Cost of Living crisis

Tory Leadership Contender Robert Jenrick’s Pro-Coal and Anti-Net Zero Record

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Original article by Adam Barnett and Sam Bright republished from DeSmog.

The Conservative candidate has changed his tune on climate action, recently attacking Labour’s net zero policies and arguing for new fossil fuel extraction.

Former Conservative minister Robert Jenrick, who has today entered the race to lead the Tory party, has a growing record of attacks on climate action.

The MP for Newark – who saw a 23.9 percent swing against him in the general election, and served as secretary of state for immigration under former prime minister Rishi Sunak – has attacked what he calls “net zero zealotry”, and has labelled the UK’s net zero target “dangerous fantasy green politics unmoored from reality”. 

This is despite Jenrick having hailed the UK’s “world-leading commitment to net zero by 2050” as recently as 2020.

Jenrick has also called for the building of “new gas power stations” and supports new fossil fuel extraction, including North Sea oil and gas, and the opening of new coal mines. 

Jenrick’s campaign manager is Conservative MP Danny Kruger, a political reactionary who is also an advisor to climate denier Jordan Peterson’s Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC).

His candidacy follows the Conservative Party losing a landslide election on 4 July against a Labour Party committed to climate action, during which the Tories supported new North Sea oil and gas extraction, and the delaying of key climate reforms.

Almost half of voters (49 percent) believe renewable energy would lower household bills, while only 14 percent say the same for more fossil fuels, according to polling by More in Common. 

This week saw what climate scientists believe could be the hottest day on record thanks to climate change. The world’s leading climate science group, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has said that there is “a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all”.

Attacks on Labour’s Climate Agenda

In his response to the announcement of Labour’s legislative agenda in the King’s Speech last week (19 July), Jenrick used an address in the House of Commons to launch an attack on the government’s climate policies, spreading familiar misinformation. 

Jenrick said that “despite being only responsible for one percent of global emissions, we find ourselves with a government pursuing for ideological reasons a net zero policy which is going to make it harder for our own consumers to afford their bills, [and] which is further going to erode our industrial base”.

Downplaying a country’s emissions is a “widely deployed” tactic used to delay international climate action, according to academics. Contrary to Jenrick’s claims, the UK’s cost of living crisis has been made worse by its dependence on fossil fuels, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

And rather than “eroding our industrial base”, net zero policies are already creating new jobs and economic development. The UK’s net zero economy grew nine percent in 2023 to £74 billion – equivalent to 3.8 percent of the total UK economy, and supported more than 765,000 jobs, according to the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU). 

Jenrick also attacked Labour’s green investment vehicle, Great British Energy – launched today – as a quango “which serves no apparent purpose”, warned that new solar farms would “despoil our countryside”, and claimed that “200,000 jobs in the oil and gas sector have been put in danger”, using a widely debunked figure.

The chief advisor to the National Farmers Union (NFU) has said solar farms “do not in any way present a risk to the UK’s food security”, while NFU president Tom Bradshaw has attacked the claims made by Jenrick and others as “sensationalist”. 

On 11 July, when Labour announced its decision not to defend the new proposed coal mine in Cumbria in the High Court, Jenrick posted on X: “First the oil and gas industry, now coking coal for the steel industry. Less than a week in and jobs and economic growth are already being sacrificed on the altar of Labour’s net zero zealotry.”

In 2021, Jenrick decided not to challenge the planning application for the new mine – the UK’s first deep coal mine in more than 30 years, which would extract 2.8 million tonnes of coking coal a year, emitting an estimated 220 millions tonnes of greenhouse gases over its lifetime.

Net Zero U-Turn

Jenrick’s attacks on Labour’s green policies mirror his growing criticism of climate action – despite having previously celebrated the Conservatives Party’s support for net zero.

In February, Jenrick wrote an article for The Telegraph – a newspaper that regularly publishes attacks on climate science and net zero reforms – claiming that voters are sick of the “dishonesty” from politicians about “what net zero entails”. 

He said that the UK’s 2050 net zero ambition was decided upon in the summer of 2019, “while the country was occupied by Brexit debates”, and was “nodded through the Commons with fewer than 90 minutes of debate”.

