The Guardian view on Labour targeting nature: the problem isn’t snails, but a broken housing model | Editorial

The Guardian 1 min read 14 hours ago

<p>Rachel Reeves’s drive to speed up development is beginning to treat wildlife and the environment as expendable. Voters want homes built, but not at any cost</p><p>It began with gastropods. Last Tuesday, the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/07/rachel-reeves-clears-planning-blockage-amid-good-relationship-with-developer">told</a> a conference of tech executives that she’d intervened to help a developer build about 20,000 homes in north Sussex that had been held up, she said, by “some snails … a protected species or something”. She added that they “are microscopic … you cannot even see” them.</p><p>No one could miss the direction the chancellor was headed in. The snail in question, the lesser whirlpool ramshorn, is one of Britain’s rarest freshwater creatures, found in only a handful of locations and highly sensitive to sewage <a href="https://naturebftb.co.uk/projects/little-whirpool-ramshorn-snail/">pollution</a>. But Ms Reeves portrayed it as a bureaucratic nuisance. She then bragged that she’d fixed it – after a friendly developer gave her a call. It’s a bad look for a Labour politician, let alone the chancellor, to boast that green rules can be bent for chums.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/12/the-guardian-view-on-labour-targeting-nature-the-problem-isnt-snails-but-a-broken-housing-model">Continue reading...</a>
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