Habitat Protection, Ideology and the British Nature State: The Politics of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981

Abstract

The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 was the most important piece of nature conservation legislation passed by the British government since the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949. Part of its purpose was to resolve the tension between modern agriculture and nature conservation by strengthening the incentive-based approach to the protection of the 'scientific interest' in privately owned land. These apparently modest intentions belie its historical importance, which rests on its strengthening of the existing conservationist tools at the disposal of the UK nature state and the role played during the long parliamentary struggle by the emerging environmental movement and environmentalist ideas.1 Notwithstanding the seminal studies by W.M. Adams published in the 1980s and the recent legal analysis by Christopher Rodgers, the political conflict provoked by the bill has yet to attract significant attention from historians and is virtually absent from histories of Thatcherism or 1980s Britain.