At the time, Jenrick, who was Treasury minister, welcomed the adoption of the target. In 2020, while serving as communities secretary under Boris Johnson, Jenrick praised the UK’s “world-leading commitment to net zero by 2050”. Ahead of the 2019 general election, he said that voters should support the Conservatives on the basis that the UK was the “first advanced economy in the world to pass a net zero target”.

Yet, in the February 2024 Telegraph article, Jenrick wrote that it was obvious to him “at the time” that the costs associated with net zero “were likely to be astronomical.” The article went on to claim that “reaching net zero by 2050 requires us to overhaul the material foundations of our economy in just three decades”, and that the result “is a dangerous fantasy green politics unmoored from reality and that lacks the buy-in of the public”.

Jenrick’s campaign for Tory leader is being run by fellow Conservative MP Danny Kruger.

Kruger is the chair of the New Conservatives faction in Parliament – a group that advocates for more socially conservative, right-wing ideas within the Tory party, campaigning against “woke” culture, and immigration. 

It also appears that New Conservative press officer Sam Armstrong is serving as one of Jenrick’s campaign aides, although Armstrong neither confirmed nor denied his role when approached for comment. 

As DeSmog has revealed, the New Conservatives received £50,000 in December from the Legatum Institute, a free market think tank that formerly employed Kruger as a senior fellow. 

In May of this year, Jenrick gave a speech to the Legatum Institute’s ‘Free Market Roadshow’ event at the group’s London office, where he called for new fossil fuel plants. He said: “We are smothering our ability to build new nuclear power stations, to build new gas power stations, which we’ve got to have to have the base capacity that we need as a country, in this mesh of regulation.”

The Legatum Institute’s parent company is UAE-based investment firm Legatum Group, which co-owns the right-wing broadcaster GB News. The outlet frequently spreads climate denial, both via its presenters and guests.

Kruger is also on the advisory board of another Legatum project, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), alongside some of the world’s most high-profile climate science deniers. 

Jenrick has pledged to win back voters who have switched from the Tories to Reform UK, the right-wing populist party led by Nigel Farage, which is bankrolled by climate deniers and polluting interests, and campaigns to “scrap all of net zero”.

Polling from the Conservative Environment Network, a green caucus backed by dozens of Tory MPs, found that only two percent of voters who planned to switch from the Conservative to Reform saw climate change as the most important issue for them in July’s election.

Original article by Adam Barnett and Sam Bright republished from DeSmog.

Continue ReadingTory Leadership Contender Robert Jenrick’s Pro-Coal and Anti-Net Zero Record

Labour’s Otherworldly Manifesto

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Zionist Keir Starmes is quoted "I support Zionism without qualification." He's asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.
Zionist Keir Starmes is quoted “I support Zionism without qualification.” He’s asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.

https://www.rosalux.de/en/news/id/52233/labours-otherworldly-manifesto

Keir Starmer’s party is set to win by a landslide, but its ambitions are simultaneously unrealistic and uninspiring

AUTHOR: Keir Milburn

“Stability is Change!” This seemingly paradoxical, almost Orwellian statement is the principal slogan of the Labour Party’s current parliamentary election campaign. Labour leader Keir Starmer used the slogan at the party’s manifesto launch, and it provides a key prism for understanding the manifesto and its weaknesses.

There is little doubt that the UK electorate is in the mood for change. The widespread, off-stated consensus in the country is that nothing works. The National Health Service is so chronically underfunded that doctor’s appointments are difficult to get and long waiting lists proliferate. The trains are shockingly expensive but utterly unreliable.

The list could go on and on, but the image most frequently used to sum up the situation comes from the failure of the privatized water services. A lack of investment in infrastructure accompanied by the looting of those companies for huge shareholder dividend payouts has led to the near constant release of untreated sewage into the UK’s river system. It flows from there onto our beaches. The British are quite literally swimming in shit!

These problems are identified quite clearly in the Labour Party manifesto, but the diagnosis of their causes and therefore their solutions proves much less convincing. Labour may have a plan to win in July, but how it will govern in the interests of its voters is anybody’s guess.

…

The totality of Labour’s spending pledges amounts to just 0.2 percent of GDP, smaller even than the Conservative pledges of 0.8 percent and dwarfed by the previous two Labour manifestos, which promised 2.1 percent and 3.2 percent respectively. Even the pro-market Institute for Fiscal Studies called Labour’s plans “tiny, going on trivial”.

