EVEN for a government not noted for honesty or compassion, the Conservatives’ 25-year plan for the natural environment has to be the most duplicitous ever. 

Theresa May sounded more like a feudal cleric offering solace to the poor: “The rich may be pillaging the earth but I promise you, the Hereafter will be so much better.” 

A 25-year plan, with no up-front upheavals, may as well be for the Hereafter.

Bereft of binding legal duties or transformative undertakings, it is a mixture of cosmetic gestures and public deception.

The issues their plan touches on are real enough, but none offers the luxury of a 25-year delivery dream. 

Theresa May sounded more like a feudal cleric offering solace to the poor, saying: “The rich may be pillaging the earth, but I promise you the Hereafter will be so much better.” 

A 25-year plan, with no up-front upheavals, may as well be for the Hereafter.

The list of big picture opportunities the government spurned is depressingly long. 

There is no withdrawal of support for the fossil fuel industry. The plan fails to commit Britain to dealing with all our own waste. 

It sets no binding annual carbon budgets. There is no mention of aviation or any shift into clean transport systems. 

The government will not restore the zero-carbon homes standard nor give local authorities powers to purchase empty properties in preference to greenfield development. Localities cannot put eco-system repair ahead of speculative ventures.

And the plan doesn’t even mention the need for measures that would offer Britain protection from the next, looming, food crisis.

May’s plan is built on cynicism. Internal polling has told the Tories they have no chance of winning support from younger voters unless they come up with more convincing green/environmental policies.

This presented the Prime Minister with a problem. She and her hard right don’t give a stuff about the environment, food standards, animal welfare or environmental protection.

They want a post- Brexit world that looks more like the wild west. As a cover story, May needed a serious amount of window dressing and a big bag of trinkets. And that’s what you’ve got.

May’s plan is supposed to demonstrate the “greening of the Nasty Party.”

Its add-ons will include a retreat from any relicensing of fox-hunting — though no action against its illegal continuation — a restriction on the use of live animals in circuses, along with extending the plastic bags tax, a tax on takeaway coffee cups and some international action against accumulated plastic waste in the seas.

One look at their latest poster campaign tells you all you need to know.

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A baby turtle makes its way across an empty beach, safe beneath the caption “We’ve banned microbeads.” 

Crisis averted. Planet saved. Thank goodness for those compassionate Conservatives.

The real tragedy is that, within the government’s free-trade obsessions, the turtle is as good as done for.

In any trade agreement Britain negotiates with US President Donald Trump or the The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), environmental and ecosystem protection will be told to “go swing.”

Theresa May knows this. She just needed cover. Enter the unlikely figure of Michael Gove.

Gove may not be everyone’s image of Rudolph Valentino, but the Secretary for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is clearly out on a wooing spree.

His pledges to protect animal welfare and biodiversity offer seductive, though undeliverable, assurances to both environmental and farming communities.

And he’s been going down well. At recent food and farming conferences, delegates gave him a warm welcome — not because they were convinced but because they were desperate for reassurance.

All they wanted to know was that they figured somewhere, anywhere, on someone’s political agenda.

Labour has to take some responsibility for this sense of abandonment if only by allowing the issues to slip out of any exchanges that hold Theresa May to account.

Jeremy Corbyn’s personal manifesto, and the Labour one, offered radical commitments on sustainability policies.

Corbyn himself — in his lifestyle, diet, environmental affiliations and even on his allotment — stands in stark contrast to the superficiality of May’s approach to a one-planet politics.

We now know that Theresa May had previously insisted that ministers dumb down all climate and environment issues.

How else do you block public opposition to fracking, the case for zero-carbon homes or the refusal to meet legal air quality standards? How else do you explain the government’s year-after-year failure to meet its own annual tree planting targets? When push came to shove, the environment always got the shove.

Beyond the trinkets in May’s 25-year plan, nothing has changed. Behind the scenes, only exploitative will become legally binding. Negotiations shaping the Tories real agenda are already heading elsewhere.

