Caroline Lucas: No10 ignored MI5 and MI6 warnings on climate change

“It wouldn’t increase our security one jot. What it would do is drive even further climate change and make us even more dependent on forces over which we have no control, such as whether the Strait of Hormuz is open or closed. Farage is trying to sell you a dud, you know.”

Farage’s rhetoric does not exist in isolation; instead, it forms a pattern of the far right “weaponising” environmental language to encourage anti-green sentiment. Far right parties have an “allergy to any kind of regulation or state intervention”, of the kind that the green agenda requires, and for Lucas, these parties promote the idea that green policies are “top down” and “elite-driven”. 

“Nothing could be further from the truth,” Lucas says, though she accepts her own side could improve its message. “The Green movement has, generally, made a mistake in allowing some of the conversations around this stuff to be driven by such technical language,” she says. When politicians speak about “the environment” or even “net zero” the terminology feels too impersonal.” 

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“I mean, to say to someone: ‘do you care about the environment?’ feels so abstract. What on earth do we mean by that?” What people do notice, however, is the cost of their energy bills, or the price to fill up their cars. 

And from Lucas’s experience, at this level, green policies can be a vote-winner and it’s a “miscalculation” from the government to assume otherwise. In February, Hannah Spencer won the Gorton & Denton by-election, becoming the Green Party’s fifth MP. Lucas believes it was a return to “integrity” in politics, insisting that the result was more than a vote against Matt Goodwin, the candidate for Reform, or the government’s stance on Gaza, but for the future the party could offer. 

Lucas is confident about the local elections. “People are fed up with Labour and don’t have confidence in the Conservatives. Sadly, it looks like Reform is going to do pretty well, too.” She says people who would be tempted by Reform are also potential Green voters. That feels like quite a stretch. 

But during her doorstop discussions, the voters she spoke to did not appear to know much about Reform, or its policies. “They’re voting for them because they just have a sense that the system isn’t working and that they want to give it a good kicking. And we agree with you. But there is an alternative. You don’t have to vote for a divisive, racist party to send that message to the government,” she says. 

Lucas is giving the inaugural State of Nature address at the Cambridge Literature Festival, a lecture she say, that’s long overdue. “[George] Robertson spoke about ‘corrosive complacency’ being at the heart of the government’s response to traditional military threats,” she said, recalling the former Nato’s chief’s recent intervention. “I would make the case that same corrosive complacency is not limited to conventional defence.” 

Last year, the government commissioned the Joint Intelligence Committee to investigate the national security impacts of the accelerating climate and nature emergencies. The report was so alarming that ministers initially tried to bury it. “It was only ever finally published when a Freedom of Information request forced the government to do so,” says Lucas. When it was eventually published, it was redacted. 

“This is a really devastating report from the security services, from MI5 and MI6, not Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, that really does tell a very alarming story of just how vulnerable we are to ecosystem collapse”. The paper looks at six ecosystems, including the Amazon rainforest and the Congo Basin, and tracks what a collapse would mean for the UK’s resilience in areas such as food security. All of them, it finds, will cause devastation.

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It’s this kind of “hard-hitting” language that, for Lucas, should be ringing alarm bells in Downing Street. But, she says, the report is regarded as an “inconvenience” and even an embarrassment for the government, which is continuing to ignore its findings. “In a sense,” Lucas begins, “there’s an incredibly dangerous lack of imagination here. Sometimes we can’t necessarily see an ecosystem collapsing until it’s past its tipping point. It’s not quite the same as seeing the Strait of Hormuz being blocked with Iranian tankers.” 

Earlier this month, Keir Starmer penned an article in the Guardian warning that the Iran war was a sign the UK needed to build more resilience, both at home and with its European allies and Lucas believed, once again, the prime minister glossed over the facts he didn’t care to mention. In a letter, Lucas responded to the publication, writing that the prime minister’s warning would “carry more weight were he to level with the British public about the full breadth of the crises we face”. 

“He writes this whole article about resilience without once mentioning the fact that ecosystems are collapsing,” she says, citing the redacted report published last year. The entire saga, Lucas sighs, is “extraordinary”.

Former Green Party leader and MP for Brighton Pavilion Caroline Lucas gives the inaugural State of Nature lecture at the Cambridge Literature Festival, 22-26 April