The State of Sustainability in British Politics 2018
Every year after the UK political party conference season has ended, I summarise the Sustainability content of the leader’s speeches as a measure of how committed each party really is to a sustainable future. For as long as I’ve been doing this, there has been a pattern: the Green Party pursues a ‘Small is Beautiful’, no-nukes old-school-greenie agenda, the Lib Dems propose Sustainability at scale by bending capitalism to its will, but Labour and the Tories merely pay lip-service (but with more commitment in the relevant frontbench speeches earlier in the conference).
2018 was significantly different.
The Greens, if anything, were even more activist oriented than previously, with their co-leaders Sian Berry and Jonathan Bartley’s joint speech focussed more on campaigns and campaigners than a joined-up green vision for the future.
Vince Cable for the Lib Dems proposed changing the public spending rules to allow more investment in the green economy:
We can start to put this right, by breaking with the economically foolish conventions of public sector accounting which treat borrowing for productive investment in the same way as day-to-day spending. The demands of climate change alone require that boldness. Take the tidal lagoon in South Wales. The Tory government has killed it; we would resurrect it. And imagine putting the country to work, building the green Britain of tomorrow, with hundreds of miles of new railways and broadband cabling.
But the big difference came from Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, whose weird caveat on a green economy bothered me last year. There was no such ambiguity this year:
That will mean working with unions to ensure jobs and skills are protected as we move towards a low-carbon economy. And working with industry to change the way we build to train the workforce that will retrofit homes and work in the new energy industries too. And I can announce today that our programme of investment and transformation to achieve a 60% reduction in emissions by 2030 will create over 400,000 skilled jobs. Good jobs based here and on union rates bringing skills and security to communities held back for too long.
And we will go further, with plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero by the middle of the century. I know that sounds ambitious. It is ambitious and will be delivered with the most far-reaching programme of investment and transformation in decades.
Labour will kick-start a Green Jobs Revolution that will help tackle climate change, provide sustainable energy for the future and create skilled jobs in every nation and region of the UK.
That’s far, far more concrete and ambitious than anything I’ve heard from Corbyn before, and it is extremely welcome. The first sentence changed last year’s caveat from an ‘if we can protect jobs’ to ‘we will protect jobs and…’, which is a significant change in attitude.
So how would Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May respond? By going into reverse. There was only a token brief mention:
But with freedom should always come responsibility. To obey the law, even when you disagree with it. To conserve our environment, for the next generation.
But apart from that, nada. Instead we got retro-Tory boasts about expanding Heathrow Airport and the “biggest roadbuilding programme since the 1970s.”
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If the Conservatives want to regain the sizeable majority they shed at the 2017 General Election, they need to attract centre ground floating voters and young people i.e. people who worry about the environment. They have a pretty good Sustainability story to tell as renewables continue to flourish (25% of electricity production in 2017), the Clean Growth Plan was generally well received, and maverick Environment Secretary Michael Gove has bitten several bullets that his predecessors of all stripes dodged e.g. on microbeads and neonicotinoids. This is stuff they have done rather than talked about – so why hide it under a bushel?
In summary, while I’m concerned about how Jeremy Corbyn might pay for his newly expansive green vision (given his Shadow Chancellor’s pledge to nationalise the energy system), his placing of Sustainability front and central in his economic planning is extremely welcome. The Prime Minister continues to ignore an open goal by ‘green hushing’ what good the Government is doing and undermining it by maintaining a parallel high carbon path. If she took ownership of Sustainability, the way she has on Brexit, it would send a clear message to decision makers across the country that change is going to come. Maybe next year, Theresa?