Bottled Budget

The Green Party's Caroline Lucas discusses how Alistair Darling bottled the Budget and presented one

By Caroline Lucas Published 13 March 2008

After weeks of spin leading us to believe that we were going to see the most environmentally conscious budget ever, Gordon Brown’s government finally bottled it and gave us more of the same old cautious and uninspired economic outlook.

Instead of seizing the opportunity to reshape our economy to deal with the serious threat of climate change, Alistair Darling used his much-awaited first Budget to set out a weak and flimsy agenda which brought new definition to the word ‘greenwash.'

It tells you all you need to know about the government’s attitude to the environment that Darling chose the section on climate change to reaffirm his commitment to expanding both Heathrow and Stansted airports. He claims he wants tougher carbon reduction targets, but if air travel expands in the way he wants, the only way to meet the cuts we need would be to sacrifice every other part of our economy.

Under pressure from roads lobbyists, Darling backed down on the already timid 2p rise in fuel duty, putting it back until autumn apparently due to high oil prices. If he really thinks oil will be cheap by October, his basic understanding of economics is suspect at best. Fossil fuel costs will remain high as long as demand remains high and conventional oil resources dwindle, and cowardly decisions like this will only make the problem worse, with solutions ever further from our grasp.

The £20 increase in child benefit is of course welcome, but it falls well short of what is required to meet the government’s laudable targets for cutting child poverty. The billions it would take to halve child poverty by 2010 are instead being spent on our illegal and immoral military pursuits – occupying Iraq and Afghanistan is set to cost £3.3bn in 2008 alone.

On plastic bags, the government has at least shown that it is listening to the public by acknowledging that action needs to be taken - and yet, even on this minor issue, the Budget has ultimately failed to deliver. Darling could have seized an ideal opportunity to introduce a green tax, or to look at the feasibility of phasing the bags out all together. Instead, he weakened the green line by wagging a feeble finger at retailers warning he would legislate next year to impose a charge on disposable plastic bags if they failed to take action to reduce them. So, rather than having the courage to enforce a government measure, like a mandatory tax, we now have to wait for individual retailers to take action.

To make matters worse, while such minor initiatives do represent a step in the right direction, they are a drop in the ocean when you consider the scale of the climate change challenge. By focusing the public's awareness on plastic bags, the government distracts attention away from its plans for a massive expansion of aviation and a new generation of coal-fired power stations - plans which amount to nothing less than climate vandalism.

Green taxation could be an effective method of charging more for carbon-intensive activities and channeling the money into new efficiency measures and the renewables industry. But such green taxes must have the support of the people. Darling has run scared, sticking close to the old economic mantra that it is economically and politically unsound to make explicit links between money raised by a particular tax and spending the revenue on the very issue that the tax was designed to address.

So, above all, this Budget was a criminally wasted opportunity to set the country on the path towards a more sustainable future. Where was the windfall tax on the huge profits of the large energy companies, for example, who look set to receive £9bn over the next four years in free allocation of emissions trading permits?

What we need is a real commitment to spending on the things that matter, we need to insist that employers pay a real living wage, and we need to end the assault course of benefit traps and welfare blackmail that the government has set up on the border between benefits and work. Most importantly, we need to see the Chancellor taking a lead on climate change and showing the British people that the government is serious about rising to the challenges ahead.

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View the discussion thread.

6 comments

Sun, 2008-03-16 15:22 — Redgreen

New Labour's current policies are on course to wreckeing the planet and abusing people's human rights. Caroline Lucas is a fine woman to say no to war, environmental degradation and human rights abuses, but she also has well thought out alternative ideas aswell

Mon, 2008-03-17 13:19 — virtuoso

@JasperRichardson
Please tell us what these "well thought out alternative ideas" of Caroline Lucas might be.
Please do so without making assumptions about unproven technological fixes or "solutions" that you cannot cost-justify. Also, in the field of foreign affairs, please do so without assuming the enemies of those that you hate are your friends and can be trusted not to commit genocides. Also, can you make your case without making heroic assumptions about the willingness of other crucial parties - such as the Russian and Chinese governments - to agree at all quicky to what you might regard as being in their own long term interests - both as regards climate change and human rights abuses.

Mon, 2008-03-17 23:02 — sennewisaexus888

It's a shame that Virtuoso has taken against Dr Lucas quite so vituperatively. Dr Lucas has not used her article as an excuse to debate foreign policy.

We cannot allow the whole of South East England to become one big airport runway. By the time it is all built, the double whammy of dwindling oil stocks and increasing demand will make kerosene so expensive nobody will be able to afford to fly anywhere.

