The Oxford Momentum/Labour Left group discussed and supported Keir Starmer’s Green New Deal proposals that he introduced at last year’s Labour Party conference at their February meeting. The meeting adopted the resolution below and has appealed for Labour Party branches and GECs to support it.
It is important that these proposals get into Labour’s manifesto and are implemented in full by an incoming Labour government. RGL is therefore calling for the widest support for this resolution inside the Labour Party and amongst affiliated trade unions.
Motion on Labour’s Green New Deal
This branch/CLP recognises that:
- The climate emergency continues to escalate and planetary tipping points threaten
the Earth’s ecosystems with collapse.
- The Tories have turned back to fossil fuel. They have opened up a new licensing round to allow oil and gas companies to boost exploration and production in the North Sea and have approved a new coal mine in Cumbria.
We welcome Keir Starmer’s commitment to making renewable energy a core commitment for a future Labour government and his statement that a rapid transition to renewable energy is crucial in relation to both the climate crisis and the economic crisis.
We endorse his pledges to cut household energy bills substantially and create up to half a million new green jobs by:
- Investing £28bn a year (i.e. 280bn over 10 years) in renewable energy
- Decarbonising the national grid by 2030
- Doubling on-shore wind capacity
- Tripling solar power capacity
- Quadrupling off-shore wind capacity
- Spending £6bn year retro-fitting 19 million homes
- Establishing a National Wealth Fund to facilitate green investment.
We call for these commitments to be included in full in Labour’s manifesto for the next general election with provisions for:
- Ensuring a just transition for all workers, and
- Full public scrutiny at all levels.
We further urge that:
- nationalisation of the oil and gas companies, highly popular with the general public, is added to these proposals;
- nuclear energy is ruled out as very expensive, very dangerous and adding little to solving the climate crisis within the urgent timescale we face.
It’s welcome to see that this motion opposes nuclear power but I wonder why it is not supporting public ownership of the entire energy system, including reclaiming of existing oil and gas companies? Starmer’s GB energy is about adding another entrant to the market and perpetuating the market basis of energy, not providing energy as a public good, including mass public retrofit plans which trade unions support.
I would also be interested to see a link that breaks down what the £28 billion covers as I understood that to be targeted at reaching net zero rather than just renewable energy i.e includes carbon capture and storage, and hydrogen (presumably blue).
Whilst welcoming any commitment to address climate change, I would personally propose amendments to this motion on the basis of the above. Aside from Starmer proving untrustworthy on any pledge he gives, they are far short of the policy the left should be calling for. In my humble opinion.
Hi Sam
You don’t need to stick to the exact wording if you want to propose the motion somewhere. You can make your own requirements. The main point is to demand that Starmer implements in office the promises that he makes before he is in office ¬ particularly when he makes some substantial proposals in the right direction as he has in this case.
Of course his proposals fall short what is ultimately necessary, but £280 million over 10 years on green energy is big. The decarbonisation of the grid by 2030 is very ambitious and would require a major transformation in electricity generation. The pledge retrofit 19 million homes is also very ambitious and would probably cost a lot more that the £16 billion he has allocated to it. By the way reaching carbon reduction targets and changing over to renewable energy are one and the same thing.
In fact Starmer’s goes beyond Labour’s 2019 election which pledged £250 billion for renewables un-time-limited. It was also far less specific on the changeover to renewables, though it would have gone further on nationalisation.
There is a real danger that these proposals could fall by the wayside and we should do all we can to stop it happening. We should not accept that proposals that Starmer put to the last LP conference are now his personal property. They were a product of the climate movement inside and outside of the LP – and not least the campaign for a GND in advance of the 2019 election which formed the basis of Labour’s manifesto commitments.
Yes, things like carbon capture and storage will still be in there, and we will need to fight against them just as we will need to fight for the nationalisation of the whole energy sector.
Alan