England is experiencing a dual collapse. The degradation of our natural environment echoes the collapse of our political and social ecosystems, the web of institutions, communities, identities and relationships through which we govern ourselves. These two crises share the same root cause: neoliberalism’s relentless attack on our natural, political and social commons.
In the proud Lancastrian town of Darwen, not far from where I live, St George’s flags hang on lampposts over queues for some of the 150,000 meals a year given out at the local food banks. Blackburn with Darwen is the 11th most deprived local authority in England. Almost 50% of children in Darwen grow up in a low-income family, and Darwen’s men and women die up to a decade earlier than those in least deprived areas. In what was once a key centre of cotton manufacturing during the industrial revolution, in 2025 almost a third of Darwen’s adults are considered ‘economically inactive’. The town’s library has reduced its opening hours due to council funding cuts, while youth services have faced significant budget reductions following the 2010 austerity measures. Meanwhile, the River Darwen, the river that gave the town its name, has been decimated by sewage. In 2025 alone, the water company United Utilities dumped sewage 546 times into the river. 1,351 hours of discharge in one year has turned the river brown, killing its freshwater life and rendering it a public health danger.
The scale of both collapses in Darwen is well documented across the nation. Privatised water companies discharged raw sewage into England’s rivers and seas 291,492 times in 2025, totalling 1.87 million hours. South West Water alone recorded over 407,006 hours. The Environment Agency reported that, as a result, less than 15% of England’s waterways are now classed as achieving ‘good ecological standards’. At the same time, the UK has become one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, with just 47% of England’s nature left intact, far below the global average of 79%. Responsibility for this catastrophe rests disproportionately with a tiny elite of landowners: according to Guy Shrubsole’s 2024 book The Lie of the Land, less than 1% of England’s population owns half the country’s land, and nobody, including the British state itself, has a reliable account of who owns the rest. Access to vanishing green spaces for working class people has ‘collapsed’.
Meanwhile, Trussell’s food banks distributed 2.6 million emergency parcels across the UK in 2025, 45% more than before the pandemic, with its Hunger in the UK 2025 report finding 14.1 million people living in households struggling to afford food. 2.2 million children go to bed hungry every night. The social hubs that shape a community are rapidly disappearing. England and Wales lost a pub every single day throughout 2025, while a privatised Post Office converts increasing numbers of full branches to unmanned ‘drop and collect’ services. As a direct result of Tory and Liberal Democrat austerity, sustained local funding cuts since 2010 have led over 800 of England’s libraries to close, with 9,000 librarian jobs lost. Spending on youth services by local authorities in England has slumped by 73% since the same austerity years, leading to 1000 youth clubs closing. Mental health problems like feelings of loneliness and anxiety ‘in any given week’ is impacting 1 in 5 adults in England. According to a 2020 report by Conservative-linked thinktank Onward, more than two thirds of British people believe that their community is in decline. Correspondingly, trust in the institutions meant to hold all of this together has collapsed: the 2025 British Social Attitudes survey recorded just 12% of people trusting the government to put the country’s interest before party interest, the lowest figure since the survey began in 1983. Only 9% trust politicians to tell the truth.(20)
These are not separate crises running in parallel.
In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams describes how capitalism destroys local webs of meaning and mutual recognition that makes a place feel like home. Williams argues that a place becomes home not simply because of its physical landscape, buildings, or geography, but because it is embedded in a dense network of social relationships, shared histories, customs, memories, and everyday practices. People know one another, recognise one another’s roles, rely on one another, and share a common understanding of the community. These social connections give places meaning. Modern capitalism and urbanisation often weaken these local networks. As economic and social relations are becoming increasingly organised at larger scales–local shops replaced by supermarket chains, factories closed by international ownership, local councils losing the means necessary to serve the needs of the community–people are becoming detached from the local systems of meaning that once anchored identity and belonging.
But these same destructive forces have also caused the degradation of England’s natural world, and our place in it. A local community’s relationship with its land, rivers, woods, and wildlife is being altered by decisions taken elsewhere, by global corporations, investors or markets that have little knowledge of the place itself. Just as Williams worried about local social life becoming subordinated to distant economic powers, local ecological relationships have likewise become subordinated to planning, building and water treatment decisions made in the name of unaccountable private interests. The local webs of meaning and mutual recognition are ecological as well as social: people are intimately related to particular rivers, footpaths, species, fields, and seasons through everyday experience, rooted in the earth that they belong to. When distant actors reshape those environments, they can disrupt both ecological systems and the sense of belonging rooted in them. And with it, a sense of loss of control over how to shape our lives and community
This is not an English phenomenon, true. But what is more particular to England is the silence that surrounds this loss. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson argues that a nation survives as a nation only through the stories its members tell about themselves to one another, narratives that require institutions to carry and sustain them. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, whatever the limits of their devolved settlements, possess at least an institution in which the damage can be named as a national story: a parliament or assembly where the closure of libraries or the polluting of a river can be debated as a question of what kind of country this is. England is a heavily centralised country, and has no equivalent local institutional space, nowhere for the English to tell stories about ourselves. It has no civic architecture scaled to England or to English communities where a people might collectively examine what neoliberalism has done to their towns, their rivers, their sense of belonging to one another, and decide together what comes next.
