By Paul Homewood
h/t Robin Guenier
In a number of ways, a quite remarkable article by Guardian standards, not least some of the comments!!
Lisa Nandy is Labour MP for Wigan, and was also Shadow Secretary of State for Energy & Climate Change between 2015 and 2016:
Next week thousands of Extinction Rebellion protesters will descend on Westminster, the latest example of direct action in a year when committed women, men and children across the world have pushed climate change to the top of the global agenda, where it belongs. Although London will again be the focal point, the movement mustn’t overlook the committed activists in places such as Bolton, Wigan, and Sunderland who are also spreading the message across the country. For the climate movement to succeed we have to build a broad coalition that covers our nation’s towns as well as our cities, and reaches out across class divides.
Calls for individual action can’t just be modelled on the lifestyles of middle-class city dwellers. Telling people to get out of their cars can’t be the solution in those parts of the country where decades of chronic underinvestment have left us without public transport. In towns such as Wigan, jobs have disappeared as investment flowed into cities, creating lengthy commutes on public transport for most working-age people. Trains are overcrowded, deeply unreliable and ceased to function entirely for a large part of last year, while the buses are few and far between, and often more expensive than getting a taxi. Demanding people abandon their cars isn’t realistic if the alternative is a round trip of 42 miles a day on foot or by bike, just to get to work. Campaigns to tackle climate change need to link up with campaigns for better transport and fairer funding for it, particularly for buses.
Rooting calls for action in the reality of people’s lives is essential if the battle against climate change is not to become a battle against each other. It is galling to be lectured on not eating meat when you and your family are struggling to get by and relying on help from friends and local food banks. It isn’t fair to ask families to forfeit the one foreign flight they have saved for all year, while we have global corporations whose business models rely on frequent air travel and governments that refuse to tax them for it.
Climate activists must also rethink their language. Phrases such as “dirty coal” are profoundly condescending to communities in which generation after generation did dangerous, backbreaking work down the mines to build the country’s wealth and influence at great cost to themselves; pneumoconiosis victims are still fighting for justice decades after the mines closed. We are owed new clean energy jobs, and the infrastructure to create them. In Wigan and Barnsley, the desire for good jobs that provide a sense of purpose is palpable. Positive movements for change, such as the One Million Climate Jobs trade union campaign, provide an antidote to the stark warnings about climate scenarios that often leave people feeling powerless to act.
We must not let the climate crisis become a further source of division in Britain. The last Labour government’s decision to load the cost of clean energy subsidies on to energy bills left the poorest people paying six times as much of their disposable income on energy bills as their wealthy counterparts. If climate change becomes a major cause of migration it may prove fertile ground for the far right looking to exploit disillusion in towns that have experienced rapid, relative decline.
Instead, let’s seize this as an opportunity to rebuild our towns so they can play a major and significant part in our national story once again. Fighting for a better environment was always part of socialist tradition, as working-class people living among the smoke and soot of industry fought for parks, protection of the countryside, wildlife conservation, clean air and fresh water.
The first Bolton Extinction Rebellion meeting saw people queueing out of the door on a hot summer evening, and I get more letters about the environment from my constituents than any other single issue. Building an environmentally sustainable future will require the talent, intellect and hard work of the whole of our society – so it’s time for the climate movement to break out of the cities to make itself a movement for the many, not just the few.
There is the compulsory plug for XR, bit what Nandy is really admitting is that climate policies have been harmful for her natural working class constituents, most of whom don’t give a fig for climate change.
She admits that XR activism is modelled on the lifestyles of middle-class city dwellers. And that telling people to get out of their cars won’t go down well with most ordinary people.
She tries to blame the latter on decades of chronic underinvestment have left us without public transport, disappearing jobs and length commutes. This is simply left wing drivel. In towns up and down the country like Wigan, ordinary people have been moving out of the city centres for decades, preferring to live in more amenable surroundings in the suburbs. In addition, jobs have tended to migrate out of city centres and into purpose built industrial estates. As a result, cars have become of vital importance for commuters.
In fact I find the suggestion that people would be much better of without cars, if only public transport was better, highly patronising.
She also admits that lecturing people not to eat meat and not fly abroad, though once again she wraps both up in irrelevant nonsense about food banks and global corporations.
Above all she recognises that renewable subsidies are in effect a highly retrogressive tax:
The last Labour government’s decision to load the cost of clean energy subsidies on to energy bills left the poorest people paying six times as much of their disposable income on energy bills as their wealthy counterparts
But she fails to ask the obvious question, how else can they be paid? The only other logical alternative is to load them onto public spending, but that what about all the “schools and hospitals” that could have been funded instead? The obvious conclusion is that those green subsidies should never have been paid out in the first place.
As for those “new clean energy jobs”, perhaps she should be more concerned at the loss of real jobs because of high energy costs.
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October 4, 2019 at 05:42AM
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