Labour can draw on its past to build a truly green future economy

By Daniel Stevens and Tristan Stubbs

—The right is continuing its attempt to seize the green mantle from Labour. David Cameron famously proclaimed a wish to run the ‘greenest government ever’; more recently the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton maintained that only the right has the answers to the sustainability challenge because its long tradition of environmental stewardship equips conservatism to value nature in ways that are anathema to socialists. Yet the right is wrong: a fundamental flaw of ‘green conservatism’ is that it sees the environment as detached from the wider economy, when in fact the environment underpins it. Conservatives’ blind faith in the free market encourages a harmful deregulatory approach. Far from fostering stewardship, their philosophy can provoke environmental destruction.

Labour’s intellectual tradition bequeaths it a pragmatic, non-dogmatic outlook in its approach to progressive causes. Early socialist thinkers like William Morris and Sidney and Beatrice Webb made valuable contributions to English understandings of the importance of environment, countryside and locality. And Labour’s own recent history proves its modern-day credentials: in government it established the Sustainable Development Commission (now scrapped by the coalition), the Department of Energy and Climate Change, and introduced the world’s first Climate Change Act. The party’s experience of marrying environmental regulation with pro-enterprise policies means that it can offer a compelling vision of a sustainable economy.

The financial crisis represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to remake our economy, and to do so on green Labour principles. There is much that shadow ministers can do now: push for a low-carbon industrial policy, for investment in low-carbon transport infrastructure, and for a green jobs programme for the young and unemployed, providing work experience and training opportunities with local environment initiatives. Labour should call for the Green Investment Bank to be strengthened by allowing it to raise its own funds, a function currently prohibited by the government. Publicly listed companies should also be allowed to issue shares via a ‘green stock exchange’.

However, our thinking must move beyond even this. One of the great advances over the past 100 years in classical economics has been its incorporation of the concepts of human, social and intellectual capital, and these now inform the decisions we make. But we are still grappling with how we handle the most important capital of all – natural capital. Consumption sits at the heart of today’s economy and this set-up relies on the healthy supply of natural resources. If this flow of goods and services is interrupted, or cannot keep up with demand, the consequences will be dire.

The foundation of long-term economic growth is therefore a sound natural capital structure and the equitable allocation of resources, but conventional approaches to economic growth cannot deliver this. Resource depletion and loss of ecosystems are treated more as benefits rather than costs, and individuals and communities are too often valued only for their ability to consume rather than for their efforts to create and protect natural capital.

To begin to achieve this, Labour could commit to passing future budgets through a sustainability audit, and to measure long-term sustainable value by going ‘beyond GDP’ – supported by independent advice from an Office of Sustainability. Shadow ministers could offer to work directly with businesses in order to identify alternative ways of measuring profit and growth, advocating a sustainable model that values community, equality and social capital as well as natural resources.

Importantly for Labour, any transition to a sustainable economy must not impact disproportionately on the least well-off. If the solution to funding a welfare state through tax receipts from the proceeds of growth, and achieving a green, more equal, future, lies in extending support for carbon capture and storage or an expansion of nuclear power, the party should articulate why these choices represent the best options. Labour should make a renewed commitment to helping people save money by giving them assistance to insulate their houses and generate renewable energy, as well as embarking on a sustainable housebuilding plan.

Economic and environmental stability will best be realised through a broad definition of sustainability that takes into account how to encourage ‘environmental citizenship’. Public involvement in the allocation of scarce resources will help ensure equity and fairness. The other main political parties are developing their versions of localism and, such will be the importance to the green transition of sustainability action at the local level that Labour should strengthen its own localist platform. In place of the ‘big society’, Labour could establish a policy and fiscal framework to promote local renewable generation and recycling schemes, combining this with using energy policy to reflect what people regard as fair, through, for instance, strengthened efforts against fuel poverty. The party should also look to its cooperative roots and promote tax incentives for establishing mutual energy companies, enterprises that are both grounded in communities and which provide a reward for their members.

At the global level, sustainability will be vital to our security. Energy independence and food security are connected to a more efficient and resilient use of natural resources, and the need to diversify our energy mix will become even more pressing as the global financial and political situation grows less certain. Moreover, climate change and unsustainable development will have the most immediate effect on the world’s poorest people, leading to significant potential repercussions for the UK. An effective post-Millennium Development Goals framework that underlines the connections between economic development and environmental sustainability is sorely needed. Labour’s traditional focus on global social justice will equip the party for these challenges.

The party’s revived emphasis on movement politics – exemplified by the establishment of groups like Movement for Change – provides further strong foundations for building the social action that tackling the sustainability crisis will require. Drawing together lessons and influences from various moments in its history, Labour can show that the government, and Conservatism, have only inadequate answers to the sustainability challenge and that it is only by allying socially sustainable policies with environmentally sustainable ones that we can begin to build a truly green society and economy.

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Daniel Stevens is a councilllor in the London borough of Hackney and director of DJS Environmental. Tristan Stubbs is a freelance environment and development policy analyst. He previously worked at the Overseas Development Institute