Modernise the UK economy with a Green New Deal

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In the face of environmental crisis, reducing inequality in our society would benefit everyone – even the wellbeing of the wealthy increases in a more equal society, argues Green Party activist, Natalie Bennett

Published: 19 August, 2010

JOHN Mills was right in identifying the serious risk that we could spend the next few years “in unsuccessful efforts to get the deficit down and mounting unemployment and stagnant living standards”.

But he missed a hugely significant risk, and opportunity, in the prescription he offered as an uncertain way out of Britain’s current economic difficulties. 

He suggested boosting manufacturing and related vocational training, and export-led growth. 

It’s a general prescription, and misses the fact that practically every other developed (and developing) country is now following the same strategy.

It also ignores a huge elephant looming over the economic graphs – that of the environmental crisis, which with massive heatwave-driven fires in Russia, unprecedented deadly floods in Pakistan, and island-sized icebergs “calving” in Greenland, is again proving unignorable.

But instead of burying our heads in the sand about the environmental crisis (as this government has done in abolishing the Sustainable Development Commission,  threatening plans for the funding of the Green Investment Bank and cutting back many other “green” programmes), and putting us at high risk of a double-dip recession with cuts, the government could take an alternative path.

We need a Green New Deal – a major investment package to rapidly modernise the UK economy for a low-carbon future, while seeing off the recession through large-scale job-creation.

Some countries are already hugely ahead of us: take for example Denmark, which is now getting more than 20 per cent of its electricity from wind power, and more than 10 per cent of its export income from wind technology (some of which is being installed in the UK).

Some people have accused the Green Party of inconsistency in encouraging growth in some industries when we also accept that all western economies have to downscale dramatically our resource consumption and rebalance the economy away from our current three-planet lifestyle. 

But as the New Economics Foundation (NEF) says, you don’t get to a sustainable steady state economy through a failed growth economy.

And we can’t say to the many people in already inadequate benefits, on poverty pay in expensive London, who face the loss of their jobs, and possibly their homes: “You have to cut back.” 

When they’re already desperate, that’s neither fair nor reasonable. Or achievable.

We need to raise the living standards of the poorest in our community, so they feel that they have hope and expectations for the future. 

And we can help to do that by ensuring their homes are properly insulated (and hence their fuel bills are reduced), that affordable, reliable public transport is available when they need it, and by providing decent safety-net benefits and services, without humiliating, frightening conditions attached.

That means that some people and institutions will have to make a fairer contribution, to pay their share, not see their already inadequate contributions cut back, the direction this government is taking. 

Interesting statistic – the total  profits for the first six months of this year announced last week by the five “Big Banks” – the institutions that played a major part of getting us into this mess – totalled £15billion. 

That’s roughly double the net saving planned from the first year of budget cuts. 

But as The Spirit Level, that hugely influential book now “honoured” by entire right-wing tracts attacking it, points out, reducing inequality in our society would benefit everyone – even the wellbeing of the wealthy increases in a more equal society.

And if we start on the path genuinely to reshaping our economy towards a green sustainable one, we can also start planning for a more balanced, happier society. 

NEF suggests a 21-hour working week would fairly share the work around – and just imagine, a life with a real work-life balance, where there was time for children and grandchildren, time for hobbies, time for education, time for life. 

Boom and bust has not only been economically disastrous, it has also left us languishing at the bottom of international measures of the physical and emotional wellbeing of our children with hugely raised levels of mental illness across society and huge levels of stress and simple unhappiness. 

It has left us with an environment where the bellweather species like amphibians and butterflies are disappearing fast, warnings of the risk of environmental disaster for us and our children. 

The old prescriptions will simply no longer do.

• Natalie Bennett of Camden Green Party fought Holborn and St Pancras constituency at the general election