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Caroline Lucas MEP urges Greens to take forward 'positive inspiring vision of a future of hope'

21st Mar 2006

Low-carbon future doesn't have to mean a drop in well-being and happiness

Green Party Principal Speaker, Caroline Lucas MEP, addressed Green Party Conference on Friday 17th March. She condemned the Government's record on climate change, human rights and Iraq and urged Greens to take their positive vision to the British public.

Caroline Lucas MEP, Keynote Speech at Green Party Conference Scarborough, March 2006

"Welcome to Scarborough. It really is a pleasure to be here, amongst friends, with the fresh air and wonderful sea views providing a backdrop which couldn't be much more different from Brussels and Strasbourg.

This is one of my favourite places. But with climate change very much on my mind, however, I'm disconcerted to be reminded just how close to the coast we are here - I hope very much that this won't be one of our last conferences in this wonderful venue....

Friends, in the six months since we last met, much appears to have changed.

Not only do the environmental and social problems ahead loom larger than ever, the British political landscape has been razed by what sometimes seemed to be little more than one interminable leadership contest after another.

So now we have two new Party leaders.

David Cameron, who exists in a carefully manufactured policy vacuum which allows him to be all things to all people.

He tells the voters the environment is the top priority for him, then tells the CBI we need more road-building.

He is also supporting Labour's plans for the biggest programme of airport expansion for a generation, while his right-hand man George Osborne is busy working out how to relax the planning laws which protect green belt sites from rapacious development.

And just this week we've had the unedifying spectacle of Tories filibustring in order to try to wreck the Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Bill, by trying to ensure it doesn't complete Report Stage this week.

And when he gets caught out over his inconsistencies, Cameron just squirms and slides, he ducks and dives, and finally dodges the issue by saying we'll have to wait until his ongoing policy review is complete - in other words when he's decided whether the CBI or the environment lobby is more important to him. Well, I'm not holding my breath.

And Ming Campbell, under whose leadership the Lib-Dems too are reviewing all their policies - but unlike the Tories this hasn't created an unusual policy vacuum, for the truth is that the Lib-Dems have always felt free to pretty much ignore party policy and their leaders views, and act in extraordinarily contradictory ways whenever they're given a taste of executive power.

How else to explain those Lib-Dems in Scotland who are calling for a new nuclear power station, approving GM crops and slashing financial support for organic farmers?

It's just as well that Ming Campbell has promised to deliver a more "open-minded party", because only an extremely "open-minded party" could try to claim green credentials whilst its MPs, councillors and Members of the Scottish Parliament are propping up Labour administrations intent on wreaking environmental destruction.

So yes, we've had 6 months of promises and pledges, policy reviews and party make-overs from the Trinny and Susannah of British politics - but although the image may look more stylish, the reality is little changed.

In an unseemly scrabble for the safety of the centre-ground, both parties are utterly failing in their responsibility to provide effective opposition and genuine alternatives to a government which is becoming ever more illiberal and out of touch. Blair's reliance on Tory opposition support for his education bill this week is only the latest example of the increasing interchangeability of New Labour and New Conservative policies.

And that matters, because this is a :

 A government intent on taking away our hard won liberties and freedoms in the name of security.  A government exacerbating the collapse of Iraq into civil war in the name of regime change and democracy  A government intent on punishing Iran, pushing us to the edge of conflict once again, ostensibly in the name of a treaty - the nuclear non-proliferation treaty - of which we are ourselves in breach.  A government wedded to the apparent technical fix of nuclear power, leaving a costly and deadly legacy for generations to come.  A government which says climate change is the greatest threat we face and yet which has shown itself to be utterly incapable of exercising the political leadership necessary to save us from the worst of it.

These issues are linked by a drifting duplicity at the heart of government. Today's sleazy cash-for-ermine scandal is just the latest example of a yawning gulf between rhetoric and reality which has, time and again, seen New Labour say one thing and do just the opposite.

Take Human Rights

Despite never missing a chance to remind us of its philosophical commitment to protecting individual rights and the international rule of law, this government continues its shameful attack on civil liberties, here in the UK and around the world, systematically violating human rights supposedly enshrined in law.

 Tony Blair's continued failure to speak out against Guantanamo Bay and CIA 'kidnappings',  His draconian Terrorism Bill, with its attempt to enforce a 90-day detention without trial,  and the ban on the right to protest within half a mile of Westminster, under which Maya Evans was convicted simply for reading out the names of those who have lost their lives in Iraq.

This erosion of our hard-won human rights - to free speech, free assembly, freedom of religion and privacy, freedom not to be tortured or to be kidnapped and locked up without trial - this makes Britain, and the world, a grimmer, darker place in which to live.

