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Growth and Consequence:

Rethinking our economic future

There’s a growing sense that the kind of debt-driven economic growth that brought the global economy to the edge of the precipice is no longer viable. But politicians are desperate to get back to that ever-so-reassuring paradigm of conventional economic growth. So what is going to resolve this chronic impasse?
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Nailing the Lib Dems

Thanks to everyone for those empathetic responses on the government pulling the plug on the SDC. Crass, unfounded, self-defeating, ideologically-motivated – that just about sums it up!

Which brings me to the role of the Lib Dems in this wretched business. And what one detects here is a combination of indifference and supine deference to their coalition partners. Not so much as a puppy-dog whimper of dissent.

For Lib Dem MP’s and voters, this has sent out a very worrying signal. Whatever the Party’s internal rationale may have been for throwing in its lot with the Tories, the external perception is that the Lib Dems have four things they have to deliver on if they are going to come out of this the other end with any credibility: electoral reform; civil liberties enhanced; environment and sustainable development on the up; and the Lib Dems need to have exercised a restraining, moderating and civilising influence on their coalition partners.

Sticking to the environment / SD bit for now, Lib Dem performance to date has been poor to very poor. Not having a Liberal Democrat Minister inside Defra is proving particularly problematic. Claims that Defra will be enhancing its capability to promote sustainable development are, as yet, entirely unsubstantiated, and the likely outcome of further cuts in Defra is that SD capability will be even further hammered come the Comprehensive Spending Review this Autumn.

If the SDC was still there, that probably wouldn’t have mattered that much. Defra always struggled with its cross-government remit in this regard. But without the SDC, other Departments will just get on and do what they want to do without any SD oversight.

So this may well be the time to create the first test for Caroline Spelman in her self-declared role as ‘personal lead’ on promoting SD across government. Right now, she has a wonderful opportunity to prove her championing skills with the Department of Education.

I won’t bore you with the details, but for the last four or five years, the Department of Education has done an increasingly good job in ‘mainstreaming’ sustainable development, quietly and intelligently, across the whole educational system. Michael Gove, as the new Secretary of State, has now decided that he wants to get rid of the department’s Sustainable Schools Strategy – and will no longer be actively involved in promoting sustainable schools.

A small thing in itself – relative to the systematic slash and burn underway on every other front – but fairly disastrous in terms of engaging young people in building a low-carbon sustainable future.

Again, this is straight ideology. The cost associated with the department’s leadership in this has been minimal.

Plenty of scope, therefore, for Caroline Spelman to pick up the phone to persuade Michael Gove to withdraw those proposals, and start championing SD even more enthusiastically than his Labour predecessor.

If Mrs Spelman is too busy, then perhaps some of her greener Lib Dem colleagues could weigh in with Mr Gove.

As I said earlier, it’s too early to come to any definitive conclusion here. Maybe what we’re seeing is a series of one-off, heedless decisions – taken simply because they don’t know any better. Alternatively, it could be a pattern emerging along the lines of ‘slash the deficit, sod the environment’.

In which case, suggestions that we should be targeting Lib Dem MPs now, before the pattern is established, becomes all the more important.

And the parallel idea that we might set up some independent, web-enabled scrutiny function (under the compelling title of ‘ GreenestGovEverYeahRight.com!’) is beginning to sound more and more attractive.


Posted on July 28, 2010 3:38 PM | | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The Government's First Green Betrayal

As the former Chair of the Sustainable Development Commission from 2000-2009, I’m clearly going to be a bit biased about the Government’s decision yesterday to get rid of the Commission. So I’ve been working really hard to put myself in Ministers’ shoes in terms of the ‘rationale’ they’ve advanced for this reprehensible decision. They’ve put forward four justifications:

1. It will save money
The SDC costs the taxpayer around £4 million a year, around 50% of which come from Defra. The rest comes from the Devolved Administrations and other Whitehall Departments – all of which wanted to carry on working with the SDC. As George Monbiot has pointed out, the SDC’s advice on reducing costs through increased efficiency has already saved the Government many, many times that negligible amount, and would have gone on doing so year after year.

2. Sustainable development is now mainstreamed across government.
Defra Ministers are now claiming that sustainable development has been embedded in every department. In other words, no specialist capability at the centre is any longer required, simply because the Government ‘gets it’.

Like hell it does. To hear Caroline Spelman, Secretary of State in Defra make such a totally fatuous claim after a few weeks in power is irritating beyond belief. She clearly knows nothing of the constant slog required (of the SDC and many other organisations) to achieve the limited traction that is all that can be laid claim to today.

There’s a rich irony here. The SDC is a UK-wide body. Neither Wales nor Scotland was in favour of getting rid of the Commission, no doubt because both Countries have done an infinitely better job than Whitehall on ‘mainstreaming’ sustainable development.

