The Root of Labour's Problems

There is a clear fundamental difference between the basis of most of Green Party's policies and those of labour and those of Labour, and that difference is crucial.

As many have already noticed, Labour's policies, especially since the installation of Burnham as PM, are piecemeal and do no more than tinker around the edges. Even a generous interpretation of them regards them as PR gimmicks intended to make Burnham appear to be doing something, to be different from Starmer, when the reality is, he is just another frontman for the same tried and failed rightwing Labour Together cabal. The problem for Labour is that - because it is increasingly run by a rightwing cabal that is in hock to all kinds of rightwing interests, from political Zionism to fossil fuel companies - this leaves it incapable of seeing the wood for the trees, much less doing anything worthwhile to solve the increasingly difficult root problems this country faces.

Since being in power, whether the front-puppet has been Starmer or Burnham, Labour has shown that it is incapable of making any of the serious structural or systemic changes the country needs. This resulted in Starmer focussing on "Delivery" as his main unifying message. "Delivering" a mishmash of superficial policies for a target voter they have constructed as bigoted, rightwing, patriarchal male, manual affluent working-class, white and northern. This means that effectively all these two transphobes have done is put in place piecemeal policies aimed at attracting the votes this particular - and largely fictitious - group. The coherent, systemic thinking is not there and has never been.

That is the difference between Labour and the Green Party. The Green Party's core policies are rooted in solving core, underlying systemic issues that have got the country - and indeed the world - into the current mess. This mess includes an economic system that is bleeding everyone into poverty, including forcing tenants to pay sky-high rents, while working everyone to the bone, giving huge sums of unearned money to the mega-rich, an overheating planet where the new normal is going to be summer heat in most of the UK of over 40C, and where water and food becomes scarce and a biased, far-right mainstream media that feeds hatred of minorities and the bigotry, hatred and violence we see regularly on our streets.

The solutions to these problems are systemic and cannot be solved by clamping down on vape shops of reducing electricity bills by 87p a week. We cannot solve this country's problems without changing the broken systems that produced them.

What is needed to solve these problems is systemic change. This means things like a clear policy to end fossil fuel production and reliance, a policy of taxing the obscenely rich and making work pay enough to end so many people living precariously. We need policies that reduce car use, especially cars that use internal combustion engines. We need to get people using trains instead of planes where possible, we need rent controls and quality controls on private rented accommodation coupled with the state building a much greater number of genuinely affordable houses. We need measures that increase employees and trade unions power to hold managements to account over pay and conditions, we need genuine Green policies that make a difference, from solar powered roofs for car parks to fully-electrified public transport.

We also urgently need systematic reform of mainstream media, including ownership rules, a statutory right to reply for minorities and marginalised groups, employee-owned cooperatives, a genuine media regulator with teeth and an end to the obscenely rich interfering with freedom of speech through SLAPPs and suchlike.

Nothing will change in the UK without systemic changes like these.

An example of the systemic change required, we need to make it possible, indeed easy and cost-effective for people to travel within Europe by train. In the last century I used to regularly travel across Europe using sleeper services. I was unhappy to find out when invited to speak at a conference near Malmö in southern Sweden, that the sleeper service I used to take to Copenhagen - now joined to Malmö by a bridge - was no longer running. If I wanted to get there by train I would have needed to take two £400, 19-hour journeys (there and back) during the daytime, instead of arriving fresh and ready to work at Copenhagen Central station at around 8.00 am on the sleeper.

Until and unless the European rail system is reconstructed to enable travel like this , through a combination of affordable sleeper services and high-speed trains like the Japanese shinkansen (which BTW gets you from Tokyo to Osaka in 2 hours 10 minutes; a distance equivalent to London-Edinburgh, which currently takes about two hours longer than this) people will still need to fly. Short-distance flights currently produce a disproportionate amount of climate-changing pollution, eliminating as many as possible of those while electrifying road, sea and rail transport, including all forms of public transportation and freight, will go a long way to reducing greenhouse gasses.

Individual action cannot, on its own, bring about these changes, that is one of the reasons why the Green Party tends to look for systemic and structural solutions while Labour, in hock to big money, and not wanting to rock the gravy-train of the rich and powerful, can only ever serve up piecemeal tinkering.