A NEW POLITICS: WHY WE NEED COLLABORATION BETWEEN THE GREENS AND LABOUR
Michael Jacobs
Published in Resurgence magazine November-December 2013
I want to discuss the relationship between green politics and the left. My thesis is that left and green politics belong together. Neither can do the job that each wishes to do on its own; and though the short term tactics and the political programmes of the parties associated with the two traditions will differ, we now need a synthesis of them. Moreover, and more interestingly, I believe this is now beginning to happen.
I am not saying that the green and left traditions are somehow the same. Green politics, what Andy Dobson has called ‘ecologism’, is a distinctive philosophical tradition in its own right. I think we can identify six ideas which constitute the core of green political philosophy, and these are patently not the same as those which define the left.
The first and most fundamental is a belief in the intrinsic value and primacy of nature, and the essential embeddedness of humanity within the natural world. Second is an expanded idea of what it means to live a flourishing human life: that the meeting of human needs and achievement of wellbeing cannot be reduced to material consumption. Third, green politics (drawing on a long anarchist tradition as well as the writings of Schumacher and others) emphasises the value of the small scale and the local, of self-sufficient, self-organising, cooperative forms of social organisation. Fourth is an emphasis on the value of ‘good work’ (Schumacher again): on the ability of work to fulfil human purposes, to make us better people and to generate beauty and craft. Fifth, green politics emphasises non-violence: not just a rejection of war as a means to achieve social goals but a fundamentally peaceful and tolerant stance towards others. And last, green politics is (eco-) feminist, not just in terms of equal rights but in the sense of wanting society to attach much stronger value to those aspects of human life – notably caring and nurturing – which women have traditionally performed.
Picking out these core philosophical values does not mean that greens do not believe other things: many of them for example would emphasise their commitment to social justice and to democratic principles. But these are not, I would argue, distinctively green: these values come from older left and liberal traditions. They show indeed that ecologism is already partly a synthesis with other political philosophies.
And what are the core values of the left? I think there are three which mark socialist politics out from other traditions. The first is equality as the basis of social justice. The fundamental belief of those on the left is that people have equal worth, and that human beings and societies flourish only when power, wealth and income are fairly shared and the gaps between the top and bottom of society are not too large. In practice, in the real world, this makes socialists stand up for those at the bottom, for the poor and the powerless.
Second, people on the left value collective action. When people come together in mutual support and solidarity with one another - whether through trade unions, voluntary organisations, co-operatives or the state (which is a form of collective action) – they can not only achieve social outcomes which individual action cannot, but they manifest a fundamental and valued aspect of human nature, social co-operation.
Third, socialists believe that capitalism, as a system of economic and social organisation, tends if left to itself to produce socially undesirable outcomes in a whole variety of ways, and therefore needs to be regulated and managed (in some form) to ensure that the economy serves the common good of society, not just the interests of those with economic power. Different leftist traditions have different views on how capitalism should be regulated: many of them in the past (and some still in the present) have argued that capitalism needs to be replaced by a different system of economic organisation altogether, though as we know few such alternatives have been successful in practice, and some have been monstrous.
This brief account should already show where there are convergences between green and left politics – and where, of course, there are major divergences.
Let’s start with the latter. It is absolutely undeniable that most of the left has not, in its history and in its practice, been green. The dominant left philosophies, both socialist and social democratic, have been productivist and modernist in form. They have celebrated the liberation from traditional forms of society – and traditional forms of poverty – which the industrial process, and the transformation of culture which accompanies it, have achieved. They have been deeply careless of the natural environment, equating progress with industrialisation, based on a rationalist and instrumental approach to our relationship to nature and often to one another. In their pursuit of greater material wellbeing for the poor, they have tended to ignore and under-value many of the non-material components of wellbeing. The left has largely identified with the capitalist notion that what makes us better off is consuming more.
Yet let’s acknowledge what this tradition achieved in the 150 years up to the end of the 20th century in the now developed world, and is still achieving in China: an unimaginable improvement in the lives of the poor and the working class, their liberation from the economic and cultural shackles which had formerly enslaved them, and a material quality of life which was previously available only to a tiny ruling elite.
At the same time, it left a natural environment desecrated almost beyond repair, and millions more people on the global peripheries of the economy systematically excluded from the wealth it created.