It is evidence of a Government and Labour Party which have lost their way, that have forgotten that these are essential components not just of a healthy, modern democracy, but of justice itself.

And it hasn't gone unnoticed.

Amnesty International last month published 'Human rights: a broken promise', a hugely critical report into the state of human rights in the UK, calling for almost every piece of 'anti-terror' and security legislation introduced since New Labour came to power to be scrapped.

Even our democracy is under threat.

Not content with undermining international law by ignoring the UN in its rush to war in Iraq, the Government has published proposals to abandon the democratic safeguard of parliamentary scrutiny of national lawmaking and government.

The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill (more accurately dubbed the 'Abolition of Parliament bill'), will effectively allow government ministers to amend, repeal or replace any legislation without consulting Parliament, and even to create new offences with penalties of up to two years in prison, without any democratic scrutiny whatsoever.

This isn't the sort of society I want to live in - and I don't believe it is the kind of society the peoples of this country want to live in either.

We Greens believe in real, locally-delivered, democracy, together with respect for human rights, civil liberties and the international rule of law - that's what we're working for at every level to which we're elected.

Iraq

But the rule of international law seems to have very little place in this government's hugely discredited, and manifestly failing, foreign policy.

In Iraq, the brutal bloody death toll mounts - an average of 35 people killed a day in the last 2 weeks alone, and then on Wednesday news that, in just 24 hours, 85 bodies have been found of people executed in Baghdad.

Far from preventing a civil war, our presence is helping to provoke one.

So, as Greens, we demand again - End the Occupation. Bring the troops home now.

As we approach the 3rd anniversary of the start of that illegal and immoral war, we cannot even draw hope that the government might have learnt from its mistakes.

It still doesn't acknowledge that it made any.

Instead, it blunders on.

And from Iraq, attention turns now to Iran.

In a display of the most extraordinary arrogance and hypocrisy, our government is colluding in the condemnation of Iran for contravening the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, when we are ourselves in breach of it.

That treaty has 2 parts - yes, the first - that non-nuclear states would not attempt to gain nuclear weapons - but also, the much forgotten second part - that existing nuclear states will systematically get rid of theirs.

Yet far from ridding this country of nuclear weapons, our government is intent on upgrading them, at an obscene cost of anywhere up to £20 billion. We don't actually know the figure because despite promises of an open debate on the issue, the government has rejected requests under the Freedom of Information Act to disclose studies on the costs involved.

Indeed, all of the plans are shrouded in secrecy. In a show of startling arrogance, the Ministry of Defence is refusing to appear before a Defence Select Committee's Inquiry into the future of Britain's nuclear weapons, in complete contradiction to the Prime Minister's promise of the "fullest debate" on the issue.

And who, precisely, would we be firing Trident, or its replacement, at? We're not allowed to know that either, because - according to the government - it's apparently "not in the public interest" to publish its assessments about what threats such weapons could deter.

The absurdity and hypocrisy of the pro-nuclear position is clear. The government appears to believe that possession of nuclear weapons helps to secure Britain's position as one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council.

Well, if the ability to blow up the planet and its people is the key qualification for presiding over the world's peacemaking body, then we should be welcoming India, Pakistan, and Israel to the Security Council too, and dusting off the chairs ready for Iran and North Korea.

And so we cannot be surprised when this country is accused of double standards.

Not just in Iraq and Iran, but in Palestine too. Evidence again just this week that the government is in the pocket of the Israeli and the Americans, as we see it appearing to collude with the shameful Israeli attack on the prison in Jericho.

And so our message to government is very simple and very clear

 UK foreign policy must change - to place justice and human rights at its heart  The occupation of Iraq is part of the problem, not the solution, and the troops must come home  and recognise that you can't make atoms for peace without making them available for war - the two are inextricably linked

Nuclear

If Tony Blair goes down the road of nuclear energy here in Britain he can't possibly exercise any moral authority when arguing Iran or any other country shouldn't do exactly the same thing.

He has announced a so-called energy review, which is supposed to decide whether or not to do just that. And yet it's perfectly clear that Mr. Blair has already decided to build a new generation of nuclear power stations here regardless of the results.

And so our message for Tony Blair today is this:

Nuclear power is uneconomic, unsustainable, unsafe and unnecessary.

And as the government's own advisory body, the Commission on Sustainable Development has pointed out, even if you doubled the UK's existing nuclear capacity, it would only bring an 8% cut in CO2 emissions by 2035 - you could achieve almost the same saving just by changing regulations on emissions from appliances left on stand-by.

Even if there were no environmental problems associated with it, and even if we could afford the billions needed in perpetuity from public purse to make the economics stack up, a new programme of nuclear power stations would never come on stream much before 2020 - so hardly great help in closing the so-called "energy gap" over the next decade.

