Labour is "losing the eco-war," says Sustainable Development Commission

The government's own sustainability commission has once again vindicated the long-standing Green Party critique of the Labour government, said the Greens today.

According to media reports, a new document to be published this Wednesday (1 July) by the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) will argue that the government is "winning a few battles but losing the war" on matters like climate change.

Sir Jonathan Porritt, outgoing chair of the SDC, yesterday issued a powerful parting salvo against the government in the pages of the Independent on Sunday. Sir Jonathan said: "We have a terrible record of leading the world on rhetoric and then failing to deliver in our own backyard, and that's particularly true on climate change."

Responding today, Green Party leader Caroline Lucas MEP said the SDC's remarks were entirely justifiable:

"Tony Blair came to power promising the first ever green government, but it took him four years even to make a major speech about sustainability. By that time he was forging ahead with a £30 billion roadbuilding programme and encouraging airport expansions everywhere. One of his flagship green policies was a plan for 3,000 solar roofs within three years, at a time when Germany was aiming for a million and delivering thousands every month.

"Movement on the sustainability agenda has always been hindered by Labour's business-as-usual mentality. A lot of problems could be solved if only the government would accept responsibility for making sure things happen that urgently need to happen, instead of using market forces as an excuse for the failure of policy. For instance, we still produce little more offshore wind energy than Denmark, a country one-tenth of our size, and England's only wind turbine factory has just announced its closure. Labour is talking big and acting small, as always."

"Labour doesn't get it"

The Green Party leader, who hopes to win the Greens' first Westminster seat in the coming general election, said the Labour government had never understood the need to green the economy - nor the potential benefits of doing so. She said:

"Labour simply doesn't get it. Gordon Brown launched a so-called green stimulus package, but as the New Economics Foundation quickly pointed out it was in fact only 0.6 per cent actual new green investment. It was supposed to tackle the recession, but it included nuclear and so-called "clean coal," neither of which will deliver jobs in time to help deal with the recession. Green policies for renewables would start delivering large numbers of jobs immediately and in the long run would create far more jobs per megawatt than either nuclear or coal."

Seven years ago ago the Green Party published a critique of Labour's eco-policies titled Far More Spin Than Substance - and the Greens would say this still sums up Labour's eco-policy.

It's not just eco-policy but social and economic policy too...

The Greens believe Britain needs MPs at Westminster, partly to deliver the strong critique of the government's sustainability policy from within the House of Commons - but also because Labour no longer represents a progressive option. Dr Lucas said today:

"Labour has always lagged behind both the climate science and the Green Party's policies for tackling climate change. Significantly, the Green Party is also proposing far more job-creation through our million-jobs manifesto than Labour is through all of their proposals. While Labour has failed to get its head round sustainability, it has also lost its original principles about a fairer economy. Anything that used to be radical and progressive about the Labour Party can be found at the core of Green Party policy, while Labour is still way behind the Green Party on modernising the economy for a sustainable future."

She concluded: "The raison d'etre that Labour used to have now belongs to the Green Party."

Tony Juniper and Jonathan Porritt on voting Green

In the second of a series of videos, Tony Juniper and Sir Jonathan Porritt talk about the value of voting Green in the local and European elections.

They were attending the official launch of the Green party's election campaign in the East of England region. Our lead candidate in the East of England is Rupert Read, the party's spokesperson on public services, and a councillor in Norwich.

Tony Juniper, former director of Friends of the Earth, and now the Green Party's candidate for Cambridge in the next general election, said: "We cannot continue with the high-consumption, high-pollution, resource-wasting economy that Europe has gotten used to. We need Greens in the European Parliament to make that happen."

Sir Jonathan Porritt is founder of Forum for the Future, a former director of FoE, and chair of the Sustainable Development Commission. Sir Jonathan said: "The Green Party is the only party that has consistently told the truth about the state of the Earth, and our relationship with it, over the last 35 years. The party's ideas remain as relevant and as radical as all those years ago."

The local and European elections will be on the 4th of June, 2009.

Future videos will outline Green policies on animal protection, on crime, on fuel poverty and housing.

Politicians "in state of cognitive dissonance" over climate, says UK

Sir Jonathan Porritt, chairman of the UK's Sustainable Development Commission - the most influential Green in Britain - told journalists today that British politicians were "in a state of cognitive dissonance" over the ecological crisis.

Cognitive dissonance is the psychologists' term for an inability to make rational decisions despite being able to clearly see the evidence.

The Green Party, on the other hand, has been right all along, Sir Jonathan continued.

Speaking in Bristol at the launch of the South West Green Party campaign for the European Parliament elections, Sir Jonathan said that he fully supported the Green Party and had been a member continuously since its founding.

Sir Jonathan, who was director of Friends of the Earth before taking the top UK sustainable development job, told his audience about a recent analysis he had carried out on the 1979 election manifesto of the Ecology Party, the former name of the Green Party. It showed that 65% of the policies which were included have now been adopted by the three "mainstream" parties. "We were right all along," he said. But he warned that the big three parties still haven't got it right:

"Every single one of the issues that the Green Party has been campaigning on for the last 35 years is getting worse and worse, which means that people should no longer put off the day when they accept that the future is either Green or not at all."

Jonathan Porritt drew attention to the recent negotiations in Copenhagen and his amazement at the level of shock on the part of normally sober scientists when confronted with increasing evidence of runaway climate change.

He said he has been unable to make clear his political allegiances while working as a government adviser but this time around he is prepared to pin his Green colours to the mast. Joking that he only had four months left at the Sustainable Development Commission so he was unlikely to be sacked, he gave a ringing endorsement to the Green Euro-candidates.

A party spokesperson commented: "Now we need all those scientists who are fed up of governments dragging their heels over climate change to point out which party has the right policies. Alternatively, scientists can stand on the a-political sidelines and watch the holocaust that they've predicted actually happen."