But the state socialist and Fabian social democratic traditions were never the only forms of leftism. From the mid-17th century, from the Diggers and the Levellers onwards, there was always present another kind of revolt against capitalism. This deplored its destruction of the things which markets could not value: the value residing in nature and created by the traditions and communities that were destroyed in the process of industrialisation. This was a left which looked forward to a Utopian society in which nature was respected and people lived together in self-sufficient and self-regulating, cooperatively-based communities: the socialism of Robert Owen, John Ruskin, William Morris and Kropotkin; and in our own time of Murray Bookchin and Colin Ward. It was what Paul Hirst called ‘associational socialism’, which emphasised that collective action – the coming together of people to achieve the common good – should not be equated to the capture of the state, but can also be achieved through the voluntary association of people acting together in communities, civic societies and co-operatives. These much gentler traditions on the left were largely buried in the 20th century under the power of the dominant forms of state-led socialism, but they have always been there. If you go to a local Labour Party meeting, you will always find at least one person who speaks this language.
And now a third movement is beginning to emerge on the left. It’s taken much too long, but, as the environmental crisis revealed by climate change has become more apparent and more pressing, it has gained a central place at the social democratic table. This movement seeks to use the state as an instrument for environmental protection: to regulate capitalism not just to achieve social justice, but in pursuit of environmental sustainability.
This is an important development, because it extends the social democratic tradition in a critical new direction. Social democracy sought to capture the state through electoral means. It then sought to use the powers of the state to regulate capitalist market forces, with the aim of producing a more equal distribution of income and wealth, limiting the exploitation of labour and consumers, and funding the welfare state. The Marxian way of thinking about this is that social democracy effectively saved capitalism from itself. Capitalism’s problem is that its internal contradictions end up undermining its own basis. The classic Marxian analysis was that capitalism immiserated the working class, which then meant it had neither the healthy and educated workers, nor the material consumers, it needed to sustain its own expansion. So the regulation of the labour market and the creation of the welfare state rescued capitalism from its own contradictions.
But capitalism not only depends on the reproduction of the workforce. It also rests on the biophysical throughput of natural resources and assimilation of wastes, and the earth’s associated ecological services. Capitalism’s expansionary dynamic is also undermining these. So the ‘green social democratic’ project, the new task of social democracy, is not just to regulate capitalism for the sake of people, but also to regulate it for the sake of nature.
In fact the emergence of this kind of ‘green social democracy’ is not the only new development on the left. Over the last few years a different colour has been added to the red flag. The ‘Blue Labour’ movement, led in this country by Maurice Glasman and identified in particular with Jon Cruddas, the Labour MP who chairs the party’s Policy Review, emphasises the values of community and tradition, and the relationships and common goods which emerge from them. Echoing the decentralist socialists of earlier eras, Blue Labour seeks to protect and nurture what Ed Miliband has called ‘our common life’, those goods which do not arise from market exchange but from the practices of communities living together. These are the things – traditional cultures, civic and voluntary associations, green spaces, local distinctiveness, the arts, relationships of care and community – which give people a sense of identity and stability in the world, and which capitalism and materialism tend to under-value and undermine. Wishing to protect these things is a form of conservatism, but it is no less socialist for that, for it values the things that make us properly human.
For ‘left conservatives’ of these kinds point out that to protect such values is to stand against one of the most evident features of capitalism: its rapacious, locust-like tendency to destroy everything in its path which cannot be reduced to the exchange values of the market.
[[Amazingly, it was a feature of capitalism which Marx predicted. Ultimately, he foresaw, capitalism would take almost everything and turn it into a commodity, destroying all traditional and non-market values, and creating a moment when “all that is solid melts into air.” Everything that stands in the way of this process will ultimately be destroyed by it: the values that reside in nature, and in our ordinary life, the cultures we’ve grown up with, the homes and communities we live in. And it’s this recognition that has re-emerged in recent years in a rather surprising place, the top of the Labour Party. For the left – or parts of it – has understood that the really dangerous radicals today are the neoliberals of the right, whose free market capitalism threatens everything we should most cherish; and in this respect, to be on the left is actually to be a conservative.]]
I don’t want to claim that these new green and blue movements on the left are now dominant in the Labour Party in the UK or anywhere else. But they have a grip in places that matter, and they have an intellectual and practical answer to some of the most vital problems the left now faces in reshaping its historic mission to regulate and manage capitalism – perhaps even fundamentally to redefine our economic system. And of course both bring the left much closer to green thought.
But if the left is turning greenwards, do greens need the left? I would argue that they do, for three reasons.
