Britain’s triple ‘A’ credit rating is now in doubt. This, if nothing else so far has, should raise concern in the mind of George Osborne that a new approach to Britain’s economy, and future, is needed.
The Green Liberal Democrats are wondering whether he can be persuaded to take a new approach that aims for a triple G rated economy? An economy triple rated as Great Going on Green Issues?
Fears around the severe weakness of Britain’s economy are due to the reality of the unsustainable nature of many of our business practices. An economy that is dependent on oil, a finite resource, cannot be a strong economy. We need to stop investing in the past and invest in the future. Time and again advice has been offered urging the need to look at increasing our production and manufacturing sectors and not just relying on a service sector.
Despite it not being healthy to measure a country’s progress just by its GDP, significant improvements in output could be made just by altering what we produce and how we produce it. The most sustainable products and services that we could provide would be those that are environmentally driven and ethically made.
Our Vice Chair, Simon Oliver, notes that Peak Oil has come – we are in a race to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, and need to recognise that the economy will not recover until we do.
An economic strategy that truly considers and plans for the future has to be environmentally minded.
We hope that other Liberal Democrats will support us in urging the government to take this opportunity to:
– Strengthen our economy, by developing and encouraging institutions that will ensure sustainability and security through enabling energy, water, and food to be available and accessible in the future.
– Reduce unemployment and pursue the delivery of Green Jobs, particularly by promoting Renewable Energy technologies and companies; to provide jobs and increase employability through improving the nation’s knowledge and skillsets.
– Be a world leader in the coming Energy Revolution. These are not just moral imperatives but also ways to financial well-being.
A GGG rating would boost our chances of retaining our AAA rating too!
* Mia Hadfield-Spoor is passionate about ethical, sustainable development. Having been on the Green Liberal Democrat Executive since 2009, she is now Vice-Chair Political.
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10 Comments
Of course, this article rather misses the point that the change in outlook for Britain’s AAA rating is due to external factors in Europe. Perhaps the Eurozone should call for more Green investment to create jobs and wealth in Greece!
Oh dear. The headline led me to believe this was a great parody of Osborne’s unaccountable Bank of England’s monetary policy but it seems Ms Hadfield-Spoor has obviously not heard of GGG films…
Strange, that when the worldwide financial crash came, it was Labour’s fault. When we are likely to lose our AAA rating it’s “due to external factors in Europe”…..
George Osborne’s plan A was” to ensure this didn’t happen”…His current response, “This shows we must press on with plan A”….
What ever happened to, “When you’re in a hole, stop digging”?
While green is good, this articel does seem to owe more to wishful thinking than to facts. The rating energies probably pay no attention whatsoever to environmental issues, rather they are looking at the present and near-future arrangements that enable a country to pay its debts.
It is, of course, astonishingly ridiculous that France has lost AAA and that the UK is on watch. There is absolutely no chance at all that either of these two governments would default on debts.
What this means is that the “crisis” is something that has been created by markets, not by governments or currencies or countries. Markets have seen an opportunity to make money and they do it by collaborating to agree a “rating” that hypes up percieved risk and so hypes up profits for lenders. The collaboration would likely be illegal in other circumstances, but the ratings process allows it to be perceived, incorrectly, as ethical..
So my conclusion is that the crisis is a big con, and not really anything to do with environmental issues! Which does not of course mean that those issues are not important or that green jobs cannot be part of a solution. They can.
So the Green LDs want us to ” Be a world leader in the coming energy revolution “ But HOW? (Apart from wishful thinking that is).
Can you name one substantial UK company that is a player in this field? In solar, in wind, in auto batteries what we have is overwhelmingly foreign technology (usually German or US or Chinese) merely installed here by companies that are sometimes UK owned.
I forgot to say that just today we have the news that several new nuclear reactors are to be built. You may or may not like that idea but probably it’s the only game in town to secure our energy supplies – and of course it’s French, with a tiny UK input which the govt is naturally talking up a storm.
So we will be creating lots of jobs in new energy but mainly on the other side of the Channel. And I would put money on the fact that many of the more skilled posts here will have to be filled from overseas.
“Fears around the severe weakness of Britain’s economy are due to the reality of the unsustainable nature of many of our business practices.”
Says who ?- sounds like utter nonsense to me.
Richard hits it on the head… economic policy is being effectively written by a cabal of unelected, unaccountable bodies whose methodologies are completely opaque (if not secret) and whose interests are… well, where? Suiting their biggest clients, no doubt; what has the recent “negative outlook” been other than a warning shot across Osborne’s bows not to deviate from austerity?
Back to the OP, it is critical that we look at the whole health of our society (even wider than green ratings) rather than individual economic indicators. Some might be surprised to find that there are actually worse things than debt.
“the crisis is a big con”
The fears of changes to credit rating have certainly been hyped up, but they are a sign that the world is starting to take seriously the risks of permanently cheap credit.
A sustainable economy is a liberal economy based on integrated open markets, free trade and innovative technology made available where it can make the biggest difference, not the exploitation of finite primary resources. So this is definitely something we should be pushing more forcefully.
Hi, thanks for all the comments…
Ok so the tounge-in-cheek approach to ‘ratings’ did not come accross too successfully. Perhaps humour and serious issues shouldn’t be attempted, particularly via the internet when tone is very difficult to communicate. It was an opportunity to use a light-hearted approach to seriously plug renewable energy and have a dig at George Osborne’s ‘strategy’.
Anyway we have several small, and growing, renewable energy companies in the UK, e.g. GoodEnergy. Also renewable energy is about democratising energy and not about having six energy companies monopolising our access to energy. I said ‘a’ world leader because countried like Germany and China are indeed futher ahead in renewable energy production but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t develop the capacity to produce renewable energy and we can’t afford to just sit back and allow ourselves to be reduced to a net importer of energy.
I agree that the ‘crisis’ seems to be curiously upheld and intensified, rather unfairly and unproductively, when it seems that insistance on lack of confidence is only likely to cause futher loss of confidence. Positivity and wishful thinking needs to be considered and acted on more perhaps….
I do also think, as Orangepan seems to be suggesting, that it is also a serious reflection of how capitalism can’t continue to be so exploitative of resources and people. Finance is indeed intricately related to environmental issues in many ways. It is directly linked by our need for the earth’s resources to create everything we have, so we need to use them sustainably and put back what we take out.