How green are our parties?

The Green Party published its manifesto yesterday and is clearly taken great pains to emphasise its thinking in policy areas other than environmental issues, such as the economy, pensions, health and employment.

Nevertheless, the name ‘Green’ does tend to focus one’s attention on the environmental policies - so how do the parties compare here?

Clearly, the big issue is climate change and all set out ideas for how they would tackle this problem. The Conservatives want Britain to become the ‘world’s first low carbon economy’, while Labour seeks a ‘low carbon revolution’ and the Liberal Democrats to ‘lead the fight against climate change’. The Greens, however, suggest that ‘only the Green Party understands that this [climate change] is just one sign of the stress our economies and lifestyles put on the environment… it is a warning of the catastrophic social and environmental consequences of business as usual’.

As far as the three main parties are concerned, many of the ideas for reducing carbon emissions are very similar, although they have been given different names. The Liberal Democrats pledge a ‘ten-year programme of home insulation…paid for by the savings from lower energy bills’; the Conservatives a ‘Green Deal’, essentially a programme of home insulation paid for by the savings from lower energy bills; and Labour have an eye-catching ‘Pay As You Save’ scheme, which is … well, you can probably figure it out.

But there are some important differences, perhaps the most obvious being the parties' positions on nuclear power. Both Labour and the Conservatives are for a new generation of nuclear power stations in the UK. The Liberal Democrats oppose new nuclear on the basis that it is too expensive. And the Greens, unsurprisingly, resolutely oppose it both on economic and environmental grounds.

The most striking difference is really in the differing ideologies on how to achieve carbon reductions. While Labour believe active government intervention will be necessary to achieve a low-carbon transition and to generate new green jobs, the Conservatives' approach is much more laissez faire, eschewing ‘rules and regulations’ while embracing ‘incentives and market signals’. The Lib Dems have plans for tougher targets and green investment programmes and the Greens want even higher carbon targets along with direct government investment and even the re-nationalisation of gas and electricity providers.

Of course, these differences may be of little interest to an electorate focused on avoiding recession and dealing with the deficit, which suggests that the Greens’ decision not to lead on their environmental credentials but to focus on economic policies is a smart political manoeuvre.

Jenny Bird

Extreme domestic bias?

The announcement yesterday that Gordon Brown will miss Obama’s nuclear summit is yet another indication of how domestic is trumping foreign policy in this election.

A domestic bias isn’t really surprising of course. In the scrabble for votes politicians focus – naturally – on obvious vote winners; and the electorate focus – naturally – on what happens in their own backyards.

But this concentration on the domestic feels extreme compared even to past electoral battles. Whereas in the past Iraq, the Gleneagles commitments or the need for an ‘ethical foreign policy’ figured large, in 2010 only two ‘foreign’ policy issues are attracting even a marginal degree of attention – Trident and Afghanistan. And crucially, though each encompasses a set of complex considerations, they have been reduced in electoral sloganeering to a simple domestic core, ‘can we afford it?’ (Trident), and ‘how many Brits will die?’ (Afghanistan). (Indeed, the extent to which Afghanistan is now being seen solely through the lens of soldiers’ deaths – ignoring issues of British security, Afghan security, cost, the future of international cooperation, the ‘war on drugs’ and numerous other issues – has become so extreme that even the Army is complaining).

There are two worrying aspects to this trend. First, it seems likely that we are focusing so much on the domestic because things here in the UK seem so bad. When the economy has looked rosy, when we have felt confident about our place in the world – indeed, at times of ‘Cool Britainnia’ – it has been easy to consider events beyond our borders. But when things look rough, when we have to cut a deficit, find jobs for our young people and try to find a way to make our banks work for us, there is a tendency to hunker down. In other words, this isn’t just an electoral trend. Dealing with the deficit and reorganising our economy is a major task which seems likely to preoccupy the next government, whoever is in power.

Even if we have our fingers in our ears, the tree falling in Afghanistan, or the US, or Europe, or China, still makes a sound. In fact, as ippr’s National Security Commission made clear it’s a sound we can less and less afford to ignore. President Obama is calling a summit to try to limit the growing spread of nuclear weapons – a terrifying prospect for the UK. Why do we not see it as a priority? And this is just one of many challenges (including climate change, poverty, terrorism and banking regulation) in our interdependent world that require us all to act together. Let’s start by listening.

Laura Chappell