Green Party previews manifesto with extra spending on health and social care rising to over £50bn per year by 2030
This sits alongside an additional £20bn capital investment to bring crumbling hospitals, primary care buildings and outdated equipment up to modern standards
Greens will increase NHS frontline workers’ salaries including doctors, dentists and nurses
“Cast-iron Green guarantee” promise that Green MPs will fight privatisation of the NHS
Green Party Co-leader Adrian Ramsay. Wikipedia CC.
Green Party Co-Leader, Adrian Ramsay and the party’s Health and Social Care Spokesperson, Dr Pallavi Devulapalli, today announced a “game-changing” package for the NHS and social care totally £50 billion a year in investment by 2030 and an additional £20 billion in capital investment to improve crumbling buildings.
Ramsay said “Today’s announcement represents a game changing package that is more than any other political party is offering. It has been fully costed and could be fully delivered.”
Mr Ramsay, who described his personal experience in recent months supporting a family member both through hospitals and then into the care system, said that “many people” could see that the NHS was “stretched to breaking point” despite the “commitment of hard-working NHS staff”.
The Greens used the announcement to reveal a package of spending pledges alongside a “Green cast iron guarantee” that Green MPs would fight the privatisation of the NHS at every stage. The announcement included a commitment to :
Invest £20bn in a capital investment to bring our crumbling hospitals and old equipment up to standard.
Invest £50 billion per year by 2030 into health and social care – more than any other major party – and would use the money to:
Dramatically reduce waiting lists
Offer everyone access to an NHS dentist
Guarantee rapid access to a GP when there is urgent need and dramatically reduce waiting times for all
Ensure people needing mental health support can access relevant therapies within 28 days
Invest £5bn per year to boost NHS salaries and keep our wonderful nurses and doctors in the UK
Invest £20 billion per year into adult social care to ensure dignity for those in need of care and take pressure off the NHS – including introducing free personal care.
Restore public health budgets with £1.5bn uplift in spending .
The large spending commitments they say is part of a fully costed manifesto due to be released on the 12th June in Brighton that includes commitments to “tax wealth fairly” by introducing a wealth tax of 1% on assets over £10 million and 2% over £1 billion.
“The UN Secretary-General has reiterated today that the climate crisis is here and it’s hitting us hard. He made clear that if we are to have a liveable future we need to act with extreme urgency.
“Yet the Conservatives are in denial, being reckless with our future, pushing to extract more fossil fuels. And Labour are tinkering at the margins, ditching their green investment plan and will leave the UK limping towards its climate targets.
“Only the Green Party is offering real hope and real change when it comes to the climate crisis.
“Green MPs will push the next government to stop all new fossil fuel extraction projects, cancel recently issued fossil fuel licences, including Rosebank, one of the largest undeveloped oil and gas fields in the UK.
“They will also press for significant investment in the green economic transformation – something that will be good not just for our environment, but also the economy, creating thousands of new jobs. This investment makes good economic sense as the cost of inaction far outweighs the cost of climate action.
“This is an emergency. We don’t have long to act. Only the Green Party are offering the policies for a fairer greener country.”
“Nigel Farage is not just a dodgy salesman. He is a crook and a conman.
“He will package his brand of hate filled politics in a way that is populist and that he thinks he can sell to an electorate who are understandably fed up with mainstream politics.
“Frankly though, we’re not buying it.
“The latest organisation he latched himself onto, “Reform UK”, is another smokescreen. Set up to take money off people without offering them membership like any other established political party.
“Greens can see through these smokescreens and his jovial façade and see the divisive hate that pulsates through his politics.
“His politics belong on the extreme fringes not at the heart of Clacton, let alone on prime time TV.”
He continued, “Through sheer arrogance, what Farage fails to comprehend is that the great British public can also see him for what he is.
“7 failed election attempts later you would think he would have got the message but evidently not.
“I’m hoping that the good people of Clacton make this very clear to him on July 4th and instead look for a party that is offering real hope and real change.
“The Green candidate Dr Natasha Osben was born and bred in Clacton and I know will put the people of Clacton first, not just use them as a stage on which to stand to boost her own ego.”
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage campaigning in Clacton, Essex. Credit: Nigel Farage / X
Scientific modelling indicates that areas of Clacton could be submerged annually by rising sea levels and flooding.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, who is a vocal critic of green policies and climate science, is standing in a constituency threatened by rising sea levels and flooding due to global warming.
Mapping from the science-based visualisation platform Climate Central suggests that substantial parts of Clacton, Essex, will be at risk of yearly flooding even by 2030. These include Seawick and Jaywick on the west of the seaside town, and the area between Holland-on-Sea and Frinton-on-Sea.
Farage yesterday announced that he would be taking over as Reform leader and standing in Clacton at the general election on 4 July.
Climate Central’s projection of which areas of Clacton will be below the annual flood level in 2030. The annual flood level is the water level at shoreline that local coastal floods exceed on average at least once per year.The constituency boundary of Clacton.
The international journal Oceans and Coastal Management also produced a study in 2022 suggesting that the Tendring area, which encompasses Clacton, is at risk of sea level rises – potentially affecting hundreds of homes.
