On Monday 1st December, Barry spoke about the Budget, delivered on Wednesday 26th November.
Due to the time limits imposed on speakers, Barry was not able to deliver the speech in full, which can be found below:
We live in an age of public sufficiency and private luxury. That is a phrase I picked up from Professor Kevin Anderson at the National Emergency Briefing last week. It is a good one, and many of my words today owe a debt to him
Most people in the UK have enough to live on. A small number live in extraordinary comfort. I joined the Labour Party 47 years ago because I thought that balance was wrong.
Not just here in the UK, but globally where the wealthiest 1% of the global population consume slightly more resources than the entirety of the poorest 50%.
That 50% of the global population do not have enough.
I joined the Labour Party because I believe in equality and justice. And these are two of the values that I use to judge any budget. Does it create a more equal society? Is the society which it creates more just?
And so there are aspects of this budget that I can welcome:-
I welcome the removal of policy costs from household energy bills, saving families £150.
I welcome the 3,730 children in my constituency of Brent West whose parents will be helped by the abolition of the 2 child benefit cap and the expansion of free school meals.
I welcome the rise in the minimum wage and the living wage.
I think it a scandal that more than 60% of people in receipt of Universal Credit are actually in work – often working two jobs to make ends meet. A scandal, because it means that those employers are not paying their workforce at a level that we – the rest of society – consider is enough to live on. So we make up the difference.
We – the taxpayer – are actually subsidising those companies wage bills so they can pay their shareholders higher profits. Companies should pay their workers enough so that they can afford to live without the support of Universal Credit.
And it never ceases to amaze me when I hear politicians blame those workers who are forced to claim UC, instead of the companies who are either having their own inefficient production or their profit margins subsidised by other taxpayers. And often both!
But the truth about this budget is that it is marking time.
Yes. It remedies some of the political mistakes the government made in failing to address child poverty a year ago, but it doesn’t fundamentally reverse the structural inequality in our country. For that we need Land Reform.
125 years ago in the very First Labour Manifesto, for the General Election in 1900, we had measures for Land Reform: I quote: “Complete Emancipation of labour from the Domination of Landlordism”. Here we are 125 years on and we are now scared to even challenge those Landlords, with lawyerly ministers backing off even from freeing Leaseholders from paying Ground Rent which extracts a rent for no service. We need to remember that the purpose of government is not to ask what the law tells us about the status quo, but to legislate to change the status quo when it is unjust.
But I digress.
This budget doesn’t reverse structural inequality
It doesn’t shift the dial on Growth. The very thing the government says it has as its core mission.
It is a budget that whispers when it should be screaming about the catastrophe that is going to collapse our economy within the next 25 years.
So let me talk about the figures that matter and about the budgets that are actually going to change our lives.
Over the past 800 thousand years the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has varied between 180 and 300 parts per million.
During the last 10,000 years – the period of human civilisation, it has varied between 260 and 280 parts per million. And that has given us humans a relatively stable temperature and climate. When we started the significant use of fossil fuels in the 19th Century it was at 280. Today the concentration of CO2 is at 424 parts per million.
In 800 thousand years our planet has never seen a CO2 rise of this magnitude in such a short space of time. And as a result of those emissions, global mean temperatures have risen by nearly 1.5°. That is the level that we know gives us only a 50% chance of avoiding dangerous climate change.
But the world has not stopped emitting and even if it did the lag in impact would continue to see temperatures rise. Even if every country kept to the promises it has already made we would still be looking at 2.4°
So what does “Dangerous” climate change actually mean.
It means the systemic collapse of our economy
It means refugees fleeing parts of the world where life has become impossible because of persistent temperatures above 40°; because of drought, and failing crops.
It means unprecedented societal chaos as supply chains fail and competition for food turns to violence.
It means war.
The Global Tipping Points Report published this year identifies the dangerous points of collapse. These are critical thresholds that, when exceeded, lead to large scale and irreversible change.
