The Local and Global By Andrew Simms

What should anchor a one nation political project? The same thing that must anchor any modern polity: a design for us all to thrive in the world without fatally compromising the biospheres life support systems. That sounds so grand as to be almost glib. But would it mean to consider a lesser strategy? On current trends, in terms of climate change alone we could be a single administration away from irreversible climatic upheaval becoming likely. So far, every strategy put by a mainstream party before the British public is a lesser strategy. In practise, the opposite means a shift of expectation, horizon and readiness for bold action for which there are few parallels. With the 70th anniversary of the Beveridge report not far behind us, its worth noting that only possibly the period before, during and immediately after the Second World War come close as precedent in terms of scale of economic reengineering, collective social action and leaps of political imagination. But how can we fashion the mechanisms and convincing invitation to an economy of rapid, low carbon transition in our very changed world? However hard to grasp, any plan not rooted in charting this course is ultimately a distraction, a procrastination from facing the inescapable which, the longer it is left, becomes first harder, and then impossible to achieve. Once accepted, however, it is a challenge both exhilarating and full of emergent possibilities. In the contributions to the One Nation debate, elements of a plan fit for the scale of the task can already be discerned, even if they are spread about. In 2008 I was part of a group including the Guardians Larry Elliott and Ann Pettifor that published a report called the Green New Deal. It envisaged a mutually reinforcing response to the economic impact of the financial, energy and climate crises. Jobs, warm homes, safer pensions, less pollution, better public transport and many other benefits would result from investing in a make-over of Britain. Far from the approach of throwing good money after bad banks, this would involve productive, noninflationary investment in Britains homes, businesses, and a green collar workforce for newly trained young people to enter, and more. It would have the small, added benefit of demonstrating global leadership on the defining issue of our time, namely as NASAs James Hansen puts it in nicely understated fashion, how to preserve a habitable climate for human civilisation.

Yet to rewire Britain for green energy, insulate all those homes, or re-invent clean, mass transport means making it happen, and popular at the local level. Anyone who has tried will know that delivering renewable energy without community involvement and backing is like getting tadpoles to swim against a flood tide. As Jessica Studdert argues, that requires meaningful decentralisation and local financial innovation allowing tailored local infrastracture investment. Which, supported with the appropriately trained new green collar workforce, stands to radically reduce youth unemployment lowering costs and raising income to the public purse. A subsequent report by the Green New Deal group, The Cuts Wont Work elaborates on what could be achieved. The London borough of Haringey adopted a target for cutting its carbon emissions 40 percent by 2020. To discover how to do this while meeting multiple other local needs it set up the Haringey Carbon Commission. The Commission found that simply meeting local demand to give buildings an energy efficiency retrofit, and to install alternative, low-carbon energy technologies would create or safeguard 3,000 local jobs. It would contribute to an initial 10 percent carbon reduction, and over the next two decades create up to 11,000 jobs, significant for a single borough. Over 40 recommendations were made covering everything from housing to transport, enterprise and a "green bank" to exchange time and skills. To capture and reinvest financial benefits into the community, a new network of co-operatives to deliver the retrofit programme was proposed. How does the rhetoric of One Nation speak to a progressive international outlook whilst also capturing very local realities? Here, Haringey also had something to offer. The borough is fantastically diverse meaning many local residents have friends and family living on the front line of global warming around the world in Africa, Asia and Latin America, introducing a motivation that links local economic opportunity to a deeper, stronger motivation of extended human responsibility. Studdert rightly calls for setting a presumption in favour of localism into law in which decision-making about public services is passed to the lowest level practicable, closer to those who use them. This is, in fact, precisely what the Sustainable Communities Act does, initiated by nef (the new economics foundation) and passed into law after a large grassroots campaign. The Act require councils to opt in to its provisions and is still waiting to be fully exploited. If it was, every town could become a Transition Town backed by communities, local businesses and local government. Meaningful devolution and economic decentralisation, discussed by Jim Gallagher, will succeed or fail according to whether there is a similarly localised financial and banking infrastructure to support it. Germany has one, and its financial sector, not to mention

economy, has fared better accordingly since the bank crisis began. Initiatives like the Good Banking Forum pushed this message consistently and Labour has positively embraced the need for a dynamic, mutually-based local banking system. If change, or rather rapid transition is needed, and on an environmental timescale not of our choosing, there is another way in which the civil service criticised by Jon Wilson presents an obstacle. Its raison detre is continuity and stability, not change. Yet, the irony the civil service now faces is that the very continuity it self-consciously guards becomes the source of much deeper upheaval. An equal obstacle, however, maybe the Labour movement's clinging to an old consumption-addicted economics. There is tension both upward and downward in the language of One Nation. People dont inhabit a nation, as such, they live in a locality. And, there is a real world of necessary global interdependence in which to meet the needs of the majority we can no longer ignore our own levels of consumption. It goes beyond abstract, contested ideas of nationhood, whose boundaries are nevertheless irrelevant to global warming or the spread of disease. How we might re-imagine life in Britain to reconcile these tensions is the task of a new economics that I've written the book Cancel the Apocalypse: the New Path to Prosperity to explore. In essence it asks three questions of all proposals: i) will they raise or lower our ecological burden, ii) increase or decrease inequality iii) and enhance or reduce our chances of wellbeing. None can be ducked, and if there is a wrong answer to the first in any plan, it will be little more than a hymn of self-defeat.

Andrew Simms is an author, campaigner and Fellow of nef (the new economics foundation). Political notes are published by One Nation Register. They are a monthly contribution to the debates shaping Labours political renewal. The articles published do not represent Labours policy positions. To contact political notes, email onenationregister@gmail.com