Dave Murray, Eastern region Socialist Party secretary
March’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report made for grim reading. “Finance flows fall short of the levels needed to meet climate goals.”
So bond traders and global investors cheered to learn that Labour’s shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, decided that it is now Labour policy to ignore these warnings. Reeves has abandoned a 2021 pledge to invest £28 billion per year in green projects from year one of a Labour government.
It was already a retreat from Jeremy Corbyn’s 2019 manifesto. That pledged a £250 billion green transformation fund. It also included a commitment to a publicly owned national grid, and for at least the supply arms of the big six energy companies to be brought into public ownership.
Warnings
Incredibly, Reeves describes the decision as a refusal to be reckless. This in the teeth of warnings from the climate report that failure to take timely action will result in “compound and cascading risks” of “irreversible and abrupt changes” to the systems that sustain life for billions of humans. In the UK alone, the daily death toll due to the July 2022 heatwave was 253 among over-65s.
The Labour Party has bowed its knee to the vulture capitalists of the global financial sector, who hold 30% of UK government debt.
Mike Riddell, global bond fund manager of Allianz Global Investors, said: “Any additional unexpected borrowing risks another gilt meltdown”. This is a mealy-mouthed way of saying that, if a UK government attempts to use its position as an issuer of debt and currency to protect people from climate change, the market makers and financial predators will unleash their weapons of mass destruction and bring it to heel.
As Liz Truss last year, John Major in 1992 and Jim Callaghan in 1976 found out, these financial terrorists are quite prepared to execute their hostages. Who are their hostages? We are.
The £28 billion of green investments would not be enough. According to the Committee on Climate Change, up to 2% of UK GDP would be needed to achieve net zero by 2050 – over £60 billion.
Nationalise
If the working class was in charge of the financial system – through nationalisation of the banks and the institution of capital controls – all this would be possible.
Global climate catastrophe means millions of deaths through famine, plagues and war, which would come in its train. The climate report says massive gains in quality of life are available as part of an equitable programme of adaptation and mitigation of climate change.
“There is sufficient global capital to close the global investment gaps,” it says, “but there are barriers to redirect capital to climate actions”. The UK’s Labour Party is clearly one of them.