3. It will avoid duplication
This is a bit trickier, simply because the SDC does a number of different things. It advises Ministers – and there are indeed lots of other people who do that. But rarely if ever from an integrated sustainable development perspective. It helps countless public sector bodies (from the Audit Commission to the Department of Education, from Local Authorities to Primary Care Trusts in the NHS) to make sense of sustainable development, and no other government body does any of that. And it scrutinises government performance on a completely independent basis across the whole sustainable development agenda – not just on climate change. And no other body does that.

4. Sustainable development is too important to delegate to an external body
It’s worth recording Caroline Spelman’s actual words here:

“Together with Chris Huhne, I am determined to take the lead role in driving the sustainable agenda across the whole of government, and I’m not willing to delegate this responsibility to an external body.”

Even after nine years working with dozens of Government Ministers, I’m astonished at such utterly brazen cynicism. The only thing Mrs Spelman has done so far as Secretary of State at Defra is publish a new strategy for the Department. This has not one serious reference to sustainable development in it. Such is the depth of her concern.

If Defra’s next step is to get rid of what’s left of it’s own internal Sustainable Development Unit, then it will have literally no capacity to ‘drive the sustainable agenda’ even within Defra, let alone ‘across the whole of government’. And how can you drive anything if you haven’t the first clue what it actually means? And it just got rid of the only part of the system capable of providing you with a basic primer for beginners?

So let’s not beat around the bush: their justification for getting rid of the SDC is transparently vacuous, if not downright dishonest. This is an ideological decision – in other words, a decision driven by dogma not by evidence-based, rational analysis.

And the only conceivable reason for allowing dogma to dominate in this way is that the Government doesn’t want anyone independently auditing its performance on sustainable development – let alone properly-resourced, indisputably expert body operating as ‘a critical friend’ on an inside track within government.

I don’t suppose the Prime Minister was even consulted about such a footling little matter. But it’s clear that his advisors hadn’t the first idea about the kind of signal this dogma-driven decision sends out, ensuring that his claim that this will be the ‘greenest government ever’ is in deepest jeopardy.

It’s too early to make any definitive judgement about how the Green agenda will fare under the Coalition. But it’s not encouraging. ‘Greenest ever’ has to mean something substantive. Simply smearing a sickly ideological slime over everything just won’t cut it.


Posted on July 23, 2010 11:20 AM | | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Grand Designs on Sustainable Housing

Encountered my first Minister in the new Coalition government – in the shape of Grant Shapps, Minister for Housing – on Thursday last week at the ‘Opening Ceremony’ for a new housing development getting underway in Swindon.

Not just any old housing development. The Triangle is a 42-home, mixed tenure, affordable scheme, the design for which has been put together by Kevin McCloud (of Grand Designs fame) and a housing association called Green Square. All the houses will meet Code Level 4 in the code for Sustainable Homes, and some of them Code Level 5. It’s backed by the Housing and Communities Agency (to the tune of £2.5 Million) and by DECC’s Low Carbon Innovation Fund. And the main contractor is Willmott Dixon, who were there in force at the opening.

It was Grant Shapps’s first outing as minister – so new that he inadvertently described himself as ‘Shadow Minister’ on one occasion. He did well – not just in his enthusiasm for the project itself, but in simultaneously confirming the 2016 target for zero carbon housing in England. This had somehow been left out of the Coalition’s new Programme for Government, which had caused a bit of a stir. He also pledged to bring to an end a three-year stand-off on how exactly ‘zero-carbon’ will be defined (‘that’s not as easy it sounds, by the way!’) within weeks. And that would be impressive.

Somewhat to the consternation of his equally new officials, he also had to familiarise himself with the brand new building material called ‘Hemcrete’, this is made out of hemp, produced by a company called Lime Technology, and it’s being used as the principal building material for the 42 houses.

I think he got a real buzz discovering more about Hemcrete – as did I. Kevin McCloud is already very enthusiastic:

“Hemp is the second fastest growing crop on the planet, after bamboo, so it can be slotted in between other crops during a growing season. It also requires almost no inputs, and enriches the soil. It’s non-combustible, breathable, tough and flexible, and has remained our first choice ever since we saw it being used.”

It also makes a hell of a difference in terms of greenhouse gas emissions when compared with traditional brick or concrete blocks in a normal wall section – to the tune of around 130kg less in terms of CO2 per m2 . Which makes it a genuinely ‘carbon positive’ material – as in more carbon locked up than emitted.

What really excited me about all this is the way in which innovation is, at long last, beginning to impact on a hugely conservative, risk-averse industry. There were even some leading Private Equity Investors present at the opening ceremony – and that has to be a good sign!

Posted on June 2, 2010 6:40 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Caroline Lucas makes Green Party history

So it’s happened: the Green Party has its first MP.

The look on Caroline Lucas’s face as her result in Brighton Pavilion was announced pretty much said it all: elation, exhaustion and huge relief all rolled into one. She’d been talking during the count of feeling “sick and nervous with the weight of so many people’s expectation on me”.

