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Rebecca Long Bailey's green socialist agenda

The struggle to tackle climate change is linked to improving living standards and transforming the way our economy works, writes MATT WILLGRESS

HAVING been sad enough to have attended Labour conference for over 20 years, I can honestly say that Rebecca Long Bailey’s Tuesday speech was one of the most brilliant outlines of what socialist policies could mean in transforming people’s lives I have heard here, or anywhere else.

She articulately critiqued Boris Johnson’s approach on both the economy and tackling climate chaos, and spelled out clearly how they are totally linked.

Hitting the nail on the head, she argued that “these are the very people who loaded the costs of the bankers’ crisis onto the backs of the poor. So be under no illusion, it will be the poor and the vulnerable who are forced to shoulder the human and economic price of climate breakdown.”

In contrast to the Tories, Labour stands for “government intervention to rapidly decarbonise our economy and push aside decades of neoliberal policy to create the industries of the future.”

This would mean “quality, unionised, green jobs, a proper industrial strategy, public ownership of our water and energy, and intervention in the economy, to make sure that the technologies of the future are manufactured, assembled and installed here.”

As part of this, the newly announced “people’s power plan” includes practical policies that will also be popular with the electorate.

It includes delivering a seven-fold increase in offshore turbines in 12 years and an £83 billion investment and strengthening our manufacturing sector by using public buying power to support local businesses, reshoring thousands of jobs to coastal towns.

She also explained why a left leadership and socialist policies are needed to make a Green New Deal a reality. 

Indeed, the scale of the challenge humanity faces means that nothing else than real, radical transformation of our economy will do. 

As Long Bailey put it, the stark reality is that “we can’t rely on the market to act fast enough.”

Globally this means millions of lives are at risk if we don’t change course and adopt an economic approach that puts people and planet first.

Long Bailey said: “If the height of our ambition is softening the ravages of unfettered capitalism and signing up to some watered-down version of austerity. Well, we may as well all go home now.”

She also pointed to the need for an alliance with youth strikers for climate justice, the trade union movement, Extinction Rebellion and climate activists to make a greener future a reality.

This is exactly the right approach. Labour must embrace, and ally with, the movements fighting Johnson and his reactionary “Trumpite” agenda, which can help both force the Tories out and mobilise in defence of a future Jeremy Corbyn-led government.

As with Brexit, the left’s enemies have sought in recent weeks to divide the labour movement over the approach of how we move to a greener economy, but Long Bailey’s speech, accompanied by debate on two progressive motions on the conference floor, showed that the overwhelming majority of all wings of our movement can be brought behind a bold, socialist plan of change to save our planet and humanity’s future.

This is also a plan which can improve people’s living standards and win Labour support from the majority of people.

In her speech, Long Bailey quoted the late great Tony Benn once saying: “Hope is the fuel of progress and fear is the prison in which you put yourself.”

Now is the time to have that hope — hope in a better future for mankind and our planet. In other words, socialism.

If you like this column, please follow www.facebook.com/LabourOutlook and www.twitter.com/LabourOutlook.

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