the curve of a colonnade, sunlight through trees and the first daffodils of Spring, we talk of the stuff of poetry and romance. Our hearts are stirred and our spirits lifted."

Mr Letwin said Government must work "with the grain of human nature" to create a framework of incentives "towards the creation of beauty".

"We must invest in the environment - and, to carry the public with us, we must make that investment carry economic, as well as aesthetic returns," he added.

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