Image of InBedWithBigOil by Not Here To Be Liked + Hex Prints from Just Stop Oil’s You May Find Yourself… art auction. Featuring Rishi Sunak, Fossil Fuels and Rupert Murdoch.
… UK political parties’ plans for climate and the environment have been jointly assessed by Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth in a new election scorecard published today, which ranks Labour far ahead of the Conservatives across all key green policy categories.
Published just 10 days before voters head to the polls on July 4th, the scorecard assesses the Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Green Party manifestos released in the past fortnight against 40 policy recommendations set out by the two environmental campaign groups.
Overall, the Green Party topped the league table with a near-perfect 39 score out of a possible 40 recommended policies, ahead of the Liberal Democrats in second place with 31.5.
Labour, meanwhile, scored 20.5 against the 40 green policy recommendations, over four times higher than the Conservatives’ which scored only five points.
Rishi Sunak on stopping Rosebank says that any chancellor can stop his huge 91% subsidy to build Rosebank, that Keir Starmer is as bad as him for sucking up to Murdoch and other plutocrats and that we (the plebs) need to get organised to elect MPs that will stop Rosebank.
Britain tested nuclear weapons in the Pacific in the 1950s. (Photo: Yui Mok / Alamy)
The lavish spending would continue under Labour.
Britain spends a larger portion of its military budget on nuclear weapons than any other state, a major report published today reveals.
Rishi Sunak’s government is putting 12 per cent of defence expenditure – equivalent to £12,000 every minute – towards the UK’s arsenal of at least 225 warheads.
Sunak increased spending on nuclear weapons last year by 17 per cent to £6.5 billion – a greater increase than any other nuclear power except the US.
Over the last five years UK expenditure rose by a staggering 43 per cent.
The startling figures appear in new research by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), a widely respected group that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017.
ICAN calculates that Britain is the world’s fourth highest spender on nuclear weapons after the US, China and Russia.
Nuclear Starmer
The group’s report comes at a time when the Labour leadership is championing nuclear weapons. The party’s manifesto states: “Our commitment to the UK’s nuclear deterrent is absolute.”
This spending commitment is in stark contrast to Keir Starmer’s extreme caution when it comes to investing in public services.
The party describes the “independent nuclear deterrent” as “the bedrock of Labour’s plan to keep Britain safe”.
However, it is far from independent. Regular flights from the US carry material that are essential ingredients of Britain’s Trident nuclear missile system.
A Mutual Defence Agreement (MDA) between Britain and the US enshrines Whitehall’s reliance on the Pentagon for essential technology.
The agreement, which is due to be renewed this year, is incorporated in US law. Yet it has no legal status in Britain and has never been the subject of a substantial debate or vote in parliament.
The Liberal Democrats’ policy is identical to those of the Conservatives and Labour, saying they will “maintain the UK’s nuclear deterrent with four submarines providing continuous at-sea deterrence”.
The Scottish National Party has a long record of being opposed to nuclear weapons, which it says are “wrong strategically, morally and financially.”
It adds that it supports long-term investment in the Trident submarine base in Faslane as a conventional military base.
The Green party says it would “dismantle Britain’s entire Trident nuclear deterrent and remove all foreign nuclear weapons from UK soil.”
Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer at the Mornflake Stadium, home to Crewe Alexandra while on the General Election campaign trail, June 13, 2024
From muzzling Palestinian rights to embracing austerity and outsourcing the NHS, Labour’s ‘tough choices’ always seem to hurt normal people while sparing wealthy donors — that’s why I am running to unseat Keir Starmer on July 4
…[T]he Labour Party launched its election manifesto — a dispiriting Thatcherite promise to continue endless austerity, soaring inequality and forever wars.
I announced my bid to become the independent MP for Holborn and St Pancras three weeks ago. Then, I was convinced that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party would offer little to improve the lives of this constituency’s amazing and diverse communities, or meaningfully restrain Israel’s genocide of Gaza. Having read this manifesto, I am more convinced than ever.
Starmer’s election campaign has traded on a series of stock phrases, all of which are profoundly misleading. Starmer promises to bring about “change,” but repeats tired economic shibboleths of the George Osborne variety.
He also claims to have remade the party “in the service of the working people.” In fact, the party is financially reliant on donations from big business and billionaires and its MPs rake in donations from the private-sector companies who circle the NHS.
The party’s long-feted New Deal for Working People is so disappointing that the party’s largest affiliated union, Unite, has refused to endorse the Labour Party manifesto.
