Starmer’s cowardice on climate
JVL Introduction
As soaring temperatures threaten the lives of citizens in mainland Europe because of El Niño enhanced global warming, Caroline Lucas excoriates Keir Starmer for his lack of vision in responding to accelerating climate breakdown.
He fails to recognise the urgent need to avert looming environmental catastrophes and has cut back on the promised injection of £28 billion a year, when in office, to rapidly green the economy.
In a lapse of patriotism, given the renowned nature communing of the monarch, Starmer has distanced himself from “tree huggers” and has also diluted his pledge to oppose the licensing of new oil and gas extraction by promising a free ride to the more than 100 licences for North Sea oil and gas extraction in the process of being issued by the Tories.
He even met with executives of Equinor, two thirds owned by the Norwegian government, to reassure them that the prize they have been handed of the vast Rosebank field will be unchallenged by an incoming Labour administration.
TB
This article was originally published by the Guardian on Wed 19 Jul 2023. Read the original here.
With the climate in peril, winning slowly is the same as losing. How can Starmer settle for that?
Technocratic tinkering and cautious managerialism can’t begin to address the crisis. We need vision – and now
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Good article apart from Lucas’ stating we could borrow more to fund green investment.
We do not need to borrow. With our own currency we can print money and use it to fund a Green Revolution via Quantitative Easing.
What a tragedy that Caroline Lucas was so unwilling to support Corbyn
With Labour’s continuing entrenchment into a mouse hole of vacuous policy announcements, abandoning every remotely progressive policy and proudly announcing that they will not deal with child poverty, my impulsive inclination is to act against Labour, encouraging people to switch their votes.
This irrational despair will pass, but how do we vote next time?
Who needs two parties when both main parties are owned by the financial capitalist class and tailor their competitive mendacity by using focus groups of citizens to check the unreasoned acceptability of their empty words?
The current xenophobic war hysteria directed against “communist” China as a threat to “western democratic values” masks the real admiration of our ruling class for the efficiency with which the Chinese capitalist class keeps its masses in a state of permanent subjugation. Just occasionally the admiration breaks through the mask of hypocrisy, as when British workers are told that in the real world their wages cannot be raised because the UK needs to compete with China to become a world leader in some branch of industry.
An untamed capitalist class which governs by manipulating public opinion through its control of the media and then adjusts its propaganda so as to divide any opposition and ensure that it has a plurality of overall support for its policies, can solve its real internal political divisions more efficiently by the mediation of a totalitarian one party state than by the mediation of a now dysfunctional parliamentary democracy.
Make no mistake. One party totalitarian rule is the logical end of the road down which Keir Starmer and his empty headed camp followers are leading us. The casual inhumanity and racism of the parliamentary Labour Party shown by its failure to oppose the recent immigration bill illustrates clearly why a Starmer government with a large majority would be far more dangerous than a hung parliament even if the Tories were to have the largest number of seats. Their project must be crushed.
I have no faith in Starmer’s claim to have any Labour Party firm policies, let alone any definite plans to implement plans. His strategy is to rely upon Conservative unpopularity to carry Labour into government and by presenting an ad-hoc mixture of vanilla statements designed to avoid offending anyone he hopes to win votes. Lack of definitive intentions may help keep options open but it doesn’t provide anything tangible to vote FOR. The example of ULEZ and Uxbridge shows that a policy vacuum opened the way for blaming ULEZ for a negative when the truth was it was an absence of Labour positive messaging.
Fran are you serious? Quantitative Easing has what’s got us into this position in the first place. The US also has done this to keep the bank base rate ridiculously low for years, now we are suffering for this. I believe the problems we have now is due to BREXIT, it destabilised Europe allowing situations such in Russia and Ukraine to develop. A United Europe working together on renewable energy together with countries such as China, would have given some hope on climate change mitigation. As it is each country is now in a mode of protectionism. We don’t stand a chance of getting anywhere not until all the second homes on the continent are burnt in climate induced wildfires, or our homes here are flooded in the deluge. Seems to me the greens have got it right.
Caroline is a breath of fresh air, and it’s sad that she is soon stepping down as an MP. Anyway, here’s another Guardian article:
‘Gulf stream could collapse as early as 2025, study suggests’
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/25/gulf-stream-could-collapse-as-early-as-2025-study-suggests
PS It’s amazing – as I recently discovered on youtube – how many documentaries there are still being churned out dismissing Global Warming as a hoax, and most of them with hundreds of thousands of views.
Nobody should be surprised at Starmer’s lack of political knowledge on virtually any subject. The only time he sounds like he has, is when he’s clearly been coached, probably by Mandelson.