First, because we cannot protect the global environment without the state. It is not fashionable, particularly in green circles, to defend the state, but defend it we must, because only the state has the power to regulate private enterprise and control the dynamics of markets. Yes, there are various mechanisms by which voluntary associations can defend particular local environments. And there are individual actions we can all take to help. But most environmental damage is now caused by huge global corporations, through the ways in which they extract resources, produce and distribute goods and services and promote consumption. Only the state has the coercive power to ensure that corporate behaviour is constrained in ways which offer even a chance of staying within our planet’s natural boundaries. Only states can tax environmental bads and spend the proceeds on environmental goods that no individual can buy alone. Only the state can direct research and development into technologies – renewable energy, resource efficiency and carbon capture and storage – that will enable us to avoid catastrophic climate change.
I know many greens would prefer the world somehow to stop consuming so much, and hope that simpler, less materialistic lifestyles might reduce the damage being done to the environment. But time is too short for that. If we wait for a mass conversion to voluntary simplicity we will find ourselves engulfed by environmental disaster long before we will notice, at global scale, any impact at all. The world’s population is too big, its aspirations to material wellbeing too unstoppable, the corporations which generate employment and profit too entrenched. Only state-enforced regulation of these corporations and the market forces they unleash has any chance of limiting the damage in the short time we still have available. Of course controlling the state is not a panacea: states fail and power corrupts in myriad ways. But without the state we cannot succeed.
Second, greens need the left because both of them wish to redistribute income, wealth and power to those who have less of it, and it will much easier to do this together than separately. Capitalism, particularly in its current form, is a huge generator of inequalities. Again, only the state can ensure a more just outcome through its powers of regulation, taxation and welfare spending – and the protection it can afford to trade unions and community organisations to negotiate directly for better working and living conditions.
Third, greens need the left because only the left has a realistic chance of winning power and so being able to direct the state to adopt pro-environmental and pro-social justice policy. Of course green parties may in time win more votes than they do now, but even in their most successful countries, such as Germany, they remain very much a minority. And time is what we don’t have. Waiting for green parties to come to power is not a strategy for winning the battle against climate change or wider environmental degradation.
So a collaboration between those who have a greater chance of reaching power and those who wish to pursue that power for environmental and green ends seems to me to be absolutely critical if progress is to be made in the real world. [[During my time as an adviser in the last Labour Government we introduced the Climate Change Act (which requires greenhouse gas emissions to be cut by a third from 1990 levels by 2020 and at least 80 per cent by 2050), set the UK on course to generating over 30 per cent of its power from renewables by 2020, insulated 6 million homes, saw the number of jobs in green sectors grow to around a million, increased overseas aid to hit the 0.7 per cent of GDP by 2013, introduced marine protection zones, made the entire English coastline publicly accessible and reversed the decline in most farmland indicator species. For doing this the Green Party and most environmental organisations used to criticise us hugely for not doing more. Fair enough: that’s their job, and such criticism sometimes (not always) pushed us to go further. But we now know what a Conservative-led government looks like on the environment, as well as on social justice. So greens should not be in any doubt about which would be better. This matters, because we’re not just talking about philosophy here. We are talking about the real world in which we have a responsibility to act now if are to protect the environment we cherish.]]
And the Labour Party needs the greens. We need the environmental movement to provide an alternative to the cultural hegemony of capitalism and neoliberalism which the Labour Party cannot properly now offer, because it must ensure that it maintains its electoral prospects in the face of constant media hostility. And Labour needs the greens because the battle for ideas and ideology in any party is always a tug of war between competing forces, and Labour needs as many people pulling on the green end of the rope as it can find.
I am not claiming that a Labour victory at the next election would usher in a green utopia. But I do believe that it offers the best chance of a British government which will seek to develop a more sustainable and socially just economy and society – and to work for that globally as well as at home.
So, in conclusion, I think there is a very interesting synthesis of political philosophies beginning to emerge. It draws on the environmentalism of the greens, the social justice commitments of the left, and the attachments of the conservative tradition to commonly held values and longstanding communities. It knows that we don’t gain meaning or identity in the world as floating individuals engaged in exchange relationships in a market, but from our relationships: with nature, with one another, with our past and with future generations. It recognises that we need to protect the spaces where those values can be expressed and nurtured. That protection will come partly from individual motivation, partly from voluntary association, but also from the protections which the state can offer from the dynamics of a capitalist market which will always try to destroy them. It offers a new kind of politics for a troubled world.
This is an edited version of a talk given to Green House's 2012 conference on The Future of Green Politics. www.greenhousethinktank.org
Michael Jacobs is a Visiting Professor in the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the LSE and in the School of Public Policy at University College London, and a former Special Adviser at the Treasury and 10 Downing St.