These policies do not point to stability, not least because they do not address the 18 billion pounds of government spending cuts that the Conservatives have already baked into the government budget going forward. The effects of implementing such cuts on government services — which have already suffered so badly under 14 years of severe austerity — makes it hard to imagine that Labour will stick to this commitment. It seems likely that money will be found to prevent the worst of these cuts through technical changes in accounting between the government and the notionally independent Bank of England.

Beyond this paddling, however, the need for investment in the UK is huge. Both public and private investment in the country has collapsed since 2008. It has the lowest business investment in the G7 and ranks just twenty-eighth out of the 31 OECD countries. In the face of this, Labour, hamstrung by self-imposed fiscal rules on bringing down government debt and pledges not to raise the main forms of taxation, are promising so little investment that their plans seem unbelievable.

…

Until last February, Labour was promising to immediately strengthen workers’ rights through a New Deal for Workers, and to spend 28 billion pounds per year to decarbonize the economy through its Green Prosperity Plan. The Labour Party’s current openness to corporate funding and lobbying, including the imposition of over 30 parliamentary candidates with corporate lobbying backgrounds, has led to a dramatic watering down of these pledges. The Green Prosperity Plan has been reduced to just 3.5 billion pounds, but the form that spending will take reveals another logic or worldview which may come to the fore as crises mount.

The word “securonomics”, an ugly portmanteau favoured by shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves, makes an appearance in the manifesto, introducing the idea that public investment should support and de-risk private investment in strategically key sectors. The chief vehicle for this will be a National Wealth Fund “capitalised with £7.3 billion over the course of the next parliament”. What precisely this will look like has yet to be determined, but The National Wealth Fund “will have a target of attracting three pounds of private investment for every one pound of public investment”. This is an explicit return to and acceleration of the kind of public-private partnerships that lost legitimacy in the UK during the fallout from the disastrous Public Finance Initiative under New Labour.

…

Recommended article at https://www.rosalux.de/en/news/id/52233/labours-otherworldly-manifesto

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Amid economic hardship and repression, Kenyans reject the Finance Bill 2024

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Original article by Nicholas Mwangi republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Police heavily repressed the protests against the Finance Bill 2024 on Tuesday June 18. Photo: Mathare Justice Center

Hundreds were arrested and brutalized in Nairobi by police forces during protests against the government’s finance bill

On Tuesday June 18, the streets of Kenya’s capital were the site of a major showdown, as peaceful protesters advocating for the rejection of the Finance Bill 2024 were met with brutal repression by state forces. According to human rights groups in Kenya, between 300-400 protesters were arrested as they rallied against the punitive tax measures proposed by the government. The protest organized by a wide variety of civil society organizations and left groups was violently disrupted by police forces attempting to prevent the demonstrators from reaching the parliament building, where organizers had planned to launch a sit-in at 2 pm.

Despite the heavy-handed police attacks with water cannons, and tear gas, the protesters persisted throughout the day, ensuring their voices were heard by those in power and not allowing their right enshrined in article 37 of the constitution – “Assembly, demonstration, picketing and petition” to be compromised. This article outlines that every person has the right, peaceably and unarmed, to assemble, to demonstrate, to picket, and to present petitions to public authorities.”

The tension and public dissent exerted considerable pressure on the government. This was evident as President William Ruto convened an early meeting with members of parliament. The outcome of this meeting saw some “compromises” in the government’s stance on the contentious finance bill. The parliamentary finance committee announced the government’s U-turn at a press briefing on Tuesday, attended by the president and ruling party lawmakers. They announced the decision to withdraw certain proposed taxes, including those on cooking oil, mobile money services, and motor vehicles. The concession was clearly a direct response to the mounting public outcry nationwide.

However, the selective removal of these taxes has done little to appease the masses. Many view it as a strategic move by the government to placate the population while still pushing through other unpopular measures. The finance bill of 2024, in its entirety, remains widely rejected by the masses. The protesters’ message is clear: they demand a complete overhaul of the proposed financial policies, not just a piecemeal reduction of specific taxes.

Ruto’s neoliberal Finance Bill

The Finance Bill 2024, much like its predecessor in 2023, has stirred controversy and discontent across Kenya due to its stringent and, many argue, draconian proposals. This widespread dissatisfaction is deeply rooted within the broader context of an already high cost of living, which will be increased by the proposed new taxes. Beginning last week, Kenyans have voiced their disapproval with the finance bill by taking to social media, where they posted the contacts of Members of Parliament (MPs) and encouraged each other to reach out to their leaders, urging them to reject the bill.

