Editorial

In May 2011, the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies published Lessons for the Coalition: an end of term report on New Labour and Criminal Justice (Silvestri, 2011). In that collection I described Labour’s performance on environmental issues as ‘too little too late’. The UK experienced a period of Blair/Brown environmental governance that demonstrated ‘symbolic success but real failure’. Amongst New Labour’s environmental achievements were the establishment of the Climate Change Act 2008, the creation of the Department of Energy and Climate Change and the establishment of numerous green quangos to oversee and implement a range of environmental policies. However, these steps forward were seemingly threatened by the early days of a Cameron-led coalition where austerity measure, trade and the abolition of green quangos were on the cards. In sum, I concluded ‘future UK government report cards on the environment do not look good’ (Walters, 2011). After two and half years of a Conservative/Liberal Democratic coalition, and much rhetoric about it being ‘the greenest government ever’, the interim report card for the Cameron government on environmental matters is grim reading indeed. The demise of green quangos, record carbon emissions, renewable energies policies stultified, environmental criminality and victimisation all but ignored, and billions of pounds lost to environmental corporate fraudsters are just some of the headlines of Tory inspired governance with much environmental rhetoric and no environmental results.

This special edition of cjm draws upon the expertise of UK academics working in the field of green criminology. The contributors were invited to reflect upon the Cameron government’s ‘green performance’, including its role at the Rio+20 earth Summit, as well as Caroline Spelman’s recently articulated view that ‘green performance’, ‘It’s in our [UK’s] interests to be green and growing’. The collection reveals that public sector cuts, free trade, market regulation and economic prosperity are the vastly superior values of the UK government. The environment merely provides David Cameron with silver tongued slogans and sound bites to charm the House of Commons whilst repeatedly failing to deliver on any meaningful environmental outcomes.

In this collection, Polly Higgins, Damien Short and Nigel South identify how unstoppable and ramped capitalism, with perilous environmental harms, is part and parcel of daily corporate business practices in Britain and abroad and they call for ‘ecocide’ to be the fifth crime against peace under an amendment to the Statute of Rome. The dominance of free trade ideologies that underpin the coalition politics have resulted in the UK’s pending appearance in the European Court to answer charges of unrelenting pollution failures. Moreover, I argue in my piece, cowritten with Peter Martin, that the government’s faith in a carbon trading scheme to reduce emissions has provided new criminal markets for savvy corporate fraudsters to scam and manipulate unregulated carbon markets and thus deny British taxpayers of billions of pounds in unpaid VAT. Tanya Wyatt identifies how the government’s push towards greener energy solutions, and its current agricultural policies, continues to be made with disregard for the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem degradation in both Britain and abroad. For Hazel Croall, Britain food industry and its government led policies of food monopolies and deregulation are failing people and the environment alike, especially children, as ‘food crime’ is exacerbated by austerity measures and market models of regulation. The protection of the UK’s wildlife and the failure of the government to prioritise and resource efforts to prevent ‘wildlife crime’, an issue of increasingly global significance, is starkly highlighted by both Angus Nurse and Melanie Wellsmith. The marginalisation of an environmental harm and criminality consciousness within UK government thinking is highlighted by Matthew Hall, through discourses in environmental victimisation that are absent from the political radar. Finally, Gary R Potter identifies another upshot of Government failure and ineptitude, notably public resistance, and explores the ways in which various forms of citizen environmental action continue to rise.

The purpose of this edition is to prompt and promote debate on issues of pressing and growing global concern. It was hoped when authors were requested to submit articles that their contributions would contradict my foreshadowed concerns of the coalition of environmental performance, unfortunately not.

Professor Reece Walters is Professor in the School of Justice and Assistant Dean Research, Faculty of Law, School of Justice, Queensland University of Technology.