Mark Perryman, Emma Montlake, Raphie Kaplinsky and Victor Anderson
Lewes Labour since 2018 has pioneered festivals of ideas and events modelled on ‘participative discussion’ quite unlike any other local Labour Party. Speakers have included Labour MPs Clive Lewis and Jon Cruddas, writers Polly Toynbee, Jonathan Freedland and Zoe Williams, thinkers Ann Pettifor, Daniel Chandler and Jeremy Gilbert. Open to all, the only entry qualification ‘an open mind’.
The latest Lewes Labour event, to open a General Election year, was an afternoon of participative discussion with Laurie Laybourn-Langton and Mathew Lawrence, co-authors of the book Planet on Fire: A Manifesto for the Age of Environmental Breakdown.
Framed by Neal Lawson’s recent call for Pragmatic Radicalism in Renewal and in the wake of Labour downsizing its £28 billion a year green investment plan, three of the day’s participants sought to shape the outline of a ‘pragmatic environmentalism’.
Emma Montlake
The Far Horizons of Hope
The 1945-1979 post-war settlement was a politics rooted in a societal desire for broadly social-democratic change.
Attlee, Beveridge Keynes, together represented a consensus in favour of such, profoundly affected by the 1930s and the subsequent rise of, and eventual defeat, of European fascism.
Today’s society in contrast is fragmented by division. The era of conversations with neighbours over a garden fence are for the history books. Once cheery day trips to the seaside are now under threat from coastal erosion, rising sea levels, and worse.
What’s the answer? The twenty-first century version of The Commons is the absolutism of the market. This is the received wisdom of the twenty-first century. Yet it is now threatened by a paradigm shift in voters’ opinions, the plight of our rovers and seas full of sewage spilled into them by privatised water companies has sparked an anger emblematic of this shift. Countryfile chronicles the environmental cost for a much-loved countryside at the mercy of the polluters.
Yet we can’t all be Chris Packham. For many this translates into a sense of dispossession and powerlessness. Public institutions we once could rely on for protection turned into businesses. The NHS, schools, universities are run by managing directors, not doctors, teachers and lecturers.
To change all this requires a bottom-up politics. A politics that provides the space to understand how we’ve arrived where we are. A politics that is avowedly collaborative.
This requires points at which to begin such a conversation, localised, practical, inspiring, but unafraid of the political too. This means a progressivism both in and around political parties but between parties as well, and beyond. A deepening of democracy and participation.
To be successful all of this will take many forms including intellectual practice, cultural production and recreational activism. It might spark actions ranging from community ownership to sustainable production. Lisa Nandy and Andy Burnham in many ways have represented this best with their combination of levelling up and a ‘North that will rise again’. Neither of these sit easily alongside the binary opposition of Labour Left vs Labour Right that the party’s internal politics is more comfortable with.
The electoral cycle, with a General Election every five years, is likewise ill-suited for change – specifically environmental breakdown – measured in decades not years. A progressive Labour politics must have the courage to adopt a long-vision, pragmatic policies – but it will rely on durable values too. The nineteenth century framed the world in empire and revolution. The 20th century, an age of extremes, typified by fascism vs communism. If we are to survive the 21st century we will need a movement on a scale that dwarfs such a history. Therein lie our far horizons of hope.
Raphael Kaplinsky
The Constraints of Crisis
It would be foolhardy to underestimate the scale of the challenge which an incoming Labour government will face in late 2024/ early 2025.
The shorthand which I believe most accurately and evocatively describes this crisis is ‘The Pothole Economy’, a reflection of the decay which happens when a government steps aside from its social and economic responsibilities. The deterioration in our roads is an ever-present metaphor of societal decay.
There will be very little room for investment activism and this will be a binding constraint on an incoming Labour government.
Compounding this is an uncertain geopolitical and environmental outlook which threaten to further constrain the space for radical change. We have not yet seen the full consequences of El Nino, and this looks likely to lead to shortfalls in agricultural production globally and to inflationary pressures on foodstuffs.
In such circumstances, caution and trimming the sails to electoral winds is, for now, the only way forward. But what implications does this have for economic policy, and specifically a green economic policy for Labour in government?
This requires a narrative. When Roosevelt intervened during the 1930s with his New Deal Programme he had a big story to tell – ‘We have Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself’. When Kennedy was elected in 1960 he committed to putting a ‘Man’ on the moon, and achieved this seemingly impossible challenge within a decade. When the Koch Brothers in the US decided to attack the role of government in the 1970s, they went about it systematically, with a suite of interconnected programmes to change world views and promote a small-state, low-tax agenda. An incoming Labour Government will need not just a Big Narrative, but a programme to actively spread that message.
Yes there will be constraints but also scope for both direct government investment in infrastructure, in energy and of course most of all in service provision and in directing investment. Government investments need to be directed ‘forwards’, promoting emergent green sectors rather than rescuing brown sectors. But new investments will need to be encompassed in new ways of doing things. This redirection will inevitably run up against vested interests, including in the Trade Unions. But the response here should be to provide the training to allow workers to transition to new skills, rather than to throw them on to the scrap heap.
Regulations will be necessary but they are binary – you have no option but to comply. Behaviour is not just a response to regulation, it also responds to incentives. For example, we tax employment heavily in the UK (National Insurance makes up 22 percent of revenue), and pollution lightly (air passenger taxes, landfill taxes and climate change levies such as a carbon tax contribute less than two percent). We need to change incentives so as to persuade firms and people to change their behaviour because it makes sense for them to do so.