But even more importantly, if we can't solve the energy crisis without resorting to nuclear, then the whole world will follow our example. We can hardly deny them the same technology. And the risks of proliferation and terrorism would increase enormously.

And that's why we, the Green Party, have published our own alternative energy review, which makes it perfectly clear that we can meet our climate change commitments without nuclear through a programme of demand reduction, increased energy efficiency and support for renewable technologies.

And that's why we're promoting our green energy works campaign to persuade a million British households to sign up to green energy.

Climate Change

Friends, our agenda has never been as urgent as it is now

Not just because of the spectacular failure of British foreign policy in general, and its war on terror in particular

Not just because the political context in the UK is one of three centrist parties, all seeking to out-green each other in their rhetoric (for which we should take much credit), but all wedded to the notion of pursuing economic growth at all costs and committed to road-building, airport expansion and nuclear weapons.

But also because of the desperate state of our fragile environment and the urgency of tackling climate terror which threatens every aspect of life on earth as we know it.

In the last few months the pace of climate change - and the frequency of scientists' warnings that we are passing 'tipping points' after which the pace of change will accelerate - are increasing.

So where are the radical proposals to address these enormous challenges?

They're not to be found in any of the other parties.

Because this bland blancmange of soggy centre ground, and this suffocating degree of contrived consensus across the political spectrum is nowhere more dangerous than on the subject of climate change, where the 3 main parties continue to demonstrate the most indefensible political and intellectual cowardice.

We are sleepwalking towards catastrophe, with most people, and almost all politicians (present company excepted, of course) in a state of denial.

Yet if we are to have any chance of seriously addressing this threat, we need bold and ambitious political leadership now, using the Contraction and Convergence model ensuring that other nations across the world act too in line with their capacity and responsibility.

To cut our GHG emissions here in the West by between 80-90% by 2050 we'll need nothing short of a revolution in the way we run our economy, the way we measure human welfare, and the way we produce and consume.

Yet we are faced with politicians who pretend that we can essentially continue with business as usual, thanks to the wonders of technology.

Not one of them is prepared to admit that we can't address climate change using the same economic paradigm that got us into this problem in the first place.

Not one of them has the courage to say that an economic system that's based on ever increasing throughput of natural resources, is patently unsustainable.

Not one of them will acknowledge that there is no "techno-fix" solution to climate change.

Tony Blair claims that climate change is the greatest threat that we face, and yet under his premiership, greenhouse gas emissions have actually risen, not declined.

This is a Prime Minister who has embarked on a major road building programme instead of investing in public transport

A Prime Minister who backs a massive expansion of airport capacity in the UK - knowing full well that aviation is the fastest growing source of GHG.

Which means, friends, that the Green approach is more desperately needed than ever.

Because it is only the Greens who recognize that you can't have infinite growth in consumption and production on a finite planet.

Oil Peaks

And it's only the Greens that recognize that there is another compelling reason to act - the prospect of an end to cheap oil and the very real danger that governments will try to turn to the costly alternative of extracting oil from coal, exacerbating climate change at the time when we desperately need to be mitigating it.

Scientists and geologists are beginning to warn that "Peak Oil" - the point at which growing supplies of generally cheap oil turn into fast-depleting supplies of ever more expensive oil - is just a few short years away. Some argue that it is already with us - and the increasingly desperate revisions of oil companies' estimated reserves bears testimony to their concerns.

According to conventional wisdom, we have plenty of oil left. The current high oil prices will come to an end, and we will soon be able to look forward to a return to cheap oil, and continuing supplies of it well into the century. We have plenty of time to develop alternatives to oil. No need for concern. In reply to a parliamentary question which I put to the EU's energy commissioner last month, he dismissed peak oil as 'no more than a theory'. Well that's alright then.

Yet according to increasingly vocal whistleblowers, oil is depleting fast, and the age of cheap oil will soon be over.

The biggest oil fields in the world were discovered more than half a century ago.

The peak of oil discovery was as long ago as 1965.

The last year in which we discovered more oil than we consumed was a quarter of a century ago. Since then, we have been burning progressively more, and finding progressively less.

Our current economies can't function without cheap oil, and unless we develop energy alternatives very quickly, we face an unprecedented economic depression.

The latest wobble over disruptions to gas supplies from Russia, and news just this week that gas demand is outstripping supply - are merely the latest in a series of reminders of how dependent our economies are on growing supplies of oil and gas.

We have allowed oil to become vital to virtually everything we do. Transport, agriculture, healthcare, trade, the food supply chain, plastics - there is little we do or buy in our daily lives that is not based around oil.