The Finance Bill 2024, officially published by the National Assembly on May 9, 2024, outlines the Government of Kenya’s proposed tax measures for the financial year 2024-2025. Among the numerous changes proposed are significant amendments to Income Tax, Value Added Tax (VAT), and Excise Duty, as well as modifications to the administration of taxes in Kenya. One of the most contentious proposals in the bill is the imposition of a 16% Value Added Tax on financial transactions, and among basic commodities.

Many protested as they believe this will worsen their financial hardships rather than alleviate them. The protests are set to continue, with the third round of Parliament scheduled for June 20th.

The government’s justification for raising taxes, claiming it is necessary for Kenya to live within its means, is hypocritical given its extensive and often unnecessary expenditures. For instance, the government has increased its borrowing target for the fiscal year starting in July to Sh 597 billion, a substantial sum that raises questions about fiscal responsibility. A closer look at government spending reveals significant outlays that contrast sharply with its message.

According to Business Daily, the latest budget control data show a significant rise in travel perks for foreign and local trips, with an increase of Sh 1.62 billion from the Sh 12.4 billion spent in a similar period the previous year. The Parliamentary Service Commission’s spending has also surged by 18.5% to Sh 1.86 billion, and the bill for Members of Parliament (MPs) has grown by 4% to Sh 4 billion. Such figures highlight a pattern of lavish expenditure that stands in stark contradiction to the government’s narrative of financial prudence.

Further, the bill has received backing from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), despite widespread public outcry against it. This support from the IMF is not surprising as they did the same last year, and many Kenyans feel that the country has been effectively mortgaged to the institution. Historically, the IMF’s involvement has brought about economic policies and austerity measures that are seen as an attack on the working class and the marginalized peasants alike, often leading to increased economic strain for the average citizen.

Organized resistance poses more serious challenge to government

What distinguishes the current wave of protests from previous ones is the nature of their organization. Unlike past protests that were primarily mobilized by opposition party leader Raila Odinga against the government, these demonstrations have been driven by different organizations and particularly on online platforms, which have successfully translated their digital activism into tangible, on-the-ground action. This movement has seen an unexpectedly high level of participation from “Gen Z” and the middle class, groups that have traditionally been less involved in these demonstrations.

As the protests continue, the Kenyan government will continue to face mounting pressure to address the economic concerns of the masses. In the last two months there have been three major protests organized by grassroots movements among them against state demolitions on the informal settlements of the downtrodden coming to terms with the recent flood crisis that killed many and destroyed properties of unknown value. The fight for total liberation continues.

Nicholas Mwangi is a member of the Ukombozi Library in Kenya.

Original article by Nicholas Mwangi republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Continue ReadingAmid economic hardship and repression, Kenyans reject the Finance Bill 2024

How the UK’s social security system stopped tackling poverty

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Ultraskrip/Shutterstock

Sharon Wright, University of Glasgow

The cost of living is the most important issue for many voters this election. It’s no surprise why. In 2022, nearly 4 million people in the UK experienced destitution, meaning they could not meet their basic physical needs such as having enough to eat and staying warm.

The UK’s social security system is failing in its core purpose to prevent poverty. And yet the Conservatives have promised more crackdowns on welfare, with the prime minister linking this with his pledge to lower taxes.

When the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government came to power in 2010, they inherited a social security system in radically better shape than it is now. What happened?

During the previous Labour governments (1997-2010), 2.4 million people were lifted out of poverty, including 700,000 children. This was done during favourable economic conditions, but was also the result of progressive social security measures such as tax credits and child benefits.

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People received working-age benefit payments for different needs: jobseeker’s allowance, income support for single parents and incapacity benefit for long-term illness and disability. Housing benefit went directly to landlords to cover claimants’ rent.

Enter the global financial crisis. The Conservative-led government’s response was austerity cuts: cutting back on welfare to tackle the budget deficit.

Lowering the value of benefits is the biggest austerity cut to have affected incomes. In 2010, the government switched from uprating the value of benefits each year in line with the retail price index to using a different measure of inflation, the consumer price index, instead. This is usually lower and effectively makes payments worth less.

