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

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 costIt began with gastropods. Last Tuesday, the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, told 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.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 pollution. 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. Continue reading...