Take me to your leader… – Viva!life 94

I would if I could find one, says Tony Wardle, but they’re a bit thin on the ground

Featured in Viva!Life 94/Winter 2025

Lough Neagh is the UK’s largest lake and covers 148 square miles of the lovely Northern Irish countryside. It supplies 40 per cent of the province’s fresh water and is a wondrous haven for wildlife. It’s bed and banks are owned by the 12th Earl of Shaftesbury and it is administered by the Lough Neagh Partnership – over 20 councils, charities and government departments.

For all the good they’ve done, they might as well have handed the job to Mickey Mouse, Pluto and Goofy. They have overseen an environmental catastrophe! Stinking, toxic green-blue algae now obliterates much of the lough’s surface and is wiping out its glorious biodiversity. That’s leadership for you!

Lough Neagh is dying from a disease whose symptoms first revealed themselves way back in 1974. Fifty years of handwringing by its guardians when the causes were staring them in the face – nitrogen and phosphorous run-off from animal slurry and the overuse of fertilisers, predominantly from beef and dairy farming. It’s called eutrophication, it squeezes life out of the water and is a growing problem all over the world.

The Lough Neagh Partnership sat down and worked out an action plan for resolving the situation but refused to tamper with animal agriculture, the main cause. If you ever wanted proof of livestock farming’s primacy, this is it.

In England and Wales, rivers everywhere are suffering similarly but those most under the cosh are the Wye, Lugg and Usk, where hundreds of chicken farms house some 23 million birds. Once again, it’s dung used as fertiliser that’s the main problem.

But of course, since privatisation we’ve had the government-appointed Ofwat to run the show and guarantee our water quality – its main directors apparently being Widow Twankey and Idle Jack, with a remit to be nice to water companies.

“We can do that!” they cried. Between 1991 and 2019, they allowed £57 billion to be dolled out to shareholders while running up debts of £48 billion – paying dividends from borrowed money is unjust and economic insanity. While Ofwat overlooked that little  discretion, they also allowed the companies to pump as much raw sh*t into our rivers as possible, it seems. They sanctioned it on 300,953 occasions in 2022 and after a productivity drive, upped it to 450,000 times in 2024. So that’s where the £100 million plus bonuses were earned!

I loved the news story that the world’s oldest man credited his longevity to having a weekly fish and chip supper. If that was true, you’d need regular culls to thin out the population in my hometown of Grimsby or they’d live forever. But the truth is, they have one of the lowest life expectancies in the UK.

None of that sits comfortably with the latest report from ICES (International Council for the Exploration of the Seas) which predicts that cod in the North Sea and English Channel are in “grave danger of collapse” and fishing should stop immediately. They’ve also said that mackerel catches must be cut by 70 per cent while many other species are also at risk.

These dire warnings about overfishing have made more comebacks than the late Ozzy Osbourne but unlike him, they’ve largely been ignored. Our global leaders swear by the deft political tactic of ‘kick it down the road and let the next lot deal with it’ while dolling out $35 billion in annual subsidies, mostly to the largest fishing fleets that do the most damage ($726 million for the UK fleet). As a consequence, our wondrous oceans continue to dramatically decline while pages from the scary reports seemingly dangle from a piece of string in the directors’ WC.

The greatest abrogation of leadership has to be the global response (or lack of it) to a report published in 2006 called Livestock’s Long Shadow. Nearly 400 pages long and with over 30 pages of references, it listed in horrifying detail how livestock farming was destroying the planet. A few choice quotes gives a feel for the profundity of its findings.

Livestock contributes significantly to major environmental problems: they are leading drivers of deforestation and habitat destruction and are pushing biodiversity toward mass extinction; they are responsible for 18 per cent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions – more than the entire transport sector; some 70 per cent of cleared forest land is used for grazing – most of the rest for growing animal feed.

What made this report so damning was that it came out of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and its lead author was a man called Henning Steinfeld. Both he and the FAO had spent most of their existence encouraging farmers to produce more, bigger, better, more profitable animals. It was as if the Pope, in his Easter address, had suddenly said: “Look, I’m sorry folks but the truth is, I’m an atheist!”

The reaction was extraordinary and the meat industry went into attack – its first victory was to argue the figure on GHG emissions down to 14.5 per cent. Later research from other sources argued it back up – not to 18 but 20 per cent.

In the 19 years since Livestock’s Long Shadow was published we’ve seen a huge concentration on producing electric cars (EVs) and subsidies to encourage them. Air travel is never out of the news, with extensive research being undertaken into alternative fuels, improved aircraft design and electrification. On tackling meat and dairy consumption – not a dicky bird. The reason seems obvious to me. Electric cars and new aircraft don’t reduce manufacturing output; they merely change it, so everything trundles on as before.

World leaders have ignored the vast environmental problems caused by livestock production and have congregated around just one – climate change. But even here, they have thrown an invisibility blanket over animal farming even when they know that the science says they cannot achieve net zero without tackling it.

They met in Paris on 12 December 2015 to discuss the huge threats posed by global heating and had reference to enough scientific research to sink a battleship. They signed the Paris Climate Accord – a legally binding agreement that all signatories would reach net zero by 2050 (net zero is when no excess CO2 is emitted into the atmosphere). The only countries not to sign were Iran, Libya and Yemen, all big oil producers. Of the 194 countries that did sign, not a single one is on track to meet its obligations.

While the world burns, rages, melts, floods and desiccates, what can we expect from potential leaders at the next election? According to Reform’s deputy leader, Richard Tice, human-induced climate change is “absolute garbage” and Reform will scrap net zero. The Tory’s Kemi Badenoch also wants to scrap net zero and go on an oil-pumping bonanza. The Lib Dems want to push back their net zero commitment by five years. Scottish Nationalist MPs have voted to reverse the ban on new oil drilling in the North Sea. As for the most powerful man in the world, he claims it’s all a “con job” and says: “Drill, baby, drill!”

The bizarre thing is that the science since the Paris Accord has got more pressing not less and the reasons for leaders ditching their obligations are crystal clear – they fear a pursuit of net zero will make them electorally unpopular – as most of the gutter press keeps telling them. The old cliché ‘fiddling while Rome burns’ springs to mind.

I can’t help comparing this with a little 15-year-old Swedish schoolgirl who bunked off school to sit outside the Swedish parliament building all alone amongst the snow drifts with her bobble hat and homemade banner reading School Strike for Climate. It sparked a worldwide movement that demanded action on climate change. That’s what I call leadership! I also include Viva! as being a guiding light amongst today’s leaders – clear and honest information guided solely by science and our own eye-witness experience.

So who’ll get your vote next time – Pinky and Perky, Dennis the Menace or Lord Snooty (oh, no, we’ve already had him and he gave us the jewel that is Brexit)?