The Green Futures interview: Zac Goldsmith

Zac Goldsmith talks to Martin Wright about free markets, free choice, whether to trust politicians… and lessons from the stepsister of Anne Frank

The market has to be a force for good

We have to rewrite the rules so that the market, which for so long has been an engine of unsustainable, colossal destruction, becomes a force for good. The market is the most powerful force for change, other than nature itself. And there are so many signs that it can be transformed, so many examples: make waste a liability, waste is minimised; if you put a value on something, it’s valued. It’s really very simple: we free the market to do what it’s best at, but change the parameters in which it operates.

Too many shampoos,too much information

If I go to the chemist, I don’t want to have to spend hours looking at all the different shampoos, trying to work out which chemicals are good and which are bad; which might give me cancer and which are benign. I want to be able to trust the way in which the system works – I’d like that choice to be made for me. I don’t want to have to be an expert in chemicals, that’s their job…

I think that’s why Marks & Spencer’s Plan A appealed to people. The beauty of it was that you could walk into M&S and spend money, and so be part of the solution, not the problem, without having to think about it.

You want to pollute? You’ll pay the price

Free choice is a great concept until it starts affecting other people. Then it becomes a restriction on their choice. You can’t allow people a free choice to destroy the planet – to inflict suffering on others.

Now obviously you don’t stand for election on a manifesto saying “we’re going to deprive you of choice” – but you don’t have to. If you quadruple the tax on sending waste to landfill, for example, you know that most companies would stop doing so immediately! As for the rest, you just tell them: “If you want to carry on, that’s fine, but you’ll pay through the nose to do so, and we’ll use the money to bring down the price of the [cleaner] alternatives.”

This is not an absolute restriction of choice:it’s about shifting the playing field.

Trust me, I’m a Conservative…

We’ve got to be so honest with people – if you want to introduce a new tax, like aviation fuel duty, you’ve got to show that every single penny of that has been invested in alternatives, otherwise people just won’t accept it. [There was a poll] in which people were asked if they believed in taxing on domestic flights, and about 80% said no. Shortly after, they were asked: “Do you believe that aviation should be taxed domestically if every penny was used on alternative transport?”, and it was the exact opposite – about 80% said yes! So this issue really does all come down to trust.

This is the biggest challenge for [Tory leader] David Cameron and the Conservative Party. Cameron has bent over backwards to make people believe [his environmental commitment]; he couldn’t really be doing any more. And yet still you can see a wave of scepticism among chunks of the audience – people just do not believe what politicians say. So if he becomes Prime Minister, and in his first term doesn’t make really substantial moves in the right direction, keeping to most if not all of the policies he’s set out on the environment, he will be punished for that.

Irrespective of what happens between now and the election, [environmentalism] has been a massive part of his narrative. He has absolutely pinned himself to this green flag. If he doesn’t do it, who the hell is going to do it? Who’s going to come forward?

When parties compete, everyone wins

British politics has changed massively since Cameron launched his “vote blue, go green” campaign. It set off an incredible competition between the two parties – for a while it was like a tug of war. But then the Labour Party let go of the rope – as though they thought, “OK, we’ve lost that battle”.

So the tension evaporated, and environmentalism more or less disappeared from politics. Now it seems to be picking up again, perhaps because of Copenhagen. I’m hoping the trend continues, and that by the time of the election, it’s an issue on which the parties feel absolutely obliged to fight. You need that competition: without that tension, there’s no real pressure to take things further.

Politics is very superficial

The only thing that pushes any issue to the top of the political agenda is the public. With politicians, it’s all about winning the vote and maintaining [electoral] support, so really it’s all very superficial. The public simply have to make it clear that there are certain issues that matter to them – and that [the environment] is one of them.

“The conditions that led to the holocaust are always there”Lessons from Anne Frank’s stepsister

I recently met Eva Schloss, an extraordinary woman – an Auschwitz survivor whose family had hidden for a while in the same Amsterdam house as Anne Frank. They had became close friends. [Eva’s mother and Anne’s father were the only other members of the two families to survive the concentration camps. They married after the war, so that Eva is Anne Frank’s posthumous stepsister.]

For years, Eva hadn’t wanted to talk of the holocaust, but now she’s nearly 80, and she feels it’s time to speak out. She feels that we’ve become complacent; the holocaust is so long ago, that it’s become an abstract historical footnote, albeit an awful one. So that lures us into a false sense of security. We somehow imagine we are different – but Eva points out that Germany was a highly sophisticated culture [before the Nazis]: the Germans used to say that they were the most civilised people in the world. This was the country of Beethoven, of Goethe, it had a flourishing democracy – yet this terrible thing still happened, this awful example of human brutality.

Eva Schloss feels that the conditions that led to the holocaust are potentially always there. And in her view, unless we do something about the environmental crisis, and all the chaos and shortages that will result, we are going to be creating exactly those conditions. It will lead to human problems on a scale we have never seen before. A driving force for her [in speaking out about the holocaust] is the terror of what could happen if we don’t get to grips with this.

“You simply need to take the best of today and turn it into the norm of tomorrow”All the solutions already exist

Almost everything that needs doing has already been done somewhere. You don’t have to imagine or invent a future; you don’t have to pin your hopes on new- fangled technologies that don’t yet exist; you simply need to take the best of today and turn it into the norm of tomorrow. If you did that in every sector, we would be there. Yes the problem is formidable, it’s huge, it’s off the scale. But it’s not so big that we can’t deal with it.