If Ed Miliband were to set out a radical programme for climate change that urged the EU to join forces with China to create a joint carbon market establishing an international price for carbon around the globe it could be a game changer. More than that: it could be a game changer that market makers in the US suddenly find threatening. America can resist any opposition to its policies. What it cannot take is being sidelined.
With less than one month to go until the return of the UNFCCC Climate negotiations, many are beginning to ask the question: Will the UN climate talks help save the planet or is it time to look elsewhere? Guppi Bola looks ahead to the Cancun conference.
On Thursday, the UN’s High Level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing is due to report back after eight months of deliberations on this thorniest of issues within the international negotiations.
Amazingly, the private pensions paid in that same year were very slightly less – at about £35 billion. In other words, not one penny of private pensions paid in that year was at cost to the private pension sector: all were paid at cost to the government.
Labour’s former Climate Change Secretary has been quiet on green issues since his election. Effective opposition means holding the Government to account.
David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ and Ed Miliband’s ‘New Generation’ visions for Britain are both based on a strong civil society and grassroots initiative. This Freedom Bill must not disappoint if people are to be enabled to get involved in helping to provide solutions to the local, national and global challenges these visions seek to address.
The TUC will meet the Low Pay Commission (LPC) on Monday to discuss next year’s National Minimum Wage (NMW) rise. We will be asking for an increase of 3.5 per cent on all the rates, which would increase the adult NMW next year by 21p to £6.14. The NMW needs to increase every year in order to ensure that the earnings of low paid workers do not fall behind.
Economics writer Paul Mason has pointed to a powerful implied critique of the Spending Review in an IMF document published this month. Speaking as guest lecturer at a seminar for the New Political Economy Network on Monday night, Mason called for a “forensic” analysis of what he described as “the large theoretical variability” of the outcome of George Osborne’s fiscal tightening proposals.
The Liberal Democrats have got themselves in quite a mess on higher education funding. Today, we have the bizarre spectacle of the Vince Cable pulling out (on “police advice”) of a planned speech at Oxford University because students planned to protest his Government’s plans to at least double tuition fees.
Labour MEPs voted against the overall call for a budget increase and against a host of outrageous calls to increase spending. But it gets far more interesting than that. For all their bluster Conservative MEPs failed to table a single amendment to the final budget package that would have resulted in a reduction in spending against 2010 levels. It was left to Labour members to propose cuts of more than €1bn to wasteful agricultural subsidies.