Michael Jacobs
Published in Resurgence magazine November-December 2013
I want to discuss the relationship between green politics and the left. My thesis is that left and green politics belong together. Neither can do the job that each wishes to do on its own; and though the short term tactics and the political programmes of the parties associated with the two traditions will differ, we now need a synthesis of them. Moreover, and more interestingly, I believe this is now beginning to happen.
I am not saying that the green and left traditions are somehow the same. Green politics, what Andy Dobson has called ‘ecologism’, is a distinctive philosophical tradition in its own right. I think we can identify six ideas which constitute the core of green political philosophy, and these are patently not the same as those which define the left.
The first and most fundamental is a belief in the intrinsic value and primacy of nature, and the essential embeddedness of humanity within the natural world. Second is an expanded idea of what it means to live a flourishing human life: that the meeting of human needs and achievement of wellbeing cannot be reduced to material consumption. Third, green politics (drawing on a long anarchist tradition as well as the writings of Schumacher and others) emphasises the value of the small scale and the local, of self-sufficient, self-organising, cooperative forms of social organisation. Fourth is an emphasis on the value of ‘good work’ (Schumacher again): on the ability of work to fulfil human purposes, to make us better people and to generate beauty and craft. Fifth, green politics emphasises non-violence: not just a rejection of war as a means to achieve social goals but a fundamentally peaceful and tolerant stance towards others. And last, green politics is (eco-) feminist, not just in terms of equal rights but in the sense of wanting society to attach much stronger value to those aspects of human life – notably caring and nurturing – which women have traditionally performed.
Picking out these core philosophical values does not mean that greens do not believe other things: many of them for example would emphasise their commitment to social justice and to democratic principles. But these are not, I would argue, distinctively green: these values come from older left and liberal traditions. They show indeed that ecologism is already partly a synthesis with other political philosophies.
And what are the core values of the left? I think there are three which mark socialist politics out from other traditions. The first is equality as the basis of social justice. The fundamental belief of those on the left is that people have equal worth, and that human beings and societies flourish only when power, wealth and income are fairly shared and the gaps between the top and bottom of society are not too large. In practice, in the real world, this makes socialists stand up for those at the bottom, for the poor and the powerless.
Second, people on the left value collective action. When people come together in mutual support and solidarity with one another - whether through trade unions, voluntary organisations, co-operatives or the state (which is a form of collective action) – they can not only achieve social outcomes which individual action cannot, but they manifest a fundamental and valued aspect of human nature, social co-operation.
Third, socialists believe that capitalism, as a system of economic and social organisation, tends if left to itself to produce socially undesirable outcomes in a whole variety of ways, and therefore needs to be regulated and managed (in some form) to ensure that the economy serves the common good of society, not just the interests of those with economic power. Different leftist traditions have different views on how capitalism should be regulated: many of them in the past (and some still in the present) have argued that capitalism needs to be replaced by a different system of economic organisation altogether, though as we know few such alternatives have been successful in practice, and some have been monstrous.
This brief account should already show where there are convergences between green and left politics – and where, of course, there are major divergences.
Let’s start with the latter. It is absolutely undeniable that most of the left has not, in its history and in its practice, been green. The dominant left philosophies, both socialist and social democratic, have been productivist and modernist in form. They have celebrated the liberation from traditional forms of society – and traditional forms of poverty – which the industrial process, and the transformation of culture which accompanies it, have achieved. They have been deeply careless of the natural environment, equating progress with industrialisation, based on a rationalist and instrumental approach to our relationship to nature and often to one another. In their pursuit of greater material wellbeing for the poor, they have tended to ignore and under-value many of the non-material components of wellbeing. The left has largely identified with the capitalist notion that what makes us better off is consuming more.
Yet let’s acknowledge what this tradition achieved in the 150 years up to the end of the 20th century in the now developed world, and is still achieving in China: an unimaginable improvement in the lives of the poor and the working class, their liberation from the economic and cultural shackles which had formerly enslaved them, and a material quality of life which was previously available only to a tiny ruling elite.
At the same time, it left a natural environment desecrated almost beyond repair, and millions more people on the global peripheries of the economy systematically excluded from the wealth it created.
