Budget Resolutions
Debate between Barry Gardiner and Tom Collins(1 week, 5 days ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Barry Gardiner
I will not.
Parliament is supposed to be a gathering of the leaders of our community: rational and intelligent human beings capable of horizon scanning and guiding our country to a safe and sustainable future. Instead, it acts like the frog in the pan of gradually boiling water, delaying its escape until too late.
The Budget should have been bold. It should have put our country on a wartime footing with a national programme of retrofit, no new build that is not net zero in its embodied and operational carbon, a huge roll-out of public transport and a major programme of electrification. We have a huge majority, yet we act as though we are afraid of the power that we spent 14 years seeking.
Today, the green economy is growing three times faster than the rest of the UK economy. If growth truly is our ambition, it is in that clean, affordable and secure future that we should be investing. People often talk of a just transition. I prefer to talk of a bloody marvellous one. What’s not to like about warm homes with affordable energy; comfortable, efficient, speedy and reliable public transport; the creation of thousands of new jobs; decent air quality; a secure food system with reliable supply chains; and a stable geopolitical world? We live in an age of public sufficiency and private luxury, as Professor Kevin Anderson said last week at the national emergency briefing. A Budget that was adequate to the challenge we face would have turned that on its head, creating a society where every private home had what was sufficient and every public domain was one of luxury. That would be the just and equal society I came into the Labour party to create.