Improving living standards and living sustainably – a progamme for radical action on the climate and living standards

Campaigning around the environmental crisis and raising policies around that in the manifesto are an essential part of building the Your Party project and a key part of making this organisation different from those parties which have alienated so many.

This is not only about the policies that Your Party adopts and puts in its manifesto, but also what it campaigns around day in and day out in communities and with trade unions. A party that only focuses on elections will not be able to change the relationship of forces that is so desperately needed. A party that doesn’t put forward and fight for a vision of a good life for all will not hold engagement.

The contribution formulated below adopts a transitional approach.  Some of the individual demands may seem quite immediate while others are more challenging – but we should be raising them as a package at least in relation to particular themes.  We think this approach is better than either expecting everyone we work with to agree with all our ideas which blocks uniting with other people or only raising questions where we think an immediate win is possible – which fails to address more systemic issues.

Human made global warming is happening, and it is a serious threat to the future of life on Earth. In addition we are in the middle of an accelerating extinction level event for many species on the planet, with some animal species disappearing at a rate 35% times higher than the normally expected rate. 

These crises are caused by a dependence on fossil fuels and an economy based on infinite growth on a finite planet. Our profit-driven economy is resulting in environmental degradation (soil depletion, ocean acidification, and over use of chemicals in production). All of us have been poisoned with Teflon, most of us have microplastics in our bodies. 

Climate change and the environmental catastrophe as a whole, like other facets of the polycrisis we are facing, disproportionately impact on those who are already marginalised under capitalism.

Those without economic resources are less able to flee floods, fires, mudslides, earthquakes and droughts. Disabled people with a range of different impairments are likely to find it less possible to leave the scene of a disaster. When Hurricane Katrina hit, it was the racialised and the poorest who died  in New Orleans as a result of the federal government and the state’s failure to maintain the levees and flood infrastructure. The response of the authorities was more than inadequate. The same pattern holds for the more recent fires in Los Angeles. According to UN Environment, 80% of the people displaced by climate change are women or girls facing heightened risks of poverty, violence and sexual violence or unintended pregnancies as they migrate to safer locations. And indigenous peoples are suffering catastrophic devastation of the habitats on which their lives and their culture depend, from the rain forests to the savannahs and beyond. 

The economic system causing these problems is the same one that leads to low wages and reliance on food banks for many, whilst billionaires consider buying a fourth super yacht. It is the same system that cannot provide a home for everyone, whilst some people hoard housing in a property portfolio. 

Many people barely have savings, long-term stagnant wages are being eroded through inflation and booming energy prices. The same people profiting from capitalism are the ones most responsible for degrading our environment to a point of no return. As French workers have raised the slogan “End of the world, end of the month – same fight.”

Socialists do not see the fight for a livable planet as separate to the struggles for a good quality of life for all humans. That is why we need radical demands to improve living standards whilst making our economy more sustainable for future generations.  We also understand that those oppressed under capitalism  both through material disadvantage and ideological violence are not only at the sharp end of the polycrisis we face but are often waging the most remarkable resistance from which the movement as a whole has a great deal to learn.

Ecosocialist infrastructure and economy

First and foremost, we call for a commitment to introduce a million new public sector jobs to carry out the massive projects which are needed to change our energy use, provide sustainable and accessible public housing, improve low carbon transport, re-organise the economy to reduce waste and improve society. All our proposals relating to energy use are founded on recognition that a green transition cannot be bought at the expense of the Global South.

To build a resilient ecosocialist infrastructure for the people and for the planet, we must:

• Radically change our relationship with fossil fuels. We must end the commodification of carbon emissions (cap and trade) and subsidies for oil and gas companies. An end to new oil and gas licenses. Keep the carbon in the ground! 

• Build sustainable and fully accessible social housing for life, and we must refit our existing homes with insulation, heat pumps and solar panels.

• Upgrade our national energy grid and provide more efficient energy storage and re-charging facilities and we must build new wind, solar, and hydro power. Connecting new power sources to the national grid should be done in consultation with local communities affected and with the least possible harmful impact on the natural environment. We must put in place emergency power supplies and backup systems that can be used to power high priority locations such as intensive care units in hospitals.
• Massively expand safe, reliable and accessible public transport, which is available around the clock. We must ensure rural buses and trains are electric whenever possible. As a first step, we will cut train ticket prices by 50% and introduce a national transport strategy to eventually make all public transport free, as is happening in cities and some countries around the world. We must re-design our national transport systems and roads to withstand the impact of a changing climate. We must introduce restrictions on private use of vehicles and petrol and/or diesel. This will include banning luxury vehicles such as sports utility vehicles (SUVs).

• Move away from an off-shore, low-tax haven for the rich towards a ‘people first’ society.  We must socialise the banks and major finance institutions (including the London stock exchange).  We must introduce progressive taxation, which will include a sweeping wealth tax, increasing Capital Gains Tax to 75% and increasing corporation tax to 80% for big business. Any businesses that don’t like it can have their British operations socialised and incorporated into the public sector to be run without profit. We must ban the further use and development of crypto assets and alternative finance which take huge amounts of resources.

• Build resilient, planned supply chains which invest in bigger stockpiles, more workers, multiple and de-centralised suppliers and higher maintenance costs. In an age of climate disasters and complexity, we cannot rely on precarious, ‘just-in-time’ supply chains powered by a handful of monopoly suppliers.

• Regulate hyper consumption practices, such as those employed in ‘fast fashion’.

