Caroline Lucas, the UK’s outgoing Green party MP has warned that Labour must combine tackling the climate crisis with pursuing social justice, if elected, to show that achieving net zero will not be done “on the backs of the poor”.
Lucas, who is said to have held the seat of Brighton Pavilion since 2010, said: “The biggest priority is to demonstrate that is not the case. We have to make sure that this is a strategy and a policy that is the opposite of being done on the backs of the poor.”
That should be achievable, she added, as social justice and shifting to a green economy go hand in hand. But if Labour takes power, as polls predict, the party must avoid mistakes that put costs on low-income families or that hurt people’s jobs, she said.
“The truth of it is that the policies that we need to get [greenhouse gas] emissions down are actually policies that will increase people’s wellbeing in any case,” she said. Home insulation was one example, where if a minimum energy efficiency standard were enforced on landlords then tenants would have warmer homes, less energy waste and lower emissions.
“Again and again there are concrete examples of where green policy is actually social justice policy, it’s one and the same thing. But that story doesn’t get told nearly strongly enough.”
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Lucas looked beyond the current election to the next, five years away, to warn that a resurgent Conservative or Reform party right wing would be planning to “weaponise” the climate crisis, and would seize on any missteps by Labour on the issue.
“There’s a lot of hope riding on what a new Labour government could do after 14 years of Tory chaos, and if they aren’t seen to deliver something in that first term then I worry about what’s going to happen during those next four or five years is that [Nigel] Farage and [Kemi] Badenoch and whoever else within the Tory right are going to be reorganising and getting ready for a comeback. And surely one of the things they’re going to have on top of their list is going to be rolling back on net zero still further,” she told the Guardian.
She also warned that Labour was not putting enough money behind net zero to ensure that its ambition for a “just transition” to a green economy could be met. Earlier this year, Keir Starmer scaled back a longstanding pledge to invest £28bn a year in a “green prosperity plan”, roughly halving the money available, even though economists and industrial experts forecast that the original investment would be quickly paid back by supercharging economic growth.
“If there isn’t enough money on the table – for example, if there isn’t a sufficiently well-resourced scrappage scheme [for people moving away from diesel cars] – it’s easier for people to make the case that this policy is going to hurt those on lowest incomes,” she said.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
