Guest election blog – Labour by Caroline Lucas

I’m the former MP for Brighton Pavilion and the UK’s first Green MP. I’ve been Chair of the Climate Change All-Party Parliamentary Group and an active member of the Environmental Audit Select Committee. I’m also a former leader of the Green Party of England and Wales and was previously a Member of the European Parliament for ten years.

Unsurprisingly, I’m a longtime Green voter. My lightbulb moment first came nearly 40 years ago when I bought a copy of Seeing Green by Jonathan Porritt and started to fully appreciate the need for a party political expression of the environmental movement. Since then, I’ve seen the vital role that elected Greens can play in holding the larger parties to account and pushing for more ambitious solutions to the climate and ecological crises.

This is my review of the environmental implications of the Labour manifesto.

Things I like:

• Labour’s commitment to “make Britain a clean energy superpower” was expected given it’s one of their five missions. However, I am concerned by Keir Starmer’s recent statement that GB energy will be “an investment vehicle, not an energy company” which, if true, would be a far cry from the publicly owned energy company that we were promised.
• It is good to see no new exploration licences in Labour’s manifesto but I very hope that they will also halt production licences for oil and gas, as well as revoking those of recently approved projects like Rosebank, otherwise we will continue to see fuel poured on the fire.
• Bringing the railways back into public ownership is exactly the kind of ambition that we need from Labour, and which has been more than matched by the Green Party manifesto, where it is coupled with investment to modernise our railways. The question that I had time and again whilst reading their manifesto was, why isn’t this bold thinking seen elsewhere (the water sector for example), and where is the investment? 
• The commitment to Improving our resilience to climate shocks was a pleasant surprise. Adaptation has long been ignored by Government, with the Climate Change Committee branding it “chronically underfunded and overlooked”. But will Labour put their money where their mouth is?

Things I don’t like:

• Growth, growth, growth. With planetary boundaries at breaking point, and a staggering three planets required if everyone in the world consumed natural resources at the same rate as the UK, growth cannot be the objective in and of itself. Greens would develop new indicators of economic success that consider the wellbeing of people and planet.
• I will never understand Labour’s newfound commitment to Brexit which has made us poorer as well as weakening environmental protections.  Greens would want the UK to rejoin and play its full part in the European Union, as soon as the conditions are right.
• Nuclear white elephants are hugely expensive, far too slow to build, and ill-equipped for the more flexible energy system of the future. Yet Labour has foolishly committed to new nuclear power stations, including Sizewell C which many have vehemently opposed not least because of its proximity to the Minsmere nature reserve, home to some of the UK’s rarest wildlife.
• Although Labour’s manifesto commits to tackling the sewage scandal, it fails to get to the heart of the matter – the unmitigated disaster that is our privatised water system. Water is a public good, so the Green Party would bring it back into public ownership.

Things that appear to be missing:

• I was shocked by the lack of detail on restoring our natural world. As the bare minimum, where’s the increased budget for arms-length bodies like Natural England and the Environment Agency? Or the funding to enable landowners to return land to nature? Or the pay rise to help farmers shift to nature-friendly farming and tackle our broken agriculture system which is driving biodiversity loss? They have even fallen short on improving access – committing to a range of slow and piecemeal measures, rather than a comprehensive English Right to Roam Act.
• So many of my concerns about Labour’s manifesto come down to the lack of investment. According to the IPPR, not only is the UK the lowest investor in the G7, but Labour’s plans for government would involve more public investment cuts than the Conservatives have implemented over the last fourteen years. Let that sink in. Yet this is hardly surprising when they also refuse to consider measures to raise revenue and make our tax system fairer, such as a carbon tax or a wealth tax, which has been left out of political debates for too long. 
• Finally, the refusal to invest means that Labour’s manifesto is missing the street-by-street, local authority-led, home insulation programme that would cut household bills and ensure that everyone has a warm and comfortable home to live in. Indeed, it was their green homes programme that was hit hardest by their £28bn rollback last year, being cut to around £2.64bn a year. A decision which will cost us all more in the long run.

Overall assessment: 

After fourteen long years of Tory rule and in the midst of a climate emergency, the country is crying out for real hope and real change, but Labour’s manifesto falls flat. I am therefore more convinced than ever that we need new Green MPs in Parliament, holding Ministers to account, and pushing them to be bolder and braver in protecting our planet.

Would I vote for these environmental policies? 

What do you think?

This is one of a series of opinion pieces on the political parties’ 2024 general election manifestos. They were commissioned by Wild Justice several months ago by approaching a wide variety of conservationists and environmentalists long before the date of the general election was known. Some people who originally agreed to write pieces found the date and short timescale impossible and had to back out. We did not know what they would write and their only brief was to pick one or two political parties’ election manifestos and tell us what they liked and didn’t like about their environmental policies. We didn’t tell people what to write and we haven’t edited what they wrote (except to squeeze things into a common format, to correct minor grammatical and spelling errors and typos). The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Wild Justice.