If China aspires to a Western standard of living in terms of car ownership per 1,000 population, one car will go on the road for every car now on the road - that is double the current world total of cars. What madness is this? Why is it that France has more cars per head of population than the UK but uses them less on long journeys inside the country? Do they have a TGV by any chance?

Not everywhere has the public transport to dispense with cars as an essential tool. In addition to taxing the greater excesses of Land Rover shopping trolleys, we should take steps to remove abusers from our roads. We should triple the standard driving bans for road traffic offences, triple all the fines and impose lifetime licence-shredding on anyone who kills by careless or reckless driving along with the prison sentence. We should make it clear that the roads are full and we need to clear them of unfit persons.

Sadly the national logistics infrastructure means that over-taxing DERV is likely to result in no Cornflakes in Sainsbury's. The oil producers have OPEC and we need OPIC, (no, not Lembit the cheeky boy, the Organisation of Petroleum Importing Countries). For their part, they fix production to maximise their revenue. For our part we should refuse to buy it unless they invest in our Sukkuk to finance our public transport and move freight from our roads.

Tue, 2008-03-18 01:12 — virtuoso

@ Roland Baker.
It’s true that I do find the person you refer to as “Dr. Lucas” extremely aggravating and provocative. For one thing, it is most pretentious of her to style herself as a “doctor” when her doctorate was for research into renaissance fiction at Exeter University’s department of Womens’ Studies. Furthermore, by styling herself as "doctor", some people might be misled into thinking that she has some kind of university science background to her assumed understanding of climate change issues.

If I must address this article by Lucas alone, I would still say that it is fairly typical example of her childish use of hyperbole to gain attention.

She accuses the Chancellor of “bottling .. the opportunity to reshape our economy to deal with the serious threat of climate change”. This is pure agitprop. It isn’t the job of a "budget" to address this. There are other arms of government and other times and places for addressing the “serious threat of climate change".

She says that the Chancellor “backed down on the already timid 2p rise in fuel duty ..,under pressure from roads lobbyists”. But in this case the “road lobbyists" comprises almost the whole UK public.

She slips in her barmy foreign policy agenda by saying “The billions it would take to halve child poverty by 2010 instead are being spent on our illegal and immoral military pursuits – occupying Iraq and Afghanistan". I don’t think that removing Saddam Hussein and his sadistic sons and heirs can be characterised as wholly immoral - certainly not in intent.

She say: “we need to insist that employers pay a real living wage” – as if the minimum wage legislation introduced by Tony Blair (who she want in prison for “War Crimes”) does not pretty much do that already.

As for your own points, Roland, I’ve yet to find anyone, of any political persuasion, in favour of Manmade Global Warming. Your reference to the nightmare consequences of the Chinese aiming for Western levels of car ownership is right on the point. There lies the true nature of the problem.

The hyperbole from “Dr. Lucas” doesn’t come close to addressing this degree of World crisis. Fiddling about with UK taxes – which is all the budget speech can ever be about – was never going to be about this at all.

Fri, 2008-03-14 11:06 — Derek Bennett

Of course Gordon Brown is not green - we are for putting up with this nonsense! Green issues are just another way of plundering the hard pressed taxpayers pockets and state manipulation, parts of the world are actually getting colder and climate figures are manipulated to suit the greenies.

Ironically, the one tax Gordon Brown wants to cut is the V.A.T. on energy saving goods and light bulbs - but guess what - he has had to go cap in hand to ask our real masters in the EU if he can be allowed to do this. Britain ceased to be a democracy ages ago.

Fri, 2008-03-14 13:38 — virtuoso

Caroline Lucas is just the Queen of NIMBY-land. She just says "No" - to coal or oil fired power stations, "No" to Nuclear power stations, "No" to new airport runways and air travel in general (except for the elite such as herself). She also says "No" to Britain's foreign policy because it is not ethical enough for her even though, in a very tough World, it is more ethical than almost all others except for maybe Sweden. She says "No" to scientifically engineered crops that might help avert the looming World food crisis that threatens starvation for billions of people.

However Caroline Lucas is able to turn a blind eye to her friends in Hamas and Hezbollah as regards their evil doctrines towards homosexuals, women, trade unions, and (oh I nearly forgot) people of Hebrew descent. This coming weekend she's off to "Stop the War". The "war" was obviously a disaster but so was Saddam Hussain. And whatever is going on now in Iraq is not really a War, it's what you get when a State has collapsed. So what is the purpose of demonstrating to "Stop the War".

No doubt she wants more wind and wave power. So do we all. But so far, the technolgy has not proved up to the job on a large enough scale basis. And other NIMBYs are intent on stopping even those projects that are economically viable.