Dear Thangam,
My name is George Harold Millman. I am an actor, playwright and political activist, and I write about politics under the blog name The Rebel Without A Clause. I am writing to you to share my concerns with the current direction that the Labour Party appears to be headed, specifically with regards to the green agenda.
In December, I voted to re-elect you to Parliament. I had never voted Labour before, and as a matter of fact your opponent in the Green Party is a personal friend with whom I used to stand on picket lines and who I wanted to support. Nevertheless, I decided to vote Labour because I felt so strongly about Labour's manifesto. There were many parts of that manifesto that I thought were incredible, and I'm gutted that we didn't get the chance to implement it; but to me, the most amazing part of it was the Green New Deal, orchestrated by your colleague Rebecca Long-Bailey. I'm approaching my late twenties, and am incredibly anxious about the desirability of my future, the futures of any potential descendents and whether I should consider things like having children eventually in this increasingly polluted world we all share. In previous elections I had voted for the Green Party, however in 2019 I felt that Labour was actually overtaking the Green Party in terms of environmental strategy and electability. You can imagine how excited this made me! It really felt like something might be about to happen.
This is why I was so dismayed the other day, when I read an article in the Independent announcing that Keir Starmer's top team are in talks about dropping Labour's 2030 net zero carbon target. To me, this is surely not an option. Extreme weather patterns are happening all over the world - we have had an extreme heatwave in the last week, and on the other end of the scale, a friend in Leeds tells me that he has bizarrely experienced snow in June. We are getting close to this being irreversible now; some studies suggest it is already irreversible, and whilst I am trying to be optimistic we cannot afford to let go of any targets in relation to climate change.
One defence I read in a social media comment of the possibility of dropping this target is that meeting it by 2030 will be a lot more difficult within five years than in ten, so on the assumption that Labour cannot enter Government until 2024 this may be an unrealistic target. This is a point I accept, however I am not convinced by it. If we have five more years of devastating Tory rule, that makes it MORE important that we stick to our climate targets, not less. It is a fact that it will be harder under this Government to get on with keeping the Earth sustainable; I realise that. But 'more difficult' does not mean impossible. The Tories meekly adopt policies that they think are popular enough... they've even been talking about free broadband. Whilst it's undoubtedly annoying to see them passing off these things as their own, what's far more important is that the work gets done, and every day should be spent making sure it is done.
I am worried about the direction that the Labour Party is going in. I am worried that Keir's attempts to make the party more popular with the media will result in him making too many concessions to the right, because the media will never support someone who actually wants to end the capitalist system that is destroying our planet. The thing that is particularly causing this concern is what has happened with Rebecca. I'm not going to talk about whether the anti-Semitism allegation she faced last week was fair (although incidentally, the article she shared doesn't meet the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism). To me, what is of more importance here is that Keir moved her from her job in Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to Education. Why would you move the architect of the strongest part of Labour's 2019 manifesto from the position in which she had done that work? Keeping her in that position would have shown Keir's commitment to keeping the Green New Deal, and I don't understand what the logic of moving her was, even before that article.
I urge you to do everything you can as my representative to make sure that the Labour Party remains uncompromisingly in support of the Green New Deal, pressures the Conservative Government into taking all action necessarily to prevent things like expanding airports and the continued use of fossil fuels, and also makes this commitment clear in regards to whom it appoints to the Shadow Cabinet and how it discusses such things in the media.
This was my primary concern in the 2019 election. Whilst I support Labour, I am not ideologically committed to voting Labour every time, and I will be much more likely to do so again next time with continued strength on environmental matters.
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