But the state socialist and Fabian social democratic traditions were never the only forms of leftism. From the mid-17th century, from the Diggers and the Levellers onwards, there was always present another kind of revolt against capitalism. This deplored its destruction of the things which markets could not value: the value residing in nature and created by the traditions and communities that were destroyed in the process of industrialisation. This was a left which looked forward to a Utopian society in which nature was respected and people lived together in self-sufficient and self-regulating, cooperatively-based communities: the socialism of Robert Owen, John Ruskin, William Morris and Kropotkin; and in our own time of Murray Bookchin and Colin Ward. It was what Paul Hirst called ‘associational socialism’, which emphasised that collective action – the coming together of people to achieve the common good – should not be equated to the capture of the state, but can also be achieved through the voluntary association of people acting together in communities, civic societies and co-operatives. These much gentler traditions on the left were largely buried in the 20th century under the power of the dominant forms of state-led socialism, but they have always been there. If you go to a local Labour Party meeting, you will always find at least one person who speaks this language.
And now a third movement is beginning to emerge on the left. It’s taken much too long, but, as the environmental crisis revealed by climate change has become more apparent and more pressing, it has gained a central place at the social democratic table. This movement seeks to use the state as an instrument for environmental protection: to regulate capitalism not just to achieve social justice, but in pursuit of environmental sustainability.
This is an important development, because it extends the social democratic tradition in a critical new direction. Social democracy sought to capture the state through electoral means. It then sought to use the powers of the state to regulate capitalist market forces, with the aim of producing a more equal distribution of income and wealth, limiting the exploitation of labour and consumers, and funding the welfare state. The Marxian way of thinking about this is that social democracy effectively saved capitalism from itself. Capitalism’s problem is that its internal contradictions end up undermining its own basis. The classic Marxian analysis was that capitalism immiserated the working class, which then meant it had neither the healthy and educated workers, nor the material consumers, it needed to sustain its own expansion. So the regulation of the labour market and the creation of the welfare state rescued capitalism from its own contradictions.
But capitalism not only depends on the reproduction of the workforce. It also rests on the biophysical throughput of natural resources and assimilation of wastes, and the earth’s associated ecological services. Capitalism’s expansionary dynamic is also undermining these. So the ‘green social democratic’ project, the new task of social democracy, is not just to regulate capitalism for the sake of people, but also to regulate it for the sake of nature.
In fact the emergence of this kind of ‘green social democracy’ is not the only new development on the left. Over the last few years a different colour has been added to the red flag. The ‘Blue Labour’ movement, led in this country by Maurice Glasman and identified in particular with Jon Cruddas, the Labour MP who chairs the party’s Policy Review, emphasises the values of community and tradition, and the relationships and common goods which emerge from them. Echoing the decentralist socialists of earlier eras, Blue Labour seeks to protect and nurture what Ed Miliband has called ‘our common life’, those goods which do not arise from market exchange but from the practices of communities living together. These are the things – traditional cultures, civic and voluntary associations, green spaces, local distinctiveness, the arts, relationships of care and community – which give people a sense of identity and stability in the world, and which capitalism and materialism tend to under-value and undermine. Wishing to protect these things is a form of conservatism, but it is no less socialist for that, for it values the things that make us properly human.
For ‘left conservatives’ of these kinds point out that to protect such values is to stand against one of the most evident features of capitalism: its rapacious, locust-like tendency to destroy everything in its path which cannot be reduced to the exchange values of the market.
[[Amazingly, it was a feature of capitalism which Marx predicted. Ultimately, he foresaw, capitalism would take almost everything and turn it into a commodity, destroying all traditional and non-market values, and creating a moment when “all that is solid melts into air.” Everything that stands in the way of this process will ultimately be destroyed by it: the values that reside in nature, and in our ordinary life, the cultures we’ve grown up with, the homes and communities we live in. And it’s this recognition that has re-emerged in recent years in a rather surprising place, the top of the Labour Party. For the left – or parts of it – has understood that the really dangerous radicals today are the neoliberals of the right, whose free market capitalism threatens everything we should most cherish; and in this respect, to be on the left is actually to be a conservative.]]
I don’t want to claim that these new green and blue movements on the left are now dominant in the Labour Party in the UK or anywhere else. But they have a grip in places that matter, and they have an intellectual and practical answer to some of the most vital problems the left now faces in reshaping its historic mission to regulate and manage capitalism – perhaps even fundamentally to redefine our economic system. And of course both bring the left much closer to green thought.
But if the left is turning greenwards, do greens need the left? I would argue that they do, for three reasons.
