Ed Miliband rightly hit the headlines today, telling the country it’s sleepwalking to climate change disaster. Actually too many are driving a Land Rover into catastrophic climate change – but his point is right. The science is as obvious as it needs to be. Our actions are heating up the planet, that causes the weather fluctuations, that drown the crops and the lives and hopes of anyone living near water.
And here in lies a divide to fight and win not just an election but a way of being – but to do so Labour has to be bolder and sort out some of its own contradictions. For the thing about climate change is that it splits us almost precisely along old left right lines. The deniers are almost exclusively on the right – the do something about it camp are almost exclusively on the left. The reasons are obvious. Climate change is about the ability of society to mobilise itself collectively against eco-side, it is about the state being the only vehicle that has the legitimacy and capacity to act, it is about reducing consumption and placing limits on the market. Not limits in terms of regulations but limits in terms of growth.
Climate change demands that society comes before the market, that democracy trumps corporations and that we have to find better ways to create our identities and fulfil ourselves as human beings than by buying stuff we didn’t know we wanted, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t know. Wearing designer wellies and recycling the Guardian isn’t going to cut it. Climate change means politics matters. And it matters not just on a domestic scale but on a European and global scale. So climate change is a left/right issue. History isn’t over and Ed Miliband is on the right side of the line. But to win the argument he has to go further. He has to renounce the idea, central to social democracy, that equality is all about having more stuff. If the capitalists have more things then the labourers must have more things too. The workers plasma screen can never be big enough. Apparently. But equality as an endless catch up to consumption destroys not just the planet but the fabric of solidarity as we all get locked into selfish and individualistic behaviour.
The climate for equality is crushed too. And it is climate change that hits the poor soonest and hardest – lapping at their doors and forcing up the price of food and energy that dominate their weekly bills. Instead Labour and the wider left have to talk about different kind of mores. Not more stuff – but more power, more empathy, more community, more time and more love. Climate change demands the redistribution of resources but no one dies wishing their TV screen was just that little bit bigger – they die longing for more time with the people they love. We should build a good society around such a profound insight, not the never-ending race of empty consumer fulfilment. Funnily enough Miliband did just this last Monday with his Hugo Young lecture. In it he talked about devolving power to people, enabling them to co-create public services. He gave a meaning to life beyond that of the simply consumer or passive receipt of what the state had to offer. These are more mores we need to talk about. But Miliband has helped open up the debate about how we start to make the weather
Vote Labour and change the weather?!
Come back Jim Davidson,all is forgiven!
Let us gather around our plasma screens
and watch youdisperse the hot air
of progressive claptrap.
You been missed Lewis
Miliband band wagon number twenty one.
In the unsigned comment above we read “Funnily enough Miliband did just this last Monday with his Hugo Young lecture. In it he talked about devolving power to people, enabling them to co-create public services. He gave a meaning to life beyond that of the simply consumer or passive receipt of what the state had to offer.”
Well, funnily enough, or not, this is what Miliband actually said
“The fourth principle is that it is right to devolve power down not just to the user but to the local level. Because the centralized state cannot diagnose and solve every local problem from Whitehall. And if we are to succeed in devolving powers to users, it is much harder to do that from central government.”
It seems to me that this is rank nonsense. Will the power to determine the money spent on cancer drugs as opposed to diabetes treatments be devolved down to the user? This is completely meaningless. What is most worrying is that Ed Miliband and his advisors must know that it is completely meaningless. From this I don’t see how to resist the conclusion that they are in the business of inventing catch phrases that they hope will capture the imagination of sufficient voters to put Labour in power irrespective of the reality (or lack of it) behind those phrases. It is politics devoid of principle. This “fourth principle” is clearly not a principle of any sort. It could not be used to formulate or evaluate any meaningful practical proposals.
Which is why we say he is on band wagons look at his latest one we will sack ATOS and to be honest we are just finding out they are trying to get out of the contracts. The issue sis about handing down power to the people is simply not true I have no more to say about what my Welsh Assembly does except when I vote, and that not really a say is it not when you see the people who bother voting.
The fact is devolving power down normally means more layers of politician between the people and the Government all MIliband is doing is protecting himself not adding anything more to what the people have to say, another layer of bureaucracy
I can’t help feeling that Somerset in particular deserves what it’s got because it went rapidly downhill in terms of sustainable transport when the Tories took control of the county council from the Lib Dems. Of course this doesn’t mean that the victims of the flooding deserve what they got, nor that better public transport in Somerset would have stopped the flooding, though I’m sure that some people would have us think it’s the same thing.
Excellent article. Gets right to the heart of what needs to be done.
But how we get from here to there is the biggest question of all.