• “The earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses.”

Utah Phillips

We need a viable economic road map to take us from a fossil fuel addicted, GDP growth economic model to a renewable, sustainable, social justice, human development economic model. That model is a Green New Deal.

Extractivist economics is a failed neoliberalism experiment. Privatisation, deregulation, lower taxes for business and the rich, more power for employers and shareholders, less power for workers – these interlocking policies have intensified capitalism, and made it ever more ubiquitous. There have been immense efforts to make capitalism appear inevitable; to depict any alternative as impossible. BUT rather than sustainable and widely shared prosperity, it has produced wage stagnation, ever more workers in poverty, ever more inequality, banking crises, the convulsions of populism and the impending climate catastrophe.

A UK Green New Deal will ultimately require rewiring an economy based on extraction where nature is commodified and unsustainable, consumed, where the commons – natural, social, technological – is enclosed and its wealth privatised; and where value is extracted from labour, both waged and unwaged. Extraction drives the unequal accumulation of wealth and concentrates power.

GND is about:- 

• Securing a just transition away from fossil fuel extraction: End fossil fuel extraction justly and rapidly scale a low-carbon, democratically owned energy system.
• Transforming and democratising finance including reshaping private finance, re-purposing central banking, creating a new architecture of international finance.
• Restructuring the economy and work through a green industrial strategy.
• Building public affluence in place of private wealth: Alternative Modes of Ownership expanding social goods in place of private consumption; re-imagining how we and own housing, transport, and care. Community Wealth Building.
• A decentralised and democratised state to drive decarbonisation: requiring a transformed state, radical decentralisation to the nations, regions, cities and towns of the UK. For example, a Treasury based in the North as well as the Downing Street.
• Nurturing  a 21st century commons in place of extractivism: redistributing wealth and time to universalise security, support new ways of living and thriving, and expand leisure.
• Embedding new goals in the economy: Reorienting the purpose of the economy with a focus on increasing well-being, leisure, purposeful enterprise, and generating sustainable prosperity instead of a single metric of GDP growth
• Ending the dogma of endless growth providing new ways to measure economic progress based on social and community good not GDP.
• Developing a green and just multi-lateralism: supporting the reform of international financial institutions, and promoting a global just transition through investment and technological transfers.
• Empowering citizens and their communities to make the decisions that shape their future. Reshaping consumption by incentivising low carbon lifestyles and fairly lower demand for carbon-intense activities.

Labour for a Green New Deal

LGND is campaigning body launched in March 2019 that envisions a prosperous, socialist, zero-carbon society as the alternative to our world which is in politician, economic and ecological crises. LGND is building the movement for the Labour Party to implement a swift, radical and transformative Green New Deal when in power.

LGND’s campaigning has led to 2 x Green New Deal motions being passed at September’s Party Conference 2019. This  included a Socialist Green New Deal. These 2 motions included:-

• Commitment to net-zero UK carbon emissions by 2030.
• Rapidly phasing out all fossil fuels.
• Public ownership of energy creating an integrated, democratic system.
• Encouragement of community ownership of energy.
• Large-scale investment in renewables.
• A public program manufacturing, installing and training in renewable technologies and waste elimination
• Mass insulation and building retrofitting zero-carbon council housing and public buildings.
• A worker’s led ‘just transition’ to well-paid, unionised, green jobs available for all
• Repeal all anti-union laws.
• A Green Industrial Revolution expanding public, democratic ownership as far as necessary for the transformation.
• A Green, publicly owned transport system that connects Britain. Majorly expanded, integrated, free or cheap.
• Democratic public ownership of banking and finance.
• Supporting developing countries’ climate transitions by increasing transfers of finance, technology and capacity.
• Assuring everyone’s basic rights through the provision of universal services.
• Welcoming climate refugees while taking measures against the displacement of peoples from their homes.
• Work internationally to agree a Global Green New Deal.

For more on these Conference motions see article:- https://www.eastbournelabour.co.uk/blog/2019/10/02/socialism-and-a-socialist-green-new-deal/

https://www.labourgnd.uk/

https://www.facebook.com/LabGND/

 Green New Deal UK

Examining the economic models, policy and priorities of a green new deal for the UK

https://www.facebook.com/groups/2512427248772123/files/

LGND t-shirt

https://www.labourgnd.uk/merch/tee

“We cannot trust our elites” Naomi Klein on the Green New Deal & the Working Class.

Books

The Case For A Green New Deal by Ann Pettifor

https://www.versobooks.com/books/3102-the-case-for-the-green-new-deal

LGND Explainers – a series of short videos 

1 … on green jobs and workers justice

https://www.facebook.com/263682547664617/posts/363661437666727/

2 …on Universal Basic Services 

https://www.facebook.com/263682547664617/posts/345895646109973/