CC: Keir Starmer MP, Ed Miliband MP

Environment, Energy and Culture 2020 Interim Report - We need a much more ambitious Green Recovery from Covid

The last year has been devastating, with over 100,000 dead from Covid-19, inequalities of power and wealth exacerbated, and a climate crisis raging on. While millions face unprecedented hardship and the combined results of decades of public sector cuts, billionaire tax exiles are raking in massive profits. As Ed Miliband has rightly remarked, we cannot afford to go back to ‘normal’, and the public don’t want to either.

Last year’s National Policy Forum saw over 1,400 submissions to the Environmental Commission (70% of the total) endorse our proposals for an ambitious Green New Deal in a new post-Covid social settlement. We called for millions of green jobs, public ownership, universal services, a Global Green New Deal and bailouts for workers and the planet.

However, Labour’s Green Economic Recovery plan did not demonstrate the ambition needed to radically transform our society and economy. The recent NPF Interim Report contained some welcome principles, including the case for investment in good green jobs to tackle regional inequality, the argument that “economic prosperity and environmental justice are one and the same” and the recognition that the free-market experiment in energy, water and public transport has failed.

But there is still much further to go. Particularly concerning were the core principles that failed to call for Labour’s Green New Deal to be state-led, ignoring 2019 manifesto commitments to nationalise key industries, crucial in tackling climate change and enabling wider participation in regional democracy.

Labour should be making the case for rapid decarbonisation, but neither the Green Recovery nor Interim Reports set concrete targets necessary for the scale of the crisis. Many of the aims outlined in both reports are praise-worthy, but neither document fully reckons with the scale of the challenge we face, nor provides a convincing solution for how we can tackle the climate crisis at the pace needed.

Labour must empower workers and protect their rights as we rapidly wind down fossil fuels and take on Big Polluters. This requires explicit commitments to provide millions of good, green jobs and offer (re)training rather than a token NPF principle to ‘deliver a just transition’.

Both the Green Recovery and Interim Reports fail to reflect the ambition and desire for a radical green transformation that was backed by 70% of submissions to the NPF Environmental Commission.

Neither report makes any meaningful mention of the Green Industrial Revolution endorsed by Conference in 2019. Decisions made with the overwhelming support of Labour membership and trade unions must be made binding. The NPF principles should be updated to include the following:

1. Public ownership: Labour’s Green New Deal must be state-led, with a massive expansion of democratic public ownership of industry, transport and utilities. The private sector isn’t willing to tackle climate change, so only the state can wind down fossil fuels, insulate homes and transform our energy systems at the pace and scale required. Public ownership is a prerequisite for establishing community ownership.

2. Universal services: Labour must commit to expanding universal basic services to transform our economy, tackling inequality and the climate crisis. Through ambitious state intervention Labour can deliver free green public transport, public housing, broadband, healthcare and childcare for all.

3. Rapid decarbonisation: We must rapidly and decisively end all fossil fuel extraction, with a just transition for workers and a massive program of investment in renewable energy which makes concrete our zero-carbon targets for 2030 and creates millions of well-paid, unionised green jobs.

4. Taking on Big Polluters: We must take on and wind down the Big Polluters who have contributed so disastrously to the climate catastrophe we face, whilst delivering a just transition for their workers with guaranteed re-training and financial support.

5. Internationalism: Labour’s Green New Deal must be proudly and explicitly internationalist, demonstrating practical solidarity with decarbonising countries in the Global South through technology transfer, debt cancellation and by supporting those displaced by climate change.

Yours, the undersigned