The collapse of the West Antarctic Ice sheet
The die off of Coral Reefs
The Atlantic Conveyor slowing
The dieback of the Amazon rainforest
The Sub Polar Gyre convection shutting down
2025 may have seen the first of these tipping points breached with tropical coral reefs in multiple bleaching events. And scientists tell us that it may already be too late for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
What this government has failed to understand is that you cannot weigh up the cost of addressing climate change against the cost to the economy when your whole economy depends upon keeping climate change under control.
It is 20 years since Nick – now Lord Stern – told us that the costs of addressing climate change were massively outweighed by the costs of not addressing it.
So the first budget we need is a global carbon budget that sets the quantity of CO2 we can emit if we are to meet our Paris temperature commitments.
And the IPCC has provided this. It is terrifying
If we are to stay below the 2° threshold we have only 530 billion metric tonnes of CO2 that we can release into the atmosphere.
That may sound like a lot
In fact it is only 13 years of emissions at their current rate.
To stay within that budget we would have to reduce global emissions by 8% every year
Currently they are still rising.
The budget to stay within 1.5° is a lot worse: Just 130 billion metric tonnes, which is just three years of emissions at today’s level.
Just three years for the world to do what it promised it would do 10 years ago in the Paris Treaty.
Parliament is supposed to be a gathering of the leaders of our community. Rational and intelligent human beings capable of horizon scanning and guiding our country to a safe and sustainable future. Instead it acts like the frog in the pan of gradually boiling water delaying its escape until too late.
This budget should have been bold. It should have put our country on a wartime footing focussing our investment into the technologies that are capable of turning this looming catastrophe around.
A national programme of retrofit to our existing domestic buildings.
No new build that is not zero carbon both in its embodied and in its operational carbon.
A huge roll out of public transport in our cities and rural areas
A major program of electrification for our entire energy system.
We have a huge majority yet we act as if we are afraid of the power that we spent 14 years seeking.
Where is the woman who stood up four years ago at the Labour conference and declared she would be “The Green Chancellor”? That she would invest 28 Billion pounds a year into our green economy.
Does she not know that the green economy today is growing three times faster than the rest of the UK economy. If Growth truly is our mission then it is in that clean, affordable, and secure future that we should be investing.
Instead we talk of transitioning away from fossil fuels when once we spoke of Phasing them out. We see the siren voices of the oil and gas industry positing Blue Hydrogen with CCS. The known liars at Drax who, now they have missed out on the Carbon Capture subsidies, are telling their investors that they will have private contracts with Data Centres.
These delay merchants know that Carbon Capture has been promised for thirty years and last year managed to sequester just 0.03% of global fossil fuel emissions.
These delay merchants know that Carbon Capture adds at least 25% to the cost of the energy produced, yet they peddle their false solutions because they want to extract every last drop of profit from the public.
The Stone Age did not end because of a lack of stone. And the oil age will not end because of a lack of oil. It will end because politicians wake up to the tobacco-industry style manipulation by the oil sector and decide to protect their citizens against the damage.
In the UK higher income households consume almost five times more energy than those in the poorest homes. That means we must protect those who bear least responsibility for the problem.
Most cannot afford to buy their way out of their emissions. They are locked into the structural emissions of a rented property, an older inefficient car, and a poor gas boiler heating system.
It is the energy consumption of the rich that we need to drive down. Ending the standing charge and the cheaper per unit cost the more energy you buy.
Often people talk of a Just Transition. I prefer to talk of a Bloody Marvellous Transition.
What’s not to like about:
Warm homes with affordable energy?
Comfortable, efficient, speedy and reliable public transport?
The creation of thousands of new jobs?
Decent air quality.
A secure food system with reliable supply chains
And a stable geopolitical world.
I started by saying we live in an age of public sufficiency and private luxury. A budget that was adequate to the challenge we face would have turned that on its head.
It would have shifted the resources of our country away from supporting private luxury and towards the public good.
A society where every private home has sufficient and every public domain is one of luxury. That would be the just and equal society I came into the Labour Party to create.