First, because we cannot protect the global environment without the state. It is not fashionable, particularly in green circles, to defend the state, but defend it we must, because only the state has the power to regulate private enterprise and control the dynamics of markets. Yes, there are various mechanisms by which voluntary associations can defend particular local environments. And there are individual actions we can all take to help. But most environmental damage is now caused by huge global corporations, through the ways in which they extract resources, produce and distribute goods and services and promote consumption. Only the state has the coercive power to ensure that corporate behaviour is constrained in ways which offer even a chance of staying within our planet’s natural boundaries. Only states can tax environmental bads and spend the proceeds on environmental goods that no individual can buy alone. Only the state can direct research and development into technologies – renewable energy, resource efficiency and carbon capture and storage – that will enable us to avoid catastrophic climate change.
I know many greens would prefer the world somehow to stop consuming so much, and hope that simpler, less materialistic lifestyles might reduce the damage being done to the environment. But time is too short for that. If we wait for a mass conversion to voluntary simplicity we will find ourselves engulfed by environmental disaster long before we will notice, at global scale, any impact at all. The world’s population is too big, its aspirations to material wellbeing too unstoppable, the corporations which generate employment and profit too entrenched. Only state-enforced regulation of these corporations and the market forces they unleash has any chance of limiting the damage in the short time we still have available. Of course controlling the state is not a panacea: states fail and power corrupts in myriad ways. But without the state we cannot succeed.
Second, greens need the left because both of them wish to redistribute income, wealth and power to those who have less of it, and it will much easier to do this together than separately. Capitalism, particularly in its current form, is a huge generator of inequalities. Again, only the state can ensure a more just outcome through its powers of regulation, taxation and welfare spending – and the protection it can afford to trade unions and community organisations to negotiate directly for better working and living conditions.
Third, greens need the left because only the left has a realistic chance of winning power and so being able to direct the state to adopt pro-environmental and pro-social justice policy. Of course green parties may in time win more votes than they do now, but even in their most successful countries, such as Germany, they remain very much a minority. And time is what we don’t have. Waiting for green parties to come to power is not a strategy for winning the battle against climate change or wider environmental degradation.
So a collaboration between those who have a greater chance of reaching power and those who wish to pursue that power for environmental and green ends seems to me to be absolutely critical if progress is to be made in the real world. [[During my time as an adviser in the last Labour Government we introduced the Climate Change Act (which requires greenhouse gas emissions to be cut by a third from 1990 levels by 2020 and at least 80 per cent by 2050), set the UK on course to generating over 30 per cent of its power from renewables by 2020, insulated 6 million homes, saw the number of jobs in green sectors grow to around a million, increased overseas aid to hit the 0.7 per cent of GDP by 2013, introduced marine protection zones, made the entire English coastline publicly accessible and reversed the decline in most farmland indicator species. For doing this the Green Party and most environmental organisations used to criticise us hugely for not doing more. Fair enough: that’s their job, and such criticism sometimes (not always) pushed us to go further. But we now know what a Conservative-led government looks like on the environment, as well as on social justice. So greens should not be in any doubt about which would be better. This matters, because we’re not just talking about philosophy here. We are talking about the real world in which we have a responsibility to act now if are to protect the environment we cherish.]]
And the Labour Party needs the greens. We need the environmental movement to provide an alternative to the cultural hegemony of capitalism and neoliberalism which the Labour Party cannot properly now offer, because it must ensure that it maintains its electoral prospects in the face of constant media hostility. And Labour needs the greens because the battle for ideas and ideology in any party is always a tug of war between competing forces, and Labour needs as many people pulling on the green end of the rope as it can find.
I am not claiming that a Labour victory at the next election would usher in a green utopia. But I do believe that it offers the best chance of a British government which will seek to develop a more sustainable and socially just economy and society – and to work for that globally as well as at home.
So, in conclusion, I think there is a very interesting synthesis of political philosophies beginning to emerge. It draws on the environmentalism of the greens, the social justice commitments of the left, and the attachments of the conservative tradition to commonly held values and longstanding communities. It knows that we don’t gain meaning or identity in the world as floating individuals engaged in exchange relationships in a market, but from our relationships: with nature, with one another, with our past and with future generations. It recognises that we need to protect the spaces where those values can be expressed and nurtured. That protection will come partly from individual motivation, partly from voluntary association, but also from the protections which the state can offer from the dynamics of a capitalist market which will always try to destroy them. It offers a new kind of politics for a troubled world.
This is an edited version of a talk given to Green House's 2012 conference on The Future of Green Politics. www.greenhousethinktank.org
Michael Jacobs is a Visiting Professor in the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the LSE and in the School of Public Policy at University College London, and a former Special Adviser at the Treasury and 10 Downing St.
