In recent articles, I’ve been looking ahead to the forthcoming local elections thinking about how we can help each other to prepare for canvassing. I personally believe that a great many of the British people instinctively believe in Green values, but of course, we all face the great struggle to convert values into votes. I think we can all imagine a typical doorstep conversation. Everything’s going well. They’re definitely interested. They nodded enthusiastically when you talked about health, were with you all the way on energy and the climate crisis and were ahead of the game on pollution issues in the local environment. Votes seem to be on their way! And then the inevitable question, ‘And what will the Greens do to help us with the cost of living crisis? We’d love to vote on principles, but there are bills to pay you know’. What will you say?
I’ll share some of the answers I would give, but I don’t pretend to have any kind of monopoly on expertise in this area. It would be wonderful to help each other by sharing possible answers.
It’s good to start from common ground. I don’t think it would need much argument for our potential supporters to agree that the last few decades show that both Labour and Conservatives have built the economy that is failing us all so badly now. You might be tempted to say, ‘Why not give Greens a chance with the economy, we couldn’t do any worse’ but we know our concerned voters will need more evidence than this.
The starting point is to understand the economic problems causing the cost of living crisis. I would highlight three factors where I think we clearly demonstrate the potential for Greens to do better.
The first factor is inequality. Under recent Labour and Conservative governments, long-term trends in our country towards widening gaps in both income and wealth inequality have worsened. In 2016 the Office for National Statistics published data showing that the richest 10 per cent of households hold 44 per cent of all wealth. The poorest 50 per cent, by contrast, own just 9 per cent. Of course, this explains a cost of living crisis that affects so many of our people, but it also explains why overall the economy is in such poor shape. Research has shown that the damage inequality does to trust, community, wellbeing, education and social mobility has a knock-on effect of limiting the whole economy. We can see this in the increase of food banks and warm banks around us. How could we expect someone to go from such places, wonderful as they are, to being able to contribute to a vibrant economy? We Greens are committed to making every family wealthier by following economic policies based on social and environmental justice.
The second factor is ideology, by which I mean a set of beliefs that are not founded on evidence but are used by politicians for mass appeal. These are almost always disastrous for the economy because they ignore reality. The most obvious recent example from the Conservatives is the un-costed tax cuts of Trussonomics which cost our people 40 billion pounds. Brexit is another example. The Office for Budget Responsibility expects Brexit to reduce Britain’s output by 4 per cent over 15 years compared to remaining in the bloc. Exports and imports are projected to be around 15 per cent lower in the long run. But Labour is equally blinded by ideology. An example from its last period in power is the Private Finance Initiatives born out of the Brown-Blair ideological belief in a ‘third way’ bargain between private money and public need. A report by the National Audit Office found that the annual costs of PFI projects amounted to 10.3 billion pounds in 2016/17 and that by the 2040s PFI will cost us, the taxpayers, a further 199 billion pounds. Untested ideologies from the left and the right are making us all poorer. In place of ideological thinking, we Greens will follow ‘agile’ thinking.
The third limiting factor is the failure of both parties to understand growth and productivity. To put it simply, productivity measures the rate of production done in one hour. Our country has the lowest rate of productivity among the G7 countries. In Germany, one hour’s work has 28 per cent more output, in America 31 per cent. You rarely hear politicians from the Labour or Conservative parties talk about this fundamental problem because it’s a symptom of the way they’ve both mismanaged the national economy for years. When they have so-called solutions they are mechanistic and show no understanding of how organic society works. The Conservatives have a simple carrot-and-stick mechanism – beat Trade Unions because they slow things down and reward workers with tax cuts. The truth however is that labour organisations can often find ways to improve production processes, and tax cuts just mean downgrades in essential public services, for example cutting health services means people are sicker and less able to work. The traditional Labour solution is a ‘fair day’s pay, for a fair day’s work’, but this is to ignore all of the other factors which motivate people to want to work well, such as their wellbeing, or sense of pride and job satisfaction. In a research survey by research firm ORC International, under half of UK workers felt valued by their employers and only 37 per cent believed their workplace culture encouraged them to be innovative.
I’m sure there are other reasons why the causes of the cost of living crisis lies equally with both major parties. The biggest claim of both parties is that they ‘can be trusted with the economy’, but hopefully now the confidence of our two potential voters is wavering a little. But we still haven’t won their trust. It may be clear what they can vote ‘against’, but they need to be equally clear about what they are voting ‘for’. Let’s try to give our new friends a five-point plan.
- Firstly, Greens would immediately start to bring additional money into the economy by being outward-looking and internationalist, rejecting the isolationism and petty nationalism that is literally stealing much-needed funds out of the public purse. Both the Conservatives and Labour have talked themselves into such a mess of limited thinking and party divisions that they lack the agility and common sense needed to re-negotiate the clearly failing Brexit deal. What is more, both the European Union and the United States are about to start investing massively in building new green infrastructures. Potentially there is something as enormous as the first green industrial revolution about to happen as two major economies get serious about the transition to sustainable futures. This process has already started in the third major world economy – China. Only Green leadership can position our country to be at the forefront of this, instead of the futility of waving a little Union Jack of misguided isolationism as the green future leaves us all behind.