The study’s lead author Paul Sayers, an engineering consultant who works with the University of East Anglia’s Tyndall Centre, said: “Significant sea level rise is now inevitable. We need a serious national debate about the scale of the threat.”
The Environment Agency last year upgraded Clacton’s flood defences as part of a £10 million project to protect more than 3,000 properties and businesses in the area from “climate change and sea level rise”.
However, Farage is actively campaigning to scrap the green policies that may help to limit local flooding. Farage, who is projected to win the seat, is a vocal critic of the UK’s goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2050. He has claimed that the policy is an “act of self harm” and has called for it to be dropped.
Clacton is already ranked ninth in the county in terms of properties at risk of surface water flooding. Scientists at the World Weather Attribution group found that the UK’s wet weather in the winter of 2023/24 was made 10 times more likely and 20 percent wetter due to climate change.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s foremost climate science body, has estimated that global mean sea levels will most likely rise between 0.95 feet (0.29 metres) and 3.61 feet (1.1 metres) by the end of the century.
Rising levels could directly affect more than 1 billion people worldwide by 2050, and require up to $14 trillion worth of coastal infrastructure by 2100. Rising sea levels could cost the British economy alone more than £100 billion by the end of the century, according to research published by the journal Scientific Reports.
Reform’s Fossil Fuel Donations
Despite the global warming risks posed in the area, Farage is hoping to win support for his anti-green views when he stands in Clacton on 4 July.
Speaking on GB News in August 2021, Farage said that he was “very much an environmentalist” and that he couldn’t “abide things like plastics in our seas, pollution in our rivers.” However, on the issue of climate change, he added: “What annoys me though, is this complete obsession with carbon dioxide almost to the exclusion of everything else, the alarmism that comes with it, based on dodgy predictions and science.”
The IPCC has stated that carbon dioxide “is responsible for most of global warming” since the late 19th century, which has increased the “severity and frequency of weather and climate extremes, like heat waves, heavy rains, and drought”.
Reform has also spread climate falsehoods while supporting the reversal of green measures.
The party’s manifesto claims that “scientists disagree as to how much” humans have had an impact on global warming.
A number of climate consensus studies conducted between 2004 and 2015 found that between 90 percent and 100 percent of experts agree that humans are responsible for climate change. A study published in 2021, which reviewed over 3,000 scientific papers, found that over 99 percent of climate science literature says that global warming is caused by human activity.
According to climate journalist Simon Evans, Reform’s 500 word plan on energy and the environment contains 30 false or misleading statements about the climate crisis and green policies.
Reform wants to develop new oil and gas fields in the North Sea, open onshore fracking sites across the country, end the windfall tax on fossil fuel companies, and “restart opencast coal mines using the latest cleanest techniques”.
The party has campaigned for a referendum on the UK’s 2050 net zero emissions target, and like Farage supports scrapping the policy entirely.
As revealed by DeSmog, Reform has received more than £2.3 million from oil and gas interests, highly polluting industries, and climate science deniers since December 2019, amounting to 92 percent of its donations since the last general election.
“Reform is in the business of toxic propaganda,” Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer told DeSmog. “Farage and his party have a track record of misleading voters and I hope the good people of Clacton make clear to him on 4 July that his distortions and lies on migration and climate won’t wash.”
Climate Central’s projections are based on peer-reviewed science in leading journals, though it warns that these are large datasets that always include some error and local variations.
In response to previous reporting on Climate Central’s sea level projections, the Environment Agency said that its data “does not take into account extensive efforts taken to prevent such severe incidents in the future, including the presence of sea defences, which protect communities from flooding”.
Reform did not respond to DeSmog’s request for comment, but has previously said that: “Climate change is real, Reform UK believes we must adapt, rather than foolishly think you can stop it. We are proud to be the only party to understand that economic growth depends on cheap domestic energy and we are proud that we are the only party that are climate science realists, realising you can not stop the power of the sun, volcanoes or sea level oscillation.
“The deniers are those who continually gaslight the public into thinking you can stop these powerful natural forces. We must use the energy under our feet, rather than send our money and jobs abroad.”
Green Party Co-leader Adrian Ramsay. Wikipedia CC.
Responding to Labour’s announcement on energy and security, Green Party co-leader Adrian Ramsay said:
“The road to national energy security must lead to real change – a turn away from fossil fuels and a massive investment in renewable energy generation and energy saving programmes like home insulation delivered through local authorities right across the country.
“Anything less – and Labour is offering much less – will leave people with higher bills and do nothing to solve the climate crisis that is leaving communities up and down the land vulnerable.
“It is Labour’s lack of ambition and refusal to make the real change needed that is leaving us all less secure.
“Compared to Labour’s original commitment to spend £28bn a year on green investment, Labour plans to spend just £8.3bn over the course of the parliament.
“That is nowhere near enough to deliver energy security.
“Labour’s targets focus on the electricity supply. However, to achieve net zero we need to see the electrification of home heating. This aim was ditched when Labour cancelled its £28 billion investment pledge.”
