Ours is an age of crisis. Britain faces a crisis of inequality, with the Tories’ brutal austerity programme leaving schoolchildren eating from bins and 14 million people living in poverty, whilst the obscene riches of the 1% accumulate yet further. At the same time, we face planetary collapse, with just 11 years left to stop runaway warming.
For too long we have seen these crises as distinct. No longer. The new roadmap to a Green New Deal from the think tank Common Wealth builds on the emerging understanding that it is an unjust and exploitative economic system driving all this. It’s an economy run for the profits of the few which slashes public services while handing out corporate giveaways, including to the fossil fuel industry. And it’s an economic system structured by racist, neo-colonial exploitation which mines the Global South before abandoning it to the resulting crisis.
Hope for a fairer, more prosperous and more sustainable society is inextricably bound up with a radical project to reshape our economy. It’s not about tinkering, and it’s not about personal habit changes – it’s about total transformation. As Mathew Lawrence, Common Wealth’s founder, recently argued: “bravery is our safest choice, radicalism our best hope.”
