Budget and Brexit footling affairs compared to what we’re doing to planet

The Budget provided the government, and those whose job it is to report on it, a welcome respite from having to talk about Brexit. Budgets are big news – we all know that. Money for school toilets and whiteboards matters, right? Filling in potholes is always a hot topic at dinner tables, isn’t it? And who can’t be grateful that the price of petrol is being kept down? This is big picture stuff.

If that doesn’t rock your boat then there is Brexit. Brexit is even bigger news – we can’t help but know that because people are so cross with each other in Parliament and on social media. Brexit is of generational importance, we are told.

If these two political events do not interest us then Prince Charles’s views of the world as serialised in the Daily Mail tell us what the person, nearly, at the top is thinking. Or whoever is kissing whoever on Strictly. That’s important because I saw a story on – no less – the front page of a newspaper. That’s before you think about who Russia is getting at, what China is doing in the South China Sea, and the mindboggling behaviour of the President of the United States of America.

To younger readers I guess most of the above may or may not matter very much. Doubtless there are many news stories I haven’t heard of that are absorbing your attention. My loss.

The truth is, however, the Budget, Brexit, what the Prince of Wales thinks, and all the rest of it pales into insignificance compared to what we have learned about what is happening to our planet in the last couple of weeks.

The two headline facts that have held my attention are that we have twelve years left to arrest an irreversible increase in the planet’s temperature, and that since the 1970s (the year of my birth) human beings have established a pattern of economic behaviour that is killing off a huge number of other species with whom we share the world.

We now know plastic has reached high up into the food chain. If it has not happened already it can only be a matter of time that you put something in your mouth and swallow a piece of food that contains a trace of plastic. Think of that every time you sit down to eat.

The Zoological Society of London and the World Wildlife Fund have just published the Living Planet Report 2018. It is a startling and deeply concerning document. In our quest for more food, land and water we are exhausting the planet’s resources and driving many other species to the point of extinction.

Never in my life time has the domestic pre-occupation and national discourse of the United Kingdom seemed so small and peripheral to the great international issue of our time – and possibly of all time. That is, how do we fashion an economic model that does not destroy the life of other animals and the planet itself?

The United Kingdom is only one country, but it is politically and economically influential. Our history is one of adaptation, enterprise, innovation and reform. And we need to be a leading power once again championing change, this time on the environment. Brexit, budgets, business, economic and social policy all need to be refashioned and reshaped, so that we focus our country on being in tune with the world around us. We need to be become world leaders in the most important challenge of our time.