Labour can be the party to tackle the climate crisis

A week ago today, a little article in the Evening Standard did the rounds in which Green leader Natalie Bennett received quite the monstering for travelling around Europe by train because she is opposed to flying on principle. “I haven’t flown for seven or eight years,” she said. “I quite like train travel because you can work on a train and I sleep very well on them. I would do it again.”

One of Bennett’s detractors was Labour MP John Spellar, a former Transport Minister, who declared: “This just shows how out of touch and elitist the Greens are… Imagine trying to take kids on holiday on a train journey that took up days and days, and cost a fortune.” One wonders whether such a response would have been forthcoming from a Labour MP in the days before UKIP, when politicians weren’t competing over who was the most in touch, but there we go.

I spend a lot of time wondering why Labour doesn’t go big on climate change (ok, not a lot of time, just the time since Naomi Klein published that damn book and gave me a horrible political awakening on the issue). It’s obvious from the Tories’ policies on welfare and immigration – as well as Labour’s attempts to keep up with them – that politicians seem to think terrifying the electorate is a good way of winning votes. So why doesn’t Labour start talking about the impending catastrophe that will engulf us all within the next sixty years, and with which Labour is infinitely more trusted than the Tories?

“Catastrophe” sounds like exaggeration, but it isn’t. The earth’s temperature could increase by 4C within my generation’s lifetime if there is no intervention. This could lead to massive crop failures and food shortages, soaring heatwaves – the likes of which we haven’t seen for 5 million years, the possible burning down of the Amazon rainforest, mass extinction of plants and animals, and two thirds of the world’s cities underwater. If we don’t take serious action on climate change now, imagine the kind of world your children will be living in, and your grandchildren. Debating modes of transport will seem a rather quaint notion then, I should imagine.

There is this idea that climate change is a remote issue; that people can’t relate to something that isn’t jobs or homes. But I think if politicians can fabricate the idea that this country is overrun with immigrants successfully, they will have no trouble convincing people of an extremely serious crisis that is actually real. In fact, Labour can hit the ground running: two-thirds of the UK public already want immediate action to tackle climate change, according to a poll released yesterday. And unlike the other issues Labour campaign about, climate change needs to be tackled now. We have all the time in the world to build a universal healthcare system (I do think we should do that now as well, by the way), but it’s crunch time for climate change. If we don’t start reducing emissions now, that fire-and-brimstone future I depicted above will be the one our sons and daughters will have to navigate. We don’t have time for a party that hates “green crap” to be in power for another four years, and the Labour Party can tackle climate change in a way that also promotes social justice and reduces the cost of living.

The day after that Evening Standard article was published, Ed Miliband delivered a much-lauded speech to the Green Alliance about climate change, thus proving what many of his colleagues already know: Miliband really knows stuff on climate, and he’s passionate about it. The Labour Party can be the party to tackle the climate crisis. And somebody has to be, because the alternative doesn’t bear thinking about.

Ellie Mae O’Hagan is the Media and Communications Officer at Class