The dominant media meme in the wake of the pre-budget report continues to be the alleged need for government cuts. This has now taken a shriller tone.
The dominant media meme in the wake of the pre-budget report continues to be the alleged need for government cuts. This has now taken a shriller tone, with allegations of a rift between Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling over how deeply to cut.
Brown is being cast as the bad guy in this; as resisting Darling’s ‘prudent’ desire to come up with real cuts in this pre-Budget Report, rather than delaying the ‘necessary’ cuts until 2011.
However, as Tony Juniper argues in today’s Independent, the hysteria about the ‘need’ for cuts is all wrong. The Green New Deal Group have just published their second report, to discouragingly little fanfare. This important document presents a powerful blueprint for how Britain could stabilise its economy, through a further and thoroughly-green expansion of ‘quantitative easing’.
This could enable us to avoid a repeat of the ‘Roosevelt recession’ – the kind of downturn through premature cuts that occurred in the States in 1936-8, and would occur here too, if the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives got their way and put into place the ‘savage’ cuts they are promising.
Cuts are not needed, certainly not at this time. The beauty of green Keynesian measures is that they pay for themselves, in that they guarantee future savings (lower fuel bills etc) that will repay any elements of the package which do not already pay for themselves through their positive effect on the economy.
The current attacks on Brown, then, are completely misplaced. The government should take more pride in not putting spending cuts into place. This should mark a clear dividing line between Left (Labour and Greens) and Right (Tories and Lib Dems). But at present it does not – because the government has not resisted openly the cuts meme – and because it has not bought into green Keynesianism in any meaningful way.
It is an incredible disappointment that the PBR did not embody substantive moves towards a Green New Deal (except for the boiler scrappage scheme, brilliantly and now-successfully promoted by Mick Williams.
At this time of all times, with Copenhagen in the balance, the need for leadership and for us to think of the future should have been manifested in Darling’s proposals. That, and not the welcome absence of public spending cuts, is the real scandal of yesterday.
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29 Responses to “The cuts won’t work – time for a Green New Deal”
Anon E Mouse
Rupert Read – Fair enough although I would say that realistically all parties know there need to be cuts, it’s just the timing that seems to differ. Even the size of the cuts it would appear are around the same, Labour 9.3% – Tories 10%.
Still think you’ve only done this article as a means of self promotion though.
Rupert Read
The mansion tax is good; agreed. But the fundamental positioning of the LibDems on this crucial issue of cuts is very telling – they buy into the cuts narrative completely. The LibDems have been captured by neoliberalism – that is the single biggest reason why I left them, in 1999. Look at all the people with power in the LibDems, and tell me honestly how many of them couldn’t be comfortable in the same Party as Cameron. Look at the Orange Book. Etc.
New Labour too has been captured by neoliberalism. But there are some key elements of the Labour Party that remain genuinely Left.
What I meant by my admittedly-blunt invocation of the Left vs. Right spectrum in the piece was this: Any Party that wants to stand against the would-be-economically-disastrous neo-Hooverian Rightism of Osborne’s Conservative Party needs to start leading on this, and opposing the media’s narrative on it (a narrative fully endorsed at present even by the BBC). We need politicians who are prepared to join Caroline Lucas in saying that we don’t need cuts, we need a Green New Deal. Clegg is so far standing with Cameron and Osborne on this. Brown is on the fence: he is at least against immediate cuts, and that is what is good about the PBR. If he came down clearly onto the left-green side of the equation, then the next General Election would be genuinely interesting countrywide. So far, he is quite failing to do so, as I made clear at the end of my piece. He will therefore lose badly: if the electorate are merely offered a choice between different versions of cuts-promises, they will choose the people who are offering the ‘toughest’ cuts. See my 1st post on LFF, here:
https://www.leftfootforward.org/2009/10/who-can-cut-the-hardest-the-narrative-firms-up/
The NARRATIVE has to be challenged. As things stand, it is only the Green Party that is stating clearly what Keynesians know: that the cuts narrative could yet land us in a Depression…
Finn
Well actually Rupert, the Green Party is part of the cutting narrative look at Ireland where the Green Party is in government. Will you be challenging that.
David
The Liberal Democrat’s policy paper ‘A Fresh Start for Britain’ with its commitment to “put people back to work and combat climate change by investing in green jobs” and “cut taxes for people on low and middle incomes, funded by closing loopholes for the rich and green taxes, ensuring that no one pays a penny on the first £10,000 of income they earn”; would seem to be at odds with your caricature.
That doesn’t mean the parties agree, the Lib Dems and the Canadian Green Party have almost identical policies to use green taxes, to cut tax for people on low incomes; the Green Party England/Wales (or at least Jenny Jones) opposes the policy.
nef
RT @leftfootfwd The cuts won’t work – time for a Green New Deal: http://is.gd/5jzYF