For me, it’s just the elation without the exhaustion. Thirty-one years after I first stood as a Green Party (or Ecology Party, as it then was!) candidate, the near-insurmountable barrier of our first past the post electoral system has been shoved aside by a wonderful, utterly dedicated and very inspiring politician.

But I don’t imagine Caroline has any illusions about the electoral implications of this breakthrough for the Green Party. Without a move to proportional representation, Green Party candidates will continue to be the victims of a deep-seated ‘wasted vote’ phenomenon which this general election, like every general election before it, has demonstrated all over again.

Posted on May 10, 2010 1:06 PM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Greens poised for their biggest ever vote

Today just has to be the day when the Green Party breakthrough the UK’s wretched first-past-the-post electoral system.

There are four possible candidates who might be able to do that: Caroline Lucas in Brighton Pavilion; Adrian Ramsay in Norwich South; Darren Johnson in Lewisham; and (as an extreme outsider!) Tony Juniper in Cambridge. Realistically, however, I think it’s Caroline whose got the best chance of achieving that breakthrough.

The difference between doing really well (coming second, for instance, with a higher vote for the Green Party than in any preceding General Election) and actually winning is massive. Campaigning down in Brighton last weekend I met a reassuring number of voters who are definitely planning to vote Green today. But I was also taken aback to discover two ‘floating voters’ who’d been so impressed by the ‘Nick Clegg phenomenon’ that they were going to vote Lib Dem for the first time in their lives – despite the fact that in Brighton Pavilion the Lib Dems have no chance whatsoever of coming anywhere other than fourth.

Whatever happens, it’s going to be a very close call.

It won’t be the end of the world for the Green Party if Caroline doesn’t win. Its votes will undoubtedly be up across the country as a whole, and since Caroline became leader, there’s been a new sense of confidence and authority. But the convergence of factors in Brighton Pavilion is quite unique: a constituency that is ‘naturally sympathetic’ to progressive politics; the long-term success of the Green Party across Brighton and Hove in the shape of 13 councillors, ensuring that large numbers of people see Green politics as a normal part of the political mix; and a candidate of compelling quality and integrity (having been voted The Observer’s Ethical Politician of the Year in both 2007 and 2009) at a time when people are looking for distinctively different and honest representation in parliament.

Earlier in the campaign, I would have added another factor: high levels of public concern about climate change and other critical sustainability issues. But I fear that these issues have yet again been moved to the backburner. That really doesn’t help.

So this is a moment of high drama for the party. Green Party sympathisers across the country (which includes a very large number of people who will be voting for another party, often for tactical reasons) will be watching intently to see what happens in Caroline’s constituency.

For me, after nearly 35 years in the Green Party, with my own impressive record of electoral failures back in the 70s and 80s, and having been through the usual mix of hope and despair that all members of minority parties so painfully feel, it will be a quite magical moment.

Posted on May 6, 2010 10:19 AM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

This election could be democracy's big chance

It’s been amazing to see the vested interests of the right wing media, the City, and the political establishment going into overdrive on the prospective horrors of a hung parliament. One day the world is ticking over on a more or less comfortable basis, with our governance systems bumbling along in their reassuringly inadequate way, and the next (May 7th) the rating agencies have downgraded the status of UK debt to junk bonds, there are riots in the streets, the monarchy is at risk and civilization has collapsed.

There are, of course, some legitimate concerns about the mechanisms of coalition government. We should, of course, be mindful of what happens in countries like Belgium and Italy. There will, of course, be difficulties, frustrations and failures. But in comparison to the deep unfairness inherent in the current utterly dysfunctional system, those problems seem very manageable.

And this just has to be the moment where we make an absolute priority of revitalising our entire democratic system. The idea that this election should be won or lost at the behest of ‘the markets’ just shows how comprehensively our system has imploded.

Labour had such a moment back in 1997 (especially as its manifesto for that election included a crystal-clear commitment to introduce a referendum on electoral reform), but bottled it. Having done devolution for Scotland and Wales (which was brilliant) and part-reform of the House of Lords (which was a good start, but looks pathetically inadequate 13 years on), everything else got dumped.

And it’s all about so much more than electoral reform. One of the most inspiring initiatives running along in the background during the election period has been the Vote for Democracy campaign organised by Unlock Democracy – an organisation I once knew as Charter 88.

Their main report A Vote for Democracy?, analyzes the manifestos of all the major parties (as well as the Greens, Plaid Cymru, SNP, UKIP, Respect and the BNP) and scores them against five principal areas of interest:

- Fair, free and honest elections
- Rights, freedoms and written constitution
- Stronger parliament and accountable government
- Bringing power closer to the people
- A culture of informed political interest and responsibility

The headline scores emerging from that are as follows: Lib Dems 81 out of 100, Greens 80.5, SNP 57, Conservatives 46, and Labour 45.5. The rest are not really in it.

Posted on May 5, 2010 2:05 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)