• US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has stated that any US-Britain deal would depend upon Britain accepting lower US standards of food and animal welfare. This means chlorinated chicken, growth hormones in livestock, unlabelled genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in food and fields and widespread use of Pathogen Reduction Treatments (PRTs) to reduce the soaring levels of contamination in US food and feed. 

• In the event of a “no deal” Brexit, any retreat into World Trade Organisation (WTO) standards would force Britain to adopt even lower standards than current US ones. 

• Many on the Tory right advocate lower standards still. In 2016, Jacob Rees-Mogg told the Treasury select committee that standards that were “good enough for India could be good enough for the UK.”

Whatever warm words the 25-year plan contains, it comes with the coldest, and most calculating, of hearts. Nowhere is this more evident than in the absent issue of food security.

The 25-year plan doesn’t offer any perspective on Britain’s food security — an issue that ought to worry far more than just the farming community.

Gove threw out a limited lifeline of continued subsidies without being clear about what sort of farming Britain intends to support. Let’s put the issues in a nutshell.

• Britain currently imports 40 per cent of its food needs. Some 75 per cent of this comes from the EU.

• Britain’s ‘food trade gap’ in 2016 was £22.5 billion, a massive cash drain on the economy.

• Our real import dependency is far greater, with over 50 per cent of Britain’s food and feed coming as imports.

• We are increasingly reliant on using other people’s lands — 70 per cent of the cropland, and 64 per cent of associated greenhouse gas emissions, used in supplying Britain’s food needs are located abroad.

• This international reliance has led Britain to massively reduce its domestic food stocks. Britain now has minimal buffer stocks, sufficient only for a three-to-five-day supply.

• No thought has been given to Britain’s management of food shocks, arising from increasingly turbulent global weather patterns.

None of this figures in May’s plan, even though major food suppliers have told her to her face that Britain could easily tip into food crisis. Nowhere is this more evident than in the cock-up negotiations over Brexit.

In short, a hard Brexit would be a disaster for British food and farming.

As things stand, food products coming into the country get an average two-minute inspection at the port of entry. Food suppliers have told the government that, if Brexit imposed more inspection duties, just doubling this to four minutes would create a 27-mile tailback from Dover back up the M2 motorway within 24 hours.

If tariffs come in, along with new inspection duties, there will be a huge rise in food commodity prices, from cheese (46 per cent) to tomatoes (21 per cent).

Brexiteers who argue we can replace these with cheaper goods from elsewhere make no connections whatever with the ecology of “sustainable” global food supply or with the crash they will engender to Britain’s food and farming.

The food industry is currently Britain’s biggest employer, accounting for 3.83 million jobs but is treated as a mere pawn in the pursuit of free-trade agreements.

If Gove’s extension of the £3.7bn agricultural subsidies turns out to be the end of supported agriculture, up to 50 per cent of Britain’s farms will go bankrupt.

Forget the prospects of a shift into low carbon farming. Forget the development of more localised and accountable food markets. Forget the interlinking of sustainable food, drainage, soil and energy systems.

Before the CAP, Britain’s “agricultural support system” was a form of deficit funding — a safety net for farm incomes that also allowed surpluses to become lower food prices for consumers.

The government could have used its 25-year plan to open a conversation about something closer to sustainable food, farming and land management policies. But no, this would have been a “market intervention” step too far.

Instead, Britain is offered a plan full of empty promises. There is no commitment to turn the coming Agriculture Bill into a Sustainable Food and Farming Bill, no plan to avoid the disruption of food supplies or strengthen our own resilience, no binding commitment to higher environmental standards, no strengthening of the supply line of food and jobs.

The challenge for Labour is to come up with a real alternative to May’s vacuous plan. Hers is a scam, credible only because the issues slipped off the leadership agenda.

What Labour needs is to put environment, climate, food and sustainability back at the centre of tomorrow’s politics. It is where Corbyn’s heart lies and where the next election will be won.

This is what the turtle is counting on.