And yet almost nothing is heard of this phenomenon of Peak Oil.

Our society is in a state of collective denial that has no precedent in history, in terms of its scale and implications.

But the social and economic disruptions of a post Peak Oil world will be precisely the conditions in which fascism and extremist politics breeds. It is no coincidence that the one group that has been showing a keen interest in Peak Oil for some time is the BNP.

Their message must not be the one that is heard when the crisis begins. Green policies have long been based on the presumption that we live in world of finite resources, and need to plan our activities accordingly - and we have the policies to deal with it.

Peak oil threatens enormous challenges. But it offers great opportunities too.

A transition to a world where cheap energy is no longer available is one in which the policies needed for energy, for transport, for health and education, for the economy and for society, are green policies.

They are precisely what we Greens have been arguing for years.

And it's only the Greens who have been consistently making the case that a low-carbon future doesn't have to mean a drop in well-being and happiness.

We are not, repeat not, talking about shivering around a candle in a cave or, to quote David Cameron, "living like monks".

On the contrary, we are talking about a future of greater employment, healthier food, and stronger communities.

We're talking about a future of warmer homes due to better insulation - not a future that's a continuation of the past, where last year there were some 35,000 "excess winter deaths" in the UK, most of them attributable to older people not being able to keep warm enough.

We're talking about a future where, instead of sitting for hours in traffic jams, we have clean, safe, reliable public transport.

A low carbon world would be a much safer world. Much of current foreign policy is about securing access to fossil fuel resources, often in very unstable parts of the world. If we were far more self-sufficient in energy resources, there would be far less chance of resource conflicts. It's a highly likely that we would never have had the Iraq war.

And perhaps more controversially, a low carbon world might just be one where we're happier too. Clearly in poorer developing countries, a certain quantity and quality of economic growth is urgently needed. But in the richer countries, once our basic needs are met, it seems that money doesn't make us happier. Recent research from the New Economics Foundation reveals that one of the reasons for this is that we're constantly moving the goal posts. We adapt very quickly to the material gains which come from increases in income, and we compare ourselves to others who have more, leaving us in a relentless state of constant dissatisfaction.

But we have to be more effective in painting this vision of a positive future. Too often, we've been so focused on our messages about the horrors of climate change, about what we are against - that we've perhaps not spent enough time setting out what we are for.

Martin Luther King isn't remembered for having a nightmare - although I'm sure he had many. He's remembered for his dream - a positive, inspiring, vision of what the future can be.

There are many exciting opportunities in this low-carbon future. With climate change, the challenge isn't that we don't know what to do. The challenge is to build sufficient political will to start making the changes happen. And to keep hold of that positive vision.

And it is the only the Green Party which has that political will and which has that vision.

Local elections

And in just a few short weeks voters up and down the land will have another opportunity to vote for this vision too, as local authorities across England hold elections for more than 4,000 councillors.

Local parties across the country have been campaigning hard for months, promoting the Green agenda of protecting local services, the local environment, and standing up for local communities on thousands of doorsteps - and the positive responses they've been getting point to a strong showing on May 4th.

It's become something of a cliché for us that voters like what they get after electing a Green Party councilor, and that they want more - but it's true: you've only got to look at the continued strength of Green councillors' groups in Oxford, Lancaster and Brighton and Hove. We have a duty to represent the millions who have supported us in elections over the years and deliver stronger Green groups - and break new ground by gaining that vital foothold of a first Green Party presence on a previously Green-free council.

And what do Green councilors deliver? Let me give you the example of Oxford, which I know best. Earlier this year, Oxford's 7-strong Green Group, who hold the balance of power on Oxford City Council, managed to secure one million pounds of new environmental and social initiatives during the budget negotiations, including a new energy efficiency and renewable energy scheme for Council tenants, and the establishment of a new Oxford renewable Energy Services company to provide residents and businesses with affordable, secure, green energy.

They're not alone. Here in Yorkshire, Green Councillor Andrew Cooper, Cabinet Member for Housing and Property on Kirklees Metropolitan Council, has had trailblazing success in securing a commitment from the Council to include a 30% renewable energy generation requirement in all new public buildings in Kirklees.

We expect to win and hold more than 100 seats on principal authorities - up from 70 now. The greatest breakthrough is expected in London where we hope to elect councilors in Camden, Hackney, Islington, Lambeth, Lewisham and Merton.

But electoral success requires hard work - and I urge every one of you to think about how you can help.

How you can take the Green vision, a positive inspiring vision of a future of hope, to doorsteps all around the country

And how you can demonstrate our political will as the only party which is prepared to put these policies at the heart of everything we do - on councils, in parliament, and in our communities."