Simon T. Kaye

The UK Green Party is a political success story still in motion. They’ve managed to combat the strictures of our First-Past-The-Post electoral system to the point of getting their leader elected to Parliament. Meanwhile, Jenny Jones has just finished coming third in London’s mayoral elections, their campaign has brought them to third in London Assembly votes, and at the same time the party is making council gains in various spots around the country in the face of a resurgent Labour vote.

The most electorally successful hard-left political party in British political history?

People should know that when they vote for friendly, chatty Jenny Jones or nod along with Brighton’s Green MP Caroline Lucas, they are actually (and, I believe, unwittingly) supporting what is rapidly becoming the most electorally successful hard-left political party in British political history.

The Green Party, usually the repository for the votes of people who simply (and very legitimately) want to bring environmental issues firmly on to the agenda in British politics, espouses a set of economic and social policies that put them far to the left of the most radical governments of the UK’s twentieth century, and indeed to the left of the Labour Party even in the midst of Foot’s leadership.

The main issue seems to be that nobody – least of all the people who find themselves voting for them – ever seems to have read the actual body of Green Party manifesto documents, or clicked more than three hyperlinks on the Green Party website. And the party itself seems to be complicit in the two-facedness of their public presentation. Jenny Jones’ website contains nary a hint of the Green Party’s vast hinterland of policy ideas, for example.

So let’s look at those Green policy plans in detail. You’ll see that these are set out in plain prose, with quotation marks – I thought about putting links in, but their policy website (which I link to at the end of this post) is so thick with examples of this sort that I thought it might be even better for people to dig through themselves, as I did.

• Let’s start with a biggy: The Green Party would introduce a universal ‘Citizen’s Income’: “an unconditional, non-withdrawable income payable to each individual as a right of citizenship. It will not be subject to means-testing, and there will be no requirement to be either working or actively seeking work.” This extraordinary policy would effectively destroy any semblance of a market in jobs, and eliminate any connection between state-provided incomes and a commitment to go to work. The sustainability of such a policy is highly questionable. Elsewhere, the Greens claim that “the introduction of a Citizen’s Income would reduce the cost of labour to industry without pushing people into poverty”. This is very bad economics indeed. A citizen’s income would massively reduce incentives to work, creating a shortfall in the working population and increasing demand among industries; necessarily, this would lead to an increase in salaries, not a decrease.
• As an overarching ambition, the Green Party would seek to “Raise taxation from its current very low level of GDP … [as] the fiscal gap is not caused by too much public spending but by taxation dropping to unacceptably low levels.” Well, yeah, they’d have to! This statement is not accompanied by any indication of just how high the tax burden would rise under a Green government, though an allusion is made to an overall level of 40% of GDP in pre-Thatcher years. In fact, paying for the following policies would require tax levels closer to 60% or 70% of GDP.
• They would Change Capital Gains tax from current levels (18%) to “the recipient’s highest income tax rate” – so, a rate of up to 50%. They also aim to increase inheritance tax.
• The Green party would nearly double the current basic pension to £170 a week. The current pensions system is already unsustainable, with a top-heavy, ageing national demographic proving difficult to support at current levels of productivity. The Greens are talking about doubling the pensions black hole, up from £56 billion to £110 billion each year.
• On housing, the Greens promote several extraordinary policies, including “the right to rent” – that is, where homeowners find themselves in difficulty paying their mortgages, the local council will allow them to “rent their existing home as council housing”. The cost of this policy is practically incalculable, and detail on this policy is thin indeed, but at the very least such a commitment would enshrine as a right an individual’s habitation of a given house, irrespective of their ability to afford it, and necessarily transfer all debts of this sort straight to the state.
• The Green Party wants “a national Minimum Wage of 60% of net national average earnings”, which would be something between £8 and £9 per hour. This is, of course, an interim measure until the introduction of the Citizen’s Income.
• They would legislate to reduce the full-time working week from 43.5 hours to 35 hours. This is mainly promoted as a way to reduce carbon output, but would put the British working week alongside France, and far, far south of the week-lengths of the world’s economically competitive nations.
• The Green Party aims to nationalise the railways and the London Underground, both operators and tracks.
• They would replace land ownership – in the current sense of freeholders’ rights – with a kind of land-use planning system, where the state grants usage rights to individuals on the basis of some assessment. This would also be accompanied by a Land Value Tax, an additional tariff on the worth (in terms of productive value) of owned land.
• All mains distribution of gas and electricity will be nationalised by a Green government. Public ownership of energy providers will be increased.