- Only the Greens can be trusted to sort out the wasted Conservative and Labour decades of underinvestment and waste in the sectors of education and training. As a former headteacher, I can tell you that the single biggest barrier to our young people being at the centre of transforming our country into the world centre of sustainability is the way Labour and Conservatives kick education and training around as a political football. I know from first-hand experience the creativity, determination and limitless learning capacity of the young, inspired by the values of diversity, equality, sustainability and internationalism, and equally well know all of this potential is betrayed and drains away. Greens have a sustainable vision of education as a lifelong service, putting learning at the heart of communities, where academic and vocational education are not competing in a spurious competition, but interwoven so that we can all develop the learning agility we need to adapt as the world changes. But we need to get the ball rolling. I propose that a first step would be to develop an ecosystem approach to education organisation by supporting cluster partnerships to work together on locally decided projects. Every university should be partnering with High Schools and Primary schools to empower them with the emerging sustainable knowledge and thinking that they currently lack. Schools, many of which are empty wasted buildings during the evenings, weekends and holidays can open as 'Community Innovation Hubs’ acting to hatch start-ups for all age groups in the way that universities do for university students.
- Now let’s turn to that conundrum of productivity. At the heart of my answer for our potential voters is our country’s long-term addiction to short-term answers. A disastrous symptom of this is our failure to invest in research and development (R and D). Too much of our money is gambled in the short-term return market of venture capitalism – instant profits which are the opposite of growth, often involving closing businesses, de-skilling or sacking expensive employees. Here are the chilling facts. In 2019 UK expenditure on R and D was 1.7 per cent of GDP while the OECD average was 2.5 per cent. In German,y the figure is 3.2 per cent, in the US 3.1 per cent, in China 2.55 per cent. There’s your cost of living crisis right there. That’s money that is chasing increasing house prices instead of growing the talents and skills of the coming green revolution. Let’s review the most fundamental lesson of the first industrial revolution. It did not come from financiers in London, but from the grassroots, as people like George Stephenson fused together newfound academic knowledge with vocational learning in engineering to re-invent transport and energy. From day one, Greens will nurture the talents and skills of the post-industrial evolution.
- Linked to this is the equally tragic fact that our country is turning its back on the innovation that is already underway across the globe. I doubt if anyone from the leadership teams of either Labour or Conservatives have read ‘Doughnut Economics’ by Kate Haworth or ‘Regeneration’ by Paul Hawken. If they had they wouldn’t be suggesting failed strategies that amount to nothing more than shuffling the financial deck chairs on the sinking Titanic of the English economy – ‘too good to fail’. Both of these authors detail grassroots innovations and enterprises that are solving the cost of living crises in communities across the world, many in areas of Africa and Asia which we English routinely ignore. The modern George Stephensons are everywhere around the globe. Kate Haworth tells the inspirational story of William Kampkwama who left High School due to poverty and then dedicated his ingenuity to reading books in his local library and inventing his own wind turbine that brought clean, cheap, renewable energy to his community in Malawi for the first time. The Green Party will enable local and international economies to benefit from this global ingenuity by working co-operatively with other countries to create an open source, peer-to-peer sharing of sustainable knowledge. Alongside this we will support and challenge every business and organisation in the UK to run itself along cooperative principles so that all employees feel valued and so that innovation can bubble up from any level within the company
- Finally, only the Greens can solve the fundamental problem we face, which is that as a result of the cost of living crisis, we face a quality of living crisis. Greens will immediately begin work to improve national well-being by growing new balanced relationships between ourselves and our natural environment. The very fact that this might sound like ‘hippy trippy’ mumbo jumbo tells us how successive Labour and Conservative governments have let us down. A critical part of our ‘quality’ of life is interaction with safe, sustainable urban and natural environments that grow and promote physical and mental health. This starts at home, ensuring every family can live in (not necessarily ‘own’) an ecological home, free from the blight of poor insulation or black mould. It grows out from here to ensure that our urban design is being led by the examples of eco-cities mushrooming around the world, where the design principle is learning from nature. What has this got to do with the economy? Firstly to rebuild our country to achieve an ‘ecological civilisation’ means there’s an awful lot of meaningful work to be done, much of it directly connected to rebuilding local communities. The very fact of investment in this green transition will mean up-skilling and developing the new technologies which make this possible. However, there is more than this at stake. I believe that underlying the problem of productivity is a simple issue of motivation. The Conservatives are wrong. People are not primarily motivated by consumerism and personal greed. Labour is wrong. People are not primarily motivated by a fairer workplace or a higher wage. People are much better motivated by the feeling of belonging to local, national and international communities where everyone is working together towards a common goal. If you like, it’s the spirit of 1945 when England was energised to build back over the wasteland of the war years. Now we need a new environmental spirit of ’45, to re-grow a sustainable economy and quality of life, in partnership with nature, over the wasteland of the failed decades of economic mismanagement by both parties.
And then I would say: “Thank you for listening and asking questions. So there we are. I’m not trying to bribe you to vote Green with tax cuts or wage rises, but there are five commitments which grow us out of the economic dead end that Labour and Conservatives have got us into. A final thought for you. The reason this feels like a crisis is that you feel more and more powerless to change anything, don’t you? Deep down you feel all politicians are the same. Everything about the Green Party is grassroots, it's about making sure you, us, your neighbours, and this whole community have the legal powers and the economic support you need to find sustainable solutions to all of these problems. No Green vote is wasted, every Green vote puts pressure on Westminster to move in our direction, the direction of the future. That’s got to be something worth thinking about, hasn’t it?"