AT THE recent launch of James Schneider’s book Our Bloc – How We Win, Extinction Rebellion co-founder Clare Farrell complained at the way climate change is too often treated in isolation.
“People are talking about the climate as if it’s ‘an issue’ and not the operational function of the entire world,” she pointed out.
Labour’s conference arrangements committee’s attempt to rule a green new deal motion out of order on the grounds that it covers more than one topic is a classic example of this myopic approach.
Westminster is dominated by climate denialism. Not crude denialism of the Donald Trump variety, that explicitly rejects evidence that human activity is behind global warming and dismisses the need to do anything about it.
But a denial that addressing climate chaos is going to require a radical reorganisation of society and that an economy driven by the profit motive is incapable of delivering that.
Prime Minister Liz Truss is already ditching a ban on fracking, continuing to regard the extraction and burning of fossil fuels as an energy source for the future rather than investing in renewables.
But Labour is little better, banking entirely on technological solutions like electric cars and hydrogen-powered aircraft rather than making the case for social ones, such as real investment in the public transport network so buses and trains can become a cheap and reliable alternative to cars.
A three-month experiment in Germany this summer which saw unlimited monthly train travel priced at just €9 (£7.90) cut 1.8 million tons in carbon dioxide emissions over that period.
Where is the political demand in Britain for a similar scheme? Why is it left to individual Labour mayors to make the case for publicly owned buses? Why can’t the opposition take the fight to the Tories, exposing their assault on the rail industry as the exercise in national self-harm that it is?
The green new deal motion rightly links the climate crisis to uncontrollable rises in energy bills and calls for public ownership of the energy, water and rail industries as a prerequisite for addressing both.
A couple of years ago Labour was prepared to countenance this serious challenge to the corporate profiteers.
Public ownership was popular then — given the shocking rise in energy prices, it’s even more popular now.
Yet Westminster is shutting itself off from public opinion. After the earthquakes of Brexit and Corbynism, politicians seem to believe they can reimpose the Thatcherite consensus.
The Truss government has abandoned all talk of “levelling up,” and the promise of state-directed investment in poorer regions that formed a key part of Boris Johnson’s pitch to the “red wall” has evaporated. With the announced end to a cap on bankers’ bonuses, Truss signals that Johnson’s always half-hearted attempt to revive One Nation Toryism is over.
Labour’s lurch to the right is responsible. Johnson knew he had to promise an end to austerity to compete with the popularity of Jeremy Corbyn’s economic programme, demonstrated in the 2017 general election when Labour recorded its biggest vote increase since 1945.
The absence of an opposition prepared to offer radical change allows the Tories to revert to type. There is no longer a challenge to the status quo expressed in Parliament.
But politicians would be unwise to assume that sealing off avenues to change via Westminster has ended the public’s appetite for such change.
Labour can try to rig conference against discussion of the green new deal if it likes — though it is hard to see why it bothers, given Keir Starmer ignores conference decisions anyway.
All it will achieve is to entrench the mood among trade unions and the wider public that the political system we have isn’t fit for purpose — and channel activists’ energies into non-parliamentary solutions.