There’s more to see – these are just some of the most striking examples. I strongly advise current or prospective Green voters to properly review their policy platform at their rather dense policy website, http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/.

And there’s more to say here, beyond simply pointing out the version of communism that the Green Party is subtly peddling; perhaps I’ll put some more thoughts about that up here at some later date.

Now if somebody wants to come back and say “yes, I knew of each of the policies listed above, and I voted Green because of them”, then I will do nothing but celebrate your settled political ideology with you and wish you well. But my suspicion is that some of the above will come at least somewhat as a surprise to the earnest middle-class types who usually find themselves ‘going green’.

To finally summarise my main thought, here, then: green politics could be better served – indeed, deserve to be served better – than this country’s Green Party.

With the Copenhagen Summit underway and the low rumble of discontent over the hacked emails debacle still audible, I feel the need to communicate my feelings on all the claims and counter-claims on the ‘science’ of global warming.

I marched on the ‘Copenhagen Wave’ last weekend, along with tens of thousands of other people from all around the UK. It’s a worthwhile cause, I’m strongly in favour of firm emissions reduction targets, and I believe that human activity is responsible for the climate change going on around us. Note, however, the use of the word ‘believe’ – I don’t know anything – not scientifically, anyway.

‘Scientific facts’ are curious beasts. Science may be said to be incapable of producing hard-and-fast facts. One formulates a hypothesis; one tests it; if the hypothesis is upheld, and is upheld repeatably, then surely we have a scientific fact on our hands? Well, yes and no.

Within the framework of the experiment, we have shown a ‘fact’ – but it’s possible that laboratory conditions or the specific arrangements of a test differ from what we’d assume to be ‘normal’ conditions. Test conditions are capable of presenting spurious, irrelevant or simply untrue ‘facts’. It works the same way as the framing of verbal logic.

So, scientific facts prove only the specific hypothesis which are tested. More importantly, they can only be assumed to do so temporarily. Facts have use-by dates. The first relevant experiment to come along and throw new light on a question or display slightly different results will once again throw doubt onto any ‘scientific fact’, and it is a part of scientific method to assume that proofs are finite in this way. A statement is true until proven false, just as the accused is innocent until proven guilty. The difference is that reasonable doubt runs the other way: if there is reasonable doubt as to the truth of a scientific statement, then it cannot really be called a fact. For this reason, there must be much, much more evidence in support of a claim of scientific fact than there need to be made against it in order to ‘disprove’ it – which is parallel to our legal metaphor, where the onus lies with the prosecution to eradicate reasonable doubt.

The third important point about scientific facts is that, in an important way, they can never get beyond inference. We may observe the correlation between two different things a hundred times in experiments – but all we’ve really seen is the same correlation, a hundred times. So even with the non-existence of contrary evidence, ‘scientific fact’ requires someone to look at the evidence and draw a causal conclusion about it all – to claim “these things are not coincidental: one causes the other”.

These three question-marks can help us to look at the human-caused (‘anthropogenic’) global warming argument objectively:

First of all, anyone who tells you that anthropocentric climate change is proven, certain, a done deal, is either lying to you, or doesn’t know much about science. These will be the sort of people who say ‘climate change deniers’ instead of ‘skeptics’. Even in so far as there is any such thing as a ‘scientific fact’, I cannot in good conscience write that anthropogenic climate change is one – no matter how useful that could be politically.

