In my role as shadow minister for sustainable economics, I have spent the past year looking at what will be required of government to respond to the environmental calamity we are facing. It’s been pretty bleak, if I’m honest, as the deadly impacts scientists have long predicted have spiralled into a horror carousel of heatwaves and wildfires, floods and hurricanes, droughts and famines.
For some the response is pessimism, fatalism and paralysis. In Dune, the main character declares: “The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.” With so little progress on climate, it’s little wonder we so fear what lies ahead. But two big rays of sunshine have broken through the clouds in recent months, dispelling the gloom and instilling a sense of renewed hope.
The youth strikers arrived on the climate politics scene in February like gatecrashers at a premature funeral, smashing in through the window in a shower of glass to announce to the hushed congregation that the patient is in fact still alive. Seeing these kids thronging the streets of Westminster and my own city of Norwich has been a thrilling and timely reminder of how real change happens. Meanwhile, the newly minted superstar congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the youth-led Sunrise Movement have busted open the tired assumptions of a hollowed-out US political system to demand good jobs and a liveable future, under the banner of a Green New Deal.
Friday’s declaration from the UK youth climate strikers calling for a Green New Deal in the UK brings these two strands together, and marks a shift from the oppositional to the propositional for the youth strikers. It is now up to all British politicians to heed their call.
The time for incrementalism has passed. The young people striking today recognise this. They know that their only hope of a decent future is if government works with the people to throw everything we have got at this problem before it’s too late. But they also have the vision to see that the life-saving work of tackling climate change offers a golden chance to fix so many of the other things in our society and economy that decades of neoliberal dogma have broken.
The youth strikers are calling for a government-led, 10-year mobilisation to completely modernise every aspect of our infrastructure and built environment, to reshape the public realm, restore threatened habitats and carbon sinks and prepare communities for the climate impacts we can no longer avoid. This epic transformation would create millions of good jobs across every corner of Britain, breathing new life into places that haven’t seen inward investment for decades. YouGov polling data released on Friday shows that these proposals are highly popular, enjoying more than two-thirds public support. People in Britain might not have heard of a Green New Deal yet, but they seem to really love the idea of it when they understand what it would mean in practice.
Maybe Labour still isn’t entirely where it needs to be on this issue – but, with my encouragement, we are getting there fast. While the Conservatives dither, Jeremy Corbyn has committed to achieving net-zero emissions in the UK before the middle of the century. My boss, the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, is rewriting the Treasury rulebook to ensure all future public investment is green, and is looking at moving Britain towards a four-day working week, which could improve lives and reduce pressure on the environment. The Treasury under Labour would become the driver of positive environmental policy instead of a block in the system, working with each secretary of state to develop a departmental carbon budget alongside a financial budget at each spending review. Last month, the shadow environment secretary, Sue Hayman, declared a climate and environment emergency in parliament, and the shadow business, energy and industrial strategy secretary, Rebecca Long-Bailey, has announced plans for a green industrial revolution that would see the UK lead the world in tidal energy, recapture our crown in offshore wind and recruit a carbon army of local workers to insulate millions of leaky homes.
For those who say we can’t afford to do this, I say we can’t afford not to. Dealing with the horrors of unmitigated climate change will be incalculably more costly than intervening now to prevent them. It requires a massive public investment, but that would pay for itself many times over in the years ahead through the good quality work it would create. There are huge economic opportunities in renewable technologies and energy efficiency that are currently passing Britain by as a blinkered Tory government looks the other way. Money supply is quite literally the least of our worries. As Keynes said: “Anything we can actually do we can afford.”
As the UK’s youth climate strikers geared up for their action on Friday, Theresa May was refusing to even meet the Nobel peace prize-nominee Greta Thunberg when she visits parliament later this month. My message to Thunberg and all of her British counterparts is simple: the Labour party’s door is open. We hear you, and we will work with you to do what needs to be done.
• Clive Lewis is the Labour MP for Norwich South
