avid Cameron’s Big Society vision is half- formed. Some say half-baked. But he wants
the coalition government to be ‘the greenest government ever.’ If Big Society is to be his legacy for low carbon living he’ll need to do a lot more than serve up cuts. He’ll need to provide hope and leadership and make stuff happen. But if it’s nothing more sophisticated than sacking council gardeners and replacing them with volunteers, it simply won’t work.
If the prime minister’s words don’t give you a warm glow it’s almost certainly because you’ve heard them before - or something very similar. Both Blair and Brown promised to
Nov/Dec 10
put the environment first - but didn’t. Meantime, new coalition ministers are competing to show who can be the stingiest of them all and serve up the biggest ever budget cuts.
Branded a “government of millionaires”, a cohort of politicians, academics, community leaders,
environmentalists, writers and artists have warned that the cuts will wreck the lives of ordinary people by devastating our infrastructure, public transport and local communities. The poorest, they say, will be hit six times harder than the richest and result in job losses in the order of 1.3 million.
But is it too soon for scepticism and despair? Just a few days after the election, the coalition
made positive announcements on the environment. And Cameron and Clegg were unafraid to admit that pre- election promises had to be sacrificed for a pre-nuptial agreement in the interests of a new open form of politics.
Of course, we’ve been here before. Craven politicians break promises and then deny it. But I’m trying to be optimistic. So I welcome the promise to create a low carbon economy through the creation of a green investment bank (GIB). Although the miserly amounts promised by George Osborne will need to be trumped by much larger sums if Britain is going to be an innovator in, and net exporter of, green technologies. The GIB will need huge levels of funding if we’re serious about creating
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