This was expected to save the government around £6 billion pounds a year. In 2012, the value of benefits was capped to increase at 1% while inflation was forecast at 5.2%.

Benefit sanctions and caps

In 2012, the government introduced a new system of tougher rules and sanctions on people receiving benefits. Conservative politicians said this would end “the ‘something for nothing’ culture”, but the change has had lasting negative effects.

Benefit sanctions were always part of the system, but became extreme in 2012. If, for example, someone misses one Jobcentre appointment their benefit could be reduced or removed for 28 days.

Woman looking worried and tired sat by window with toddler
Many people receiving benefits have been penalised with sanctions. Bricolage/Shutterstock

Nearly a quarter of all jobseeker’s allowance claimants were sanctioned between 2010 and 2015. Research shows that sanctions have “profoundly negative outcomes”, including on people’s mental health.

Other cuts to incomes followed the Welfare Reform Act 2012. The “bedroom tax” penalised social housing tenants who had “extra” bedrooms. The idea was to reduce renters’ housing benefit so they would downsize to a smaller home. However long-term housing shortages mean that smaller properties are rarely available.

In 2013, the household benefit cap was introduced to limit the maximum amount a family could receive in benefits payments. It had the most impact on families with children and those with high rents.

Universal credit

Universal credit, introduced in 2013, was billed as the biggest shake-up of benefits in 70 years. It promised to make work pay and simplify the system. It replaced separate tax credit, unemployment, lone parent, disability and housing payments with a single payment.

Research from think tank the Resolution Foundation suggests that universal credit provides more support for working people who rent their homes than the previous system. But disabled people who cannot work are likely to be much worse off than under the old system.

There are other problems with universal credit. Unlike under the previous system that gave housing benefit straight to landlords, claimants have to pay their rent from a pot of money provided by the government that is almost certainly too small to cover all their costs.

The first universal credit payment takes around five weeks to arrive, meaning people may fall into rent arrears. A result is that some landlords take legal action to evict those receiving universal credit.

Further cuts

In 2015, the Conservatives abandoned targets set by Labour to reduce child poverty. Then in 2016, new legislation slashed spending again. Benefits were frozen for four years.

The two-child limit was applied to tax credits and universal credit in 2017 to remove income for third or subsequent children. Large families faced increased poverty as a result.

In 2020, the pandemic hit. Universal credit and tax credits were raised by £20 per week, but this ended in late 2021. The cost of living crisis has since widened the gap between benefits and prices.

Today, the value of universal credit falls £890 per month short of the cost of living for single people over 25. This is because of the changes to uprating and the benefit freeze.

In Feburary 2024, charity the Trussell Trust published research showing that over half of people on universal credit had run out of money for food in the previous month.

What can the next government do?

The next UK government must make emergency repairs to social security to halt harrowing declines in health and life expectancy. This should ensure a minimum acceptable standard of living, including restoring the value of benefits such as universal credit to cover the costs of living.

Since 71% of children living in poverty are in working families, employers should be required to pay the real living wage. In-work universal credit also needs to top up wages enough to make work pay.

Repairing the social safety net is an enormous challenge, but public support for it has been on the rise for years. In 2010, many people thought benefit claimants didn’t deserve any help. But from 2015 there has been a growing preference to help people receiving benefits.

Sharon Wright, Professor of Social Policy, University of Glasgow

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Continue ReadingHow the UK’s social security system stopped tackling poverty

The Green party’s plans aren’t perfect but they offer a much-needed attempt at climate leadership

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The Green party’s plans aren’t perfect but they offer a much-needed attempt at climate leadership

Richard Sulley, University of Sheffield

The Green party’s target is to take four seats at the upcoming UK election. Recognising it has no chance of forming a government, its manifesto is written from the perspective of a future pressure group within Westminster.

In doing so, the party highlights some key ideas and steps that could help the UK achieve meaningful climate action. This provides a refreshing attempt to outline an alternative way forward, at a time when climate leadership is severely lacking from other parties.

The Greens’ manifesto has climate action woven through it and the wording often emphasises the link between climate and socioeconomic issues, as the impacts of a changing climate could push more people into poverty and disrupt global food supply chains. It states: “The solutions to the climate crisis are the same as those needed to end the cost of living and inequity crises, making the future not just more liveable but fairer for us all too.”

