We won’t let Labour abandon the transformative vision of a Green New Deal

The Conservatives are rushing to declare the pandemic over, but the nightmare rages on, with more than 50,000 dead so far – Europe’s highest death toll. A record 20% contraction is expected in the second quarter of the year. As panicked Tories gamble with public health in a race to “get back to normal”, Labour must champion a recovery that protects workers and wellbeing for the long-term.

This crisis has laid bare the injustices at the heart of our society. While lockdown sheltered many, working-class people – particularly communities of colour – have been forced to put their health at risk. To take one example, in early April, with the pandemic reaching its height, the government resisted calls to shut construction sites. A month later, ONS data showed that the Covid-19 death rate in the sector was higher even than in healthcare, with hundreds of construction workers losing their lives.

With the enforced shuttering of large swathes of the economy, the state was forced to make interventions previously unimaginable for a Conservative government. The state today continues to pay the wages of millions of workers and has offered billions of pounds in support to businesses. For a brief but telling moment, the pandemic made public health more important than private profit. Ministers may attempt to back-pedal on that now, but the lie behind Tory austerity has been exposed. Our basic assumptions about what is politically possible have been swept away. Labour now has an opportunity to demand a whole new social settlement.

On June 5th, Shadow Business Secretary Ed Miliband launched a consultation on a potentially transformative approach to recovery. After Labour members and trade unions overwhelmingly backed a radical Green New Deal – a huge state-driven investment programme to build a fair and sustainable economy – at Labour conference last year, now is the moment to push for radical change. To abandon any of this programme wouldn’t just be to disregard party democracy, it would be sheer folly, as temperatures in the Arctic near 40°C.

There will be a green recovery package of one sort or another. Rishi Sunak has promised to make green jobs the centrepiece of the government’s recovery package, as he looks to poach the ‘green industrial revolution’ framing. The battle will be over its terms. How many jobs, and what kind? What will be the scale of the ambition? Labour must draw a clear distinction between Tory tinkering around the green edges and a fundamental transformation of our crisis-ridden economy. Only the latter will address raging inequality and climate breakdown.

The state’s increased power finds its mirror image in the crisis currently facing the Big Polluters. Aviation, for example, is in freefall, as industry giants have gone cap in hand to governments around the world. While the French government has used a bailout to force Air France to retire its short-haul domestic routes, the Conservatives have limply handed hundreds of millions of pounds of loans over to companies interested only in massive shareholder payouts and ruthless lay-offs of their workforce.

The Keir Starmer leadership has so far failed to grasp the opportunity on aviation, instead advocating a return to a climate-wrecking business-as-usual. But members are holding him to account. Six months ago, he said the Green New Deal should be “hardwired into every level of government”. Ed Miliband, meanwhile, has rightly called this our ‘1945 moment’. Trade unions have led from the front – Unite has laid out ambitious plans for green manufacturing.

Now Labour members are leading the charge, with more than 350 already sending in Labour for a Green New Deal’s model submission to the green recovery consultation being run by Ed Miliband and Labour’s national policy forum in just twelve hours. We’re making our voice heard for new universal rights to energy and water, publicly-run green transport for the many, and an end to fossil fuel finance. Labour can take hold of this political moment, or let the Tories do it.

Doing so would mean forging a new social settlement, and, post-Covid, embedding in our society the principle that public health always comes before private profit. The building blocks are already there for Labour: one million unionised public sector green jobs, Warm Homes for All, free broadband, cancellation of Global South debt and a real just transition for workers, paid for by the wealthy. This transformative vision of a Green New Deal galvanised the membership and polled well in the run-up to the 2019 election.

That election ended in catastrophe, and last week’s Labour Together report offers useful lessons for the party. But it’s important to remember a key learning offered by Ed Miliband: we must not abandon our radicalism. It’s needed now more than ever.