Deprived of any forum for that conversation, England has been left atomised by neoliberalism, and mute about it at the same time. And into this silent fracture, the far-right has been only too willing to step. It is this unmooring, this shared experience of loss and rootlessness, that the far right has been far quicker than the left to name and weaponise. The forces of the British right and far-right are channeling the justifiable anger at what neoliberalism is doing to us into a street-level violence and disunity that is reshaping the country. At the same time, politicians of the right position themselves as the only political force defending the interests of England and the UK, while being the foot soldiers of the neoliberal economics undoing the country. Reform UK’s platform, for example, centres on broader public service privatisation (including of the NHS), and roughly £80bn in tax cuts skewed toward the wealthy. This a party campaigning on defending poorer communities, while planning to abolish the NHS as it stands, voting against workers’ rights policies in Parliament, and proposing deep tax cuts for the wealthy funded by cuts to welfare and social security.
The Green response
As progressives who wish to fight back, this is our challenge. But it is also our opportunity.
Mounting a strong political defence against the ravages of neoliberalism can be the basis for shaping the outlines of a new Englishness, a progressive English patriotism that locates at its heart rebuilding our communities and rewilding our natural world. This inclusive, plural Englishness, showing English people that a progressive England is not just possible but critical, would be a direct attack on the ability of the far-right to subvert patriotism into a question of whiteness and exclusion.
And Greens can go toe-to-toe with the forces of the right.
If a love of country is anything, then it is a love of and a desire to protect its people, its communities, the public services and the land. Through their policies, ideas and vision as the only solely English political party (the Welsh Greens will be independent as soon as they decide to be), the English Greens have the opportunity to give hope that there is a political party standing up for working class communities and defending our natural world. The Greens can lead by example that Englishness need not mean division, exclusion and hate.
Anti-poverty policies show that the English Green Party is serious about tackling the root causes of poverty, insecurity and inequality, conditions that the far-right exploit but have little desire to alleviate. Policies like a wealth tax to reverse the punishing benefits sanctions that have pushed millions into poverty and hunger, increasing the minimum wage, and a commitment to a massive municipal programme of building high quality social housing. Building a Universal Basic Income to replace means-tested benefits would remove the current choice of either work or hunger and homelessness. Manifesto pledges to undo anti-union legislation, passed by the Tories and left in place by Labour, shapes Green industrial policy to strengthen the rights of workers in English workplaces. Trade union support in Green policy far exceeds that of the Labour Party, replacing them as the political wing of the union movement. And only Greens want to fully reclaim our public services. Reclaiming our water, transport, NHS and Post Office is to reclaim a piece of the commons, to take back what was or is being sold off and put them back in the only hands they should ever have belonged in: ours.
Greens also want to find out just who owns the land beneath our feet, to better protect England’s natural world for everyone to enjoy and own. An English Greens ambition that goes to the root of Williams’s argument about belonging starts at a Land Value Tax (LVT). The LVT is designed precisely so that the people who hold this vanishingly concentrated resource contribute in proportion to it. A first step to achieving this is to uncover who actually owns England by carrying out a full survey of landholdings, since no one can tax fairly what is not properly mapped. This incompleteness is itself instructive: England has spent decades losing count of who owns it, in the same way it has lost count of what companies, offshore investment firms or foreign governments run our water, trains, and buses. In her book, Another England, Caroline Lucas describes the LVT as having an ‘elegant simplicity and essential fairness’. There is plenty of room in England, if it is shared by all. An LVT also represents a serious and long overdue reckoning with English land: who holds it, what it’s for, who is selling it, and who does it belong to in the end? As Lucas points out, the fact that a Land Value Tax has long maintained support from all sides of the political aisle and still isn’t anywhere near policy is a ‘casebook example of the landowners’ ability to block reform.’ No other party but the English Greens is even attempting to build the ledger.
And, drawing all of this together, is a call for a renewed English democracy, placing the decisions that concern English communities and lives in the hands of the people who it impacts. A commitment to devolution of economic and democratic power to communities highlights the trust Greens have in empowering working people to make the right decisions for their area, largely free of central government interference. As a 2024 New Economics Foundation report found, people in England were twice as likely to trust local politicians to improve their areas as they were national politicians, and that it is ‘vital that we capitalise on the trust there is for local government’. And these local democratic institutions could provide the platforms on which to challenge the destruction of community and nature, and finally provide English communities with the institutions Anderson describes, carrying and sustaining the stories we tell about ourselves and what we owe to each other.
The right’s answer is who to exclude from our communities. But through our policies protecting people, place and community, the English Greens offer a different account of what Englishness could be: one of plurality and inclusion, rooted in community, nature, and democratic renewal. A patriotism drawn from the rich history of protest and solidarity against the destructive neoliberal politics that is hard-wired into the British right and hard-right. Greens have the opportunity to frame their policies as defending the heart of England. The Tories, Reform UK and Restore defend the wealthy and powerful at the expense of this heart. A progressive English patriotism can identify, name and expose this betrayal.
The Greens (and the larger left) can no longer be silent on the debates of Englishness, should no longer cede the ground of what it is to be English to cynical politicians waving our flag while selling us out. These are the stories that Greens and progressive forces in England need to start telling about who we are, where we are going, and what we are prepared to defend.
Matt Hanley is editor of Green Isles.
