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Election Campaign

New Ground 69
Autumn 2005

More Snow At Christmas

A view from the General Election campaign

The General Election seems an age away now. In fact Christmas is nearer to us now than the election - time flies

If like me you are old enough to remember some of the winters of the 1970's and 1980's you would remember the magic of watching snow fall, of snowball fights with your friends and of waking to a pristine white landscape. If older you may remember the winters of 1964 or 1947 and the massive snowfalls experienced across the UK. My parents remember drifts of 15 - 20 ft in South Wales, and yet today we'd be luck to see a snow flake at Christmas.

Climate change is and will continue to have a multitude of affects on our way of life and upon the natural world around us - spring is earlier, summer (when it happens!) is shorter, and of course there's no snow at Christmas.

As a Labour PPC in a Tory held seat "More snow at Christmas" seemed an excellent pledge to make to my constituients - an opportunity to highlight the negative consequences of climate change in an accessible way.

Of the voters, a significant chunk did feel the environment and climate change to be important issues on the door step and the street stall. This was particularly true of younger voters. More importantly, as Peter Kellner illustrates in Renewal (vol13 n02/3), the environment is a more important issue to those who chose to vote elsewhere (more important than family and childcare). In addition a significant part of lost Labour voters went Lib Dem, driven, in part, by their views on our ability (or otherwise) to deliver on the environment compared to the Lib Dems.

More Snow at Christmas, my missing pledge is a unique way of artuculating Labour's comtinuing work on climate change and improving our environment - as the party seeks the outstanding prospect of a fourth consecutive term in office, to change a generation, we must demonstrably renew our public commitment to the environment.

In doing so we must address social justice here and abroad and recognise the route to a sustainable low carbon economy. For the former we will need to further investigate both trading schemes and entitlements; For example, if we know people can only fly some of the time to some locations (as opposed to all the time to any where) then how do we ensure flying and the benefits it can bring (enlightenment, mobility etc.) are fairly distributed and not just allocated on the basis of wealth?

In business terms what are the right government interventions in the private sector to help business move to more sustainable business models and practice. Interventions already go some of the way to model better business practice regarding waste and energy. Might we ant to consider how best to help manufactuering deploy lean production methods to reduce their watse and ensure only what's required is in fact made. Might we go further and consider how to incentivise investment decisions towards more sustainable processes and businesses and away from processes and even industries themsleves that are unsustainable, perhaps best done at the top of the business cycle when new jobs are more readily found?

There is a significant group of voters who value the environment and vote accordingly. We have a good record over our years in office, the trouble is we need a better one - to persuade these voters, the younger voter and to meet the growing challenges we face, for time is flying, and time is running out.