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Tag Archives: green road out of recession
The Independent View: Road to recovery
At a Reform event this week, Vince Cable gave his response to our new report on infrastructure. On the key points there is much we agree on. Infrastructure is critical for economic growth, and with a £175 billion government budget deficit, greater private finance is urgently needed to fund infrastructure investments. Government has a role to play in infrastructure, but bureaucratic, interventionist policies will be a barrier to productivity.
The report finds that the UK is in the infrastructure slow lane, ranked 34th in the world on the quality of its infrastructure in a recent competitiveness study. Road to recovery suggests that politicians of all parties have been blinded by the “green heat of technology”, moving towards a more interventionist approach in infrastructure markets.
Roger Williams MP on World Environment Day
This years World Environment Day should provide the perfect launching pad for the Liberal Democrat’s vision for a sustainable and environmentally sound future. For a party like the Liberal Democrats who profess that there is a green thread running through all of its policies. World Environment Day 2009 and its theme of Your Planet Needs You-UNite to Combat Climate Change should be used as a medium through which worldwide awareness of the environment should be stimulated and political attention should be re-focused on the issue of the environment.
Climate Change is the great challenge facing the whole of the humankind. People need leadership to guide them into a sustainable future. Human nature often means that people focus on the short term and disregard what sacrifices need to be made for the long term. For instance people who in principal are all for conservation and support the fight against Climate Change, when faced with every day decisions such as the use of plastic bags and recycling choose the easiest and most convenient option. We need to make and enforce those hard decisions for them.
The Liberal Democrat Party has been at the forefront of the fight against Climate Change with Nick Clegg proposing the Green road out of recession in December.
That put forward such initiatives as a five year programme to insulate every school and hospital, funding insulation and energy efficiency for a million homes, with a £1,000 subsidy for a million more and building 40,000 extra zero-carbon social houses
Jeremy Browne: VAT cut has helped the richest the most
The Lib Dem press release headline is stark: Wasteful VAT cut only benefiting the rich. (It’s also, whisper it gently, not 100% accurate: for ‘only’ read ‘mostly (ish)’).
Here’s what Lib Dem shadow chief financial secretary Jeremy Browne has to say about the party’s research showing that the VAT ‘savings work out at an average of over £9 a week for the richest households, while poorer households are saving less than £3, despite recent claims from Gordon Brown that families would save at least £5 a week’:
The Government’s defence of its wasteful VAT cut continues to unravel. Its benefits
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David Heath announces private member’s bill to end fuel poverty
As blogged here back in December, four Lib Dem MPs were drawn in the top 20 for the Private Members’ Bills ballot for the 2008-09 session. David Heath won second place, and has today announced that he will be bringing forward a bill on ending fuel poverty, the proposals for which formed part of the Lib Dems’ Green Road out of Recession package.
The Fuel Poverty Bill will bring in two measures:
• A major energy efficiency programme to bring existing homes up to the current energy efficiency levels enjoyed by modern homes; and
• Social tariffs to …
Opinion: A Tax-Cut-And-Spend Policy?
Stephen Tall recently asked us here on Lib Dem Voice to consider whether Nick Clegg’s call for “big, permanent and fair” tax cuts, combined with £12.5 billion of green public investment would “strike a chord, appear flawed, or be ignored”.
Well, people might just find a flaw in our argument that tax cutting should be top priority, but so should increased public spending. It looks two-faced. It suggests we can’t agree amongst ourselves. Facing enormous government debts, our policy seems to be to increase them in all directions – by taxing less, and by …