Britain is one of the most centralised economies in the high-income world. The constraints to the formulation and delivery of policy at the local level is a major obstacle to both economic growth and service provision. Societies change and flourish not just as a consequence of government investment and regulation and the behaviour and performance of the private sector, but increasingly also through civil action. There are new opportunities opened as we shift out of the decay of the centralised, top-down world of Mass Production. Enhanced citizen participation is not just good for welfare but also good for the economy and for the environment. So, any ‘Big Narrative’ must also recognise and promote the importance of greater social provision.
Globally, one of the success stories of China’s rapid economic growth is a programme of ‘Experiment and Diffuse’. Innovation is encouraged at the local level, often the town or city and sometimes the Province. Once a successful outcome is apparent, in China the state intervenes to spread this throughout the whole country.
In conclusion, three points.
First, some – indeed much – of this is already in Labour’s policy agenda.
Second, building a more sustainable Britain with a vibrant economy, greater social provision and equality, and above all an enhanced environment, requires interconnected agendas. It is not a world of trade-offs – equality or growth; growth or the environment. There is a virtuous path which allows us to proceed with comfort, and indeed with joy.
Third, there is the issue of the Green Agenda. Going Green is not a cost; it is an Opportunity. Green growth is what economists refer to as income elastic – as societies get richer, they want more green. Brown ‘growth’ is a race to the bottom.
Does all of this mean that the Big Narrative should be the Green Agenda? Yes, but only if it is argued persuasively and part of an integrated package. If I could offer one metaphor for this transition it would be to reskill those who lose from the neglect of the brown to benefit from the fruits of the green.
And if there is sustained back-sliding by the Labour government from such an agenda? It will be our job – whether as Labour members or as citizens – to hold their feet to the fire.
Victor Anderson
A Climate of Ideas
Ecosocialist arguments typically take us on a depressing journey. They start by sensibly pointing out that the economic system dominating the world is not simply ‘humanity’ interacting with ‘nature’, but capitalism seeking out profits wherever it can find them. That moves the argument away from blaming everyone equally to looking critically at a very specific way of organising the economy and society, a system humans haven’t always had and don’t have to keep.
But what conclusions follow? We need a revolution, obviously. Not any old socialist revolution, but one which is also ecological. And not just in one country, because the ecological crisis is global. Even if those conclusions are valid, we are then left with something that appears very unlikely to happen, at least in the next 50 years. So perhaps I’ll leave behind those ecosocialist theory books and just go along to the local Friends of the Earth instead, because at least they are doing something.
The authors of Planet on Fire show a way out of this depressing sequence of thoughts. What they have tried to do is find a way of using a socialist analysis of the climate crisis to generate tactics, strategies, and policy proposals which make sense in the near future. Maybe these ideas will bring an ecosocialist revolution nearer, maybe they will produce a gradual transition to much the same destination, maybe they will just help us avoid some of the worst consequences of the crisis. All this is unknowable, but at least their approach gives us something we can work with in the present.
What ideally would applying this basic approach look like? There are two sets of dynamics to consider. One is the dynamics of capitalism: can we guess what it is likely to be doing in the near future and how we should respond? The other is the dynamics explored by earth system science: can we try to predict what is going to happen to the planet, particularly to potentially disastrous tipping points?
Planet on Fire comes a lot closer to what is needed than I’ve seen elsewhere. But if I was to be critical, I’d say we need to give more attention than the authors do to the vulnerabilities of capitalism and how we can make use of them through policy ideas that are not just utopian but firmly rooted in the problems the capitalist system generates for itself. These are essentially about instability: financial instability, social instability, and ecological instability. Capitalism is taking us on a wild ride, with very large costs and extremely widespread casualties, as well as enormous profits being made, and there is a lot of political scope for the Left in responding to these costs, casualties, and risky behaviour.
We also need to be paying more attention to the ways in which the climate crisis is likely to play out. For people in the UK, the worst impacts may well not be from changes in the weather within the UK, but what happens to the availability of imported food supplies from countries overseas experiencing severe flooding, droughts, and other forms of extreme climate change.
Planet on Fire was originally published in 2021, and I don’t think the authors have given enough attention to how the UK economic context for the implementation of Green New Deal ideas has changed since then. We are now in a period of higher interest rates and higher inflation. This makes funding through borrowing more problematic, and should shift some of the balance away from government debt and on to taxation (of the rich).
One of the other speakers at the event warned of the dangers of the next Labour Government facing a “Truss moment”, a point at which the money markets get worried about unfunded tax cuts or spending increases and demand very high interest rates in return for lending their money.
This is a real problem. Liz Truss, in her recent notorious broadcast with Steve Bannon, blamed the Financial Times, The Economist, the Office for Budget Responsibility, and the Bank of England for being aspects of the “deep state” sabotaging her policies. But in reality they were just proxies, messengers warning of how the money markets would react, and they were right. Labour’s ‘fiscal rules’ play the same role. In themselves they don’t matter and could be more relaxed, but as lines warning how far a government can go without worrying the markets too much, they reflect a reality that we can’t ignore. Until the ecosocialist revolution that is.
Emma Montlake is an environmental lawyer and co-founder of Love Our Ouse.
Raphael Kaplinsky is the author of Sustainable Futures : An Agenda for Action
Victor Anderson works as a researcher for a Labour MP.