But the most galling of all of the current Starmerisms is his invocation of “tough choices.” Starmer deploys the line to explain why the country cannot afford to pull half a million children out of poverty by ending the two-child benefit cap: a decision now confirmed by the manifesto.
Liz Truss’s mini-Budget, Starmer sadly explains, has made it impossible for the sixth-richest country in human history to lift children out of poverty at a cost little under £2 billion a year, a relatively measly sum in a country with a GDP of £2,274 trillion.
As the Labour Party manifesto makes clear, there have been plenty of hard choices made by the party — but all of them to the detriment of the poor and to the benefit of the mega-rich and big business.
Starmer makes the “tough choice” not to substantially increase funding the NHS, to end child poverty or reverse the swingeing cuts of the last decade; but only because he fails to make the “tough choice” to tax billionaires marginally more, even though the 10 richest people in the country are now richer than they have ever been.
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I’m especially angry that the Labour Party, like the Tories, has promised to increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP: a real-term £7bn a year increase by 2029. This is almost double the entire £4.7bn a year the party intends to spend on its Green Prosperity Plan to tackle the imminent existential threat of climate change.
What sort of security does this really buy? The party’s offer on Palestine is, frankly, an outrage; the manifesto speaking out of both sides of its mouth. So while it recognises that “Palestinian statehood is the inalienable right of the Palestinian people,” it then makes Palestinian statehood contingent on a meaningless word salad.
“We are committed to recognising a Palestinian state as a contribution to a renewed peace process which results in a two-state solution with a safe and secure Israel alongside a viable and sovereign state.”
So much for an inalienable right, which requires Israel to feel “safe” before Palestinians get statehood — just as Israeli leaders claim that Israel will only feel safe when Gaza is cleansed of its citizens because there are “no uninvolved.”
This offer significantly dilutes the party’s previous commitment to recognising Palestinian statehood on the first day of government — something first brought in by Ed Miliband, appearing in the 2017 and 2019 manifestos. If there was any hope that Labour would be any better than the Tories on Gaza once in power, this should dispel it once and for all.
Both the Lib Dems and the Green Party, by comparison, have committed to immediately recognising Palestine. The Labour Party now joins the ignominious company of the Tories and Reform in refusing to do so.
How do Labour, Conservatives, Greens and Lib Dems compare on their promises for the environment
Groups and campaigners have called on parties to make climate and nature a core issue at the general election as meticulous scrutiny begins on party policies ahead of the general election.
Party manifestos are yet to be published, however environmental experts at Friends of the Earth have scored Labour, the Conservatives, Greens and the Lib Dems on their green commitments so far.
It comes as no surprise that the Conservative Party have come in a dismal last, scoring pretty disastrously on most of the ten policy areas analysed. Campaign group Greenpeace recently slammed the Tory Party for leaving the country, “crumbing, bereft of hope, and its climate record in tatters” after the last 14 years.
Most alarmingly the Tory Party scored the only 0 out of 10 in the category of ‘defending democracy’ based on its recent introduction of draconian legislation clamping down on protest.
Also unsurprisingly the Green Party came in top, with the Lib Dems second and Labour third. Labour’s commitment to creating Great British Energy has been praised by green campaigners. However Friends of the Earth has said the party must go further, as its score lagged behind the Lib Dems and Greens and “falls well short of what’s needed to deliver on the climate and nature emergencies”.
Friends of the Earth stressed that the ratings are a snapshot of the current moment, and policies published in the coming weeks will better reveal how the party’s commitments shape up in real terms.
Overall, the environmental group scored the Conservatives 27/100, Labour 51/100, the Lib Dems 68/100 and the Green Party 82/100.
Image: The Spring Budget is due to be delivered on 6 March 2024 | Credit: iStock
MPs from Labour, Lib Dems, Green Party, SNP, Plaid Cymru, and Alliance have jointly called for a green investment-friendly Spring Budget on Wednesday
A group of cross-party MPs and peers have called on the Chancellor to prioritise new public investment in net zero infrastructure and skills in this week’s Spring Budget, in a move they argue would help to “futureproof our economy and our energy system”.
In a letter addressed to Jeremy Hunt on Friday, Parliamentarians from across political divides urged the Chancellor to “use the forthcoming Spring Budget to address the ongoing underinvestment crisis the UK is facing” by funnelling more public spending to help deliver on net zero goals.
It also calls on the government to publish a Net Zero Investment Plan in order to “identify and close the gap between actual and required financial flows” and help catalyse increased investment from the private sector.
And the letter calls on the Treasury to work with the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) to set out a plan to ensure “every household has access to energy efficiency measures and fossil-free heat via a combination of grants and low-cost loans”.