• Reduce economic waste by shifting the economy towards well paid’ socially useful work. Care jobs are low carbon jobs.   Care is not just low-carbon. It is climate work, as central to a just transition as retrofitting homes or building renewables. We reject the capitalist logic that treats disabled, elderly or unemployed people as surplus: everyone deserves dignity and care. An ecosocialist programme must value care as climate policy, improving pay and conditions while recognising the forms of mutual aid and community care people are already organising in defiance of austerity and neglect. We fight for a society which values work in the care economy, largely carried out by women and racialised people with poverty wages and appalling conditions to be properly renumerated and valued for the contribution they make to society as a whole. A massive increase in well paid jobs in childcare education and in support  and assistance for disabled and elderly people with the aim  of ensuring independent living.

•  Introduce a four-day week with no loss of pay and reduce the retirement age with no loss of annual pension amounts due. 

• Prevent habitat destruction and ban harmful farming practices, such as agri-industrialised complexes, which directly contribute to the evolution and transmission of new deadly diseases. We must enact an international system for the monitoring and prevention of disease which has sufficient authority and power to enforce its rules and decisions. And we must ensure that all countries and communities have equal access to medical treatments. 

• Directly intervene in the production and supply of medical treatments such as vaccines and antibiotics and ensure that these can be provided for free at scale and at pace. We must stockpile PPE and medical treatments to protect against the impact of supply chain disruptions. 

• Welcome refugees and migrants, in expectation that more people will migrate to the Global Noth as the climate crisis accelerates internationally. Refugees are not an ‘enemy’ to be fought or treated with contempt, they are human beings like us and we need to ensure we lead by example in being open and welcoming. Immigration is natural – humans have always done it. We are not an island of strangers but one that welcomes people, as well as working internationally to help repair the damage of colonialism and capitalism which blights people’s lives.
  
• End GDP ‘growth’ as the measure of success and work towards a society based on a human happiness index. We stand for a shift away from market, profit-driven economics, towards society and an economy based on human need, through a democratic social plan of production.  

• Support the fight in trade unions for them to adopt and advocate just transition policies for well-paid jobs outside of environmentally damaging industries. Too often trade union leaders end up advocating for ‘polluting jobs first’ such as expanding the third runway at Heathrow or expanding North Sea oil. or increasing defence spending, propping up the nuclear power industry. We support scrapping Thatcher’s anti-union laws and replacing them with a workers’ Bill of Rights to enshrine the right to strike and take solidarity action – crucial in fighting for a genuine worker led transition. We must restrict AI-use by companies where this replaces jobs and does not serve the public interest, while being run at huge ecological cost.

We must fundamentally shift our relationship with the land and with natural resources. These proposals relate to our resilience against natural disasters, our food production and our treatment of the environment around us. We must “reclaim the commons” and socialize the land across Britain, regaining access to resources that have been privatized, enclosed, or exploited by market forces or powerful entities.

To reclaim the commons, we must:

• Impose price controls on key items to mitigate against the increases in food prices which will happen as arable land becomes more scarce. We must also index wages , benefits, and pensions to inflation so they increase automatically if prices do.

• Renationalise water and invest heavily in repairing and upgrading our ancient sewage network. 

• Reinforce and upgrade flood defences and improve drainage in flood plains. Build coastal defence systems to mitigate the effects of erosion. End building on flood plains.

• Ensure urban planning incorporates the challeges of climate change, such as to reduce the urban heat island effect.

• Re-build habitats, and ensure biodiversity is a key priority in all infrastructure projects.  

• Use brown belt land, as opposed to green belt or environmentally significant land, to build new energy efficient homes on. Socialisation of the land will allow better coordination of land as a resource for all and will help reduce house prices significantly. Any mortgages affected would be restructured by the nationalised bands.

• Enshrine the right to roam as our common inheritance.
• Stop deforestation, harmful monocrop tree plantations and large-scale fishing and replace them with small farmer agroecology, ecoforestry and small-scale fishing respectively. Provide international aid to assist with this globally.

• Take profit out of farming. Buy out or socialise large agribusinesses and reorganise farming for a more sustainable model. This will involve banning harmful pesticides and fertilisers which decimate our pollinators and destroy habitats and carbon sinks. We must enable a transition to plant-based foods to aid habitat-restoration, via investment in meat and dairy alternatives, and nutritious cheaper low-meat and low-dairy products.

• Ban factory-farming (such as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, ‘no-graze’ industrialised animal complexes), over-crowding, and confinement of animals to tiny cages. We must ban the routine misuse of antibiotics and hormones to increase ‘yields’ and/or correct some of the cruelty/harms of factory farming – such a ban also being vital for human health.  

• Improve animal welfare in all other respects. We must recognise that we are not the only species on this planet, and are part of an ecological system – not its overlord.

• Massively reduce the amount of waste we produce and change how we process our waste. We must end all offshoring of waste and invest in onshore recycling and re-use infrastructures. We must regulate the production and distribution of single-use plastic, while recognising that these are necessary in certain medical contexts and for those who have been disabled by society. Invest in alternatives to single-use plastic. 

Conclusion

Meaningful action to stop climate collapse and build a better society cannot just be left to MPs in Parliament or in the devolved legislatures. We need mass action, including climate strikes, self organisation in communities and workplace occupations to force change. Your Party needs to commit to building resistance and a generalised fight back, not solely rely on people in Parliament, to affect change. 

To ensure we have a liveable Earth, the capitalist class must be removed from power. Their wealth and authority are built on the endless exploitation of people and planet alike, driven by a profit system that sees ecosystems as resources and communities as collateral. No amount of reform can change the core logic of capitalism: grow or die. While they greenwash their destruction, emissions rise, forests burn, oceans boil, and millions are displaced. The ruling class will not dismantle the system that enriches them. It is therefore up to the working class, Indigenous peoples, and all those oppressed by this toxic order to rise, to reclaim the land, and to reorganize society on the principles of ecology, equality, and collective stewardship. A livable world demands a revolution against capitalism – before it is too late.