Politics
An economist and a telling indictment of the culture of greed
Published 06 November 2006
Such is the intellectual and political slightness of modern government that, for any bold action even to be contemplated, it requires the imprimatur of the outsider. This explains the excitement of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown at the publication of Sir Nicholas Stern's report on global warming. At last someone had provided this most timid of administrations with the ballast to reshape environmental policy. Stern's brief, to look at the economics of climate change, was designed for that purpose.
The plaudits for Stern's review are largely justified. It may, as Mark Lynas (page 14) and other critics suggest, have understated some of the data, but even so, Stern has put the debate on an entirely new plane. He concedes that global policy-making based on statistical extrapolation of events up to a century ahead is not an exact science. Such forecasting, he says, "requires caution and humility". But he sets out a compelling economic, and existential, argument about the dangers of inaction. In his starkest passage, Stern argues that failure to reduce emissions now will lead to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reaching double their pre-industrial level by 2035, which could lead to a greater than 50-50 chance that the temperature rise would exceed 5°C - equivalent to the change between the Ice Age and today.
Perhaps the most notable line in the report is the one that this Labour government has sought least to highlight. Climate change, Stern asserts, "is the greatest market failure the world has ever seen, and it interacts with other market imperfections". If ever a bureaucrat, with no known political predilections, offered the perfect indictment of a culture of economic greed and excess that politicians are frightened to confront, this was it.
The environmental failings of Messrs Blair and Brown are a matter of historical record. This report, coming in the same week as the parliamentary debate on Iraq, provides a telling contrast between inertia in one part of global policy and an excess of zeal in another - warfare. Characteristically, Blair absented himself from the debate on Iraq on 31 October, leaving it to his hapless Foreign Secretary to make the specious claim that any inquiry would jeopardise morale among British forces. It is those very soldiers and their officers who, even before the war in 2003, were most wary of this most hubristic of adventures.
An inquiry will take place, but only after Blair is gone. It will allow Brown to put some distance between himself and his predecessor's foreign policy, exposing the full extent of what Adam Price, the Plaid Cymru MP who proposed the Iraq motion, called Iraq's "monumental catastrophe".
Brown now has an opportunity to help avoid another catastrophe. To do so, this most reluctant of greens needs to perform a volte-face. Stern calls for international collaboration in four main areas - emissions trading, co-operation on technology, action to reduce deforestation and adapting to a lower-carbon-emitting way of life. The rich countries will have to take the lead and pay a larger share, but the major developing nations - China and India notably - will also have to embrace change. All of this will require adept diplomacy and collective action. The United States is the elephant in the room, but the recent record of certain states and the slight change of tone in Congress give modest cause for optimism. In essence, however, progress will remain unlikely until George W Bush leaves and the repudiation of his polity is complete.
Thankfully, all the main UK parties have achieved a general consensus on the environment. This gives the Chancellor political cover to take bold fiscal and other measures. He can change the way cars are taxed; he can help lobby for an EU-wide airline levy; he can freeze future road-building, providing more incentives to local authorities to expand public transport; he can introduce tougher regulations for new buildings, and he can abandon the ludicrous next generation of Trident missiles.
Taxation is a means not just of collecting revenue, but of engineering social and cultural change. It is to be hoped that Stern will play a part in changing the behaviour of citizens, and of our government, too.
Speak easily about gambling
How lucky we are to have a clear-thinking government which recognises that prissy prohibitions merely lead to "fraud and exploitation". Tessa Jowell, minister for casinos and online poker, reminded us of this recently when, at Ascot racecourse no less, she announced her ambitions for a new regulating regime for internet gambling.
A US-type ban would drive gambling underground and fuel crime, much as the US alcohol prohibition of 1919 encouraged speakeasies, Jowell told the representatives of the 30-odd countries that want to sign up to the British way of gambling. (Which, naturally, is the best way. Britain, around 12 per cent of the population of Europe, accounts for one-third of all European internet gambling; and British punters gamble away roughly £1bn a year online, about a fifth of the industry's estimated global takings.) Under Jowell's rules, we can rest easy that gamblers will be making their substantial losses on properly certified sites.
This has the hallmarks of a successful Labour Third Way approach, so why not extend it? Bear-baiting, now illegal, may in fact be flourishing underground. Let's legalise and regulate it. Bare-knuckle fighting? Likewise. And how about reinstating the rights of children to work down the mines (with proper controls, naturally). Child brothels, opium dens . . .
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