Why isn’t anthropogenic climate change a scientific fact? First of all, our planet’s atmosphere does not constitute a nice, stable test condition. It has its own ups and downs, is sensitive to the activity of the sun and to its own internal weather patterns, such as el niño. Even today our weather and climate can be altered by unpredictable, freak occurences. Trying to draw a general trend out of this mess, even over fairly long periods, is very hard work. Even worse, climate change scientists will always be frustrated in their efforts to project changes into the future, and a key element of scientific proof is in the success of a model: can we extrapolate our findings into a means to predict what will happen next? In this case, the short-term answer is no.

Instrumental data on warming. The range since useful records began is about 1 degree centigrade in total. From Wikicommons.

Secondly, even with something like an upward trend (which is more or less visible in the data – see the diagram above), there is the problem of cause-attribution. This is made a bigger issue by the fact that the two curves under scrutiny here do not scale particularly well together.

I take as absolutely true that greenhouse gas levels are increasing significantly in the atmosphere, and that these gases are being released because of human activity.

More difficult to prove, but still, in my opinion, true, is the general trend of a warming climate over the last fifty years or so.

But these facts together signify only correlation. I, personally, believe that there is enough evidence to link them causally. This third leap is required for ‘scientific fact’. But the problem is that the rate of the increase in temperature does not match in terms of scale the rate of increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, or adhere to the predictions of scientists. There can be little doubt of an increase in CO2 levels – whereas warming levels can be attributed to other causes, such as solar activity or the (thus far barely understood) planetary rhythm of ice-age to warm-patch.

One word of warning  – stick to the instrumental data. Information on the ‘medieval warm period’ is worse than useless, because of course there is no reliable measurement information from that far back. We are limited to the last hundred years or so, and this is both bad news and good news for climate change scientists. It means we must discount the geological probabilities that this planet has been considerably warmer and considerably cooler than it is now at various points in its history, over the course of millions of years.

But these ‘good’ records do show a temperature increase, and it corresponds in terms of timeframe with the start of human industrial activity in earnest. This is enough for me.

Skepticism, it must be noted, is a good thing. It is the scientist’s responsibility to be skeptical, which is why the activities of the UEA scientists is particularly reprehensible. But skeptics must be skeptical always: there is far, far less evidence for ‘alternative’ causes of temperature increase than there is for the greenhouse effect argument, and this is what must be said at the Copenhagen summit.

It is with healthy skepticism that we ought to take action against CO2 emissions. We don’t know anything for certain – but shouldn’t we hedge our bets? I don’t think that scientific rationalism should ever form the basis, by itself, for public policy. But the intuitive response to all this information is to detect a cause, and the response to that intuition is clear.

And wouldn’t it be a noble human objective to cut down on pollution regardless of its relationship with climate-change? Why does no-one ever make that argument?

‘The twentieth century saw an average global temperature rise of a little over half a degree centigrade, which doesn’t sound like much- but it is, as the summary explains, likely to be responsible for “decreases of about 10 percent in the extent of snow cover since the 1960s,” and “a reduction of about two weeks in the annual duration of lake and river ice cover… in the northern hemisphere.” Winter, in other words, is now two weeks shorter than it used to be.‘

 I just rediscovered this piece, written by a slightly younger and considerably more earnest yours-truly. It was officially published by a higher-education website that nobody ever reads. So here’s a nice link.

 Stuart Parkinson was actually a great guy to interview, and a man of no small importance in the battle over hearts and minds in the great Global Warming debate.

‘HERO’ is a website designed to benefit students, and often contributed to by students. Which is all well and good, but I’m not mad about some of the little grammatical stretches and typos that have been engineered into this piece between my emailing it off and it appearing, all pretty, on the website. C’est la vie, I suppose.