The Greens argue that a rebalancing of the economy is required to achieve such a just transition. While the party stops short of calling for degrowth (producing fewer unnecessary goods and services in favour of more socially beneficial economic activity), the focus on a carbon tax and push for investment in public services and renewables could deliver a similar impact.

The party also wants to change how success is measured in the economy, calling for “new indicators that take account of the wellbeing of people and planet, and track our progress towards building a greener and fairer future”. This is the first time an established party has explicitly reframed what the measures of a successful nation should be.

The manifesto embraces an agreed basic standard of living and a set of planetary boundaries that our activities shouldn’t push us beyond, based on the theory of “doughnut economics”. By comparison, the existing model focuses almost solely on economic growth as the key measure of success.

Steps to decarbonise

One of the key issues the Greens want to address is the fact the UK’s housing stock is some of the worst in Europe. A vast programme of insulation and decarbonisation measures is needed across all tenures, and the Greens earmark £50 billion over the length of the parliament for retrofitting buildings. One issue here is that they don’t specify how the current supply chain could be scaled up to achieve this.

The manifesto does recognise that to reduce the UK’s carbon impact, buildings can’t just be demolished and rebuilt. Circularity is needed with zero extraction of new materials in the construction of new homes and buildings.

The Greens propose to tackle this with planning applications to include whole-life carbon and energy calculations. Plus, all materials from demolished buildings will need to be considered for reuse, and increased rates for the disposal of builders’ waste would ensure that this is financially viable.

Significant investment is also needed to upgrade the UK’s energy networks to enable decarbonisation, with another proposed £50 billion assigned to electricity generation, transmission and storage. The manifesto also highlights the potential for greater community involvement in – and direct benefit from – new solar and wind farms, which research suggests can speed up the provision of decentralised energy generation.

Where the Greens diverge most widely from the current energy decarbonisation orthodoxy is on nuclear. Their proposal to cancel funding for research on new technology, namely small modular reactors, appears reactionary at a time where its potential is still being explored.

nuclear power station with huge white clouds of smoke, blue sky
The Green Party would not fund research into small modular nuclear reactors. stocker1970/Shutterstock

In transport, the Greens recognise that simply rolling out the sale of electric vehicles is not enough. They want to expand public transport and active travel (walking and cycling) through a £13 billion investment to deliver public transport as a service rather than for profit.

But this would depend on giving local authorities in England the powers that London has to act as bus operators. Combined Authorities in Greater Manchester, South and West Yorkshire are currently transitioning to a franchised system, but a full “London-style” network is some way off.

The Greens are also the only party to take the bold action of proposing a frequent flyer levy, although they do not detail how it will work. Typically, proposed plans for such levies increase on a sliding scale as the number of flights increases, therefore targeting the 15% of people who make 70% of the trips.

There are also proposals to remove the aviation fuels exemption from fuel duty and introduce a domestic flight ban on journeys that can be done by rail in less than three hours, making this manifesto is an exemplar of action targeted at reducing high consumption in the form of frequent flights.

How would they deliver it?

With all this investment, there’s inevitably a question about how the Greens would pay for their plans. Figures in the manifesto suggest significant government borrowing is needed for such radical changes.

On environmental measures alone, an average annual capital and revenue spend of £40 billion would be required, including £7 billion to be invested in climate adaptation. The entire manifesto requires a budget deficit of £65 billion a year for the next five years, gambled against the as yet unknown costs of inaction.

There are some other ideas on funding. A carbon tax would make polluters pay while providing money to invest in the green transition. And taxing multi-millionaires and billionaires could help fund public services, including renationalised utilities such as water companies.

There is also a question of how practical the plans are. Nothing within the Green party manifesto relies on tech that has yet to be invented or impossible interventions. This is not the stuff of techno-optimism. But there are no cities, regions or devolved nations in the UK that have yet adopted the root and branch transformation this manifesto would require.

However, surveys show most people in the UK want decisions on the overwhelming evidence for climate change and the nature crisis, in order to create a more resilient society. The Green manifesto, then, is an imperfect but sorely needed attempt at climate leadership that reflects the urgency of significant rather than iterative change. That should be welcomed in an election where you could otherwise be forgiven for thinking that a response to the climate emergency was an optional extra.

Richard Sulley, Senior Research Fellow, Sustainability Policy, University of Sheffield

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Continue ReadingThe Green party’s plans aren’t perfect but they offer a much-needed attempt at climate leadership