Local News

01 October 2009 by Allister Heath, Literary Review

True Blue Stays Green

How times have changed for the environmental movement.  It was just over three years ago that David Cameron grabbed the headlines when he called for a focus not just on GDP (gross domestic product) but also on GWB (general well-being).  For many environmentalists, this was the biggest breakthrough of their lifetime, the first time a mainstream British politician had ever rejected economic growth as the central goal of economic policy.

Not long after, Zac Goldsmith, the 32 year old son of the late business tycoon Sir James Goldsmith, became the unlikely Conservative candidate for Richmond park.  He is a radical green revolutionary and the director of The Ecologist, a magazine what make the Guardian look like a rabidly pro-capitalist organ.

That was then; today, Goldsmith is still a Tory and Cameron is still greenish; but the world has moved on.  It was easy to take wealth creation for granted at the beight of the greatest credit-fuelled economic bubble of modern times, when incomes and house prices were surging and for a political party to sacrifice jobs and growth for environmental goals now.  While the electorate sill claims to be green, support for any truly painful measures has dwindled over the past twelve months.  With the public finances in crises, nobody will be spending £36 billion on a high-speed rail network any time soon. 

It is still worth reading Goldsmith’s book, however, even if it has missed its ear.  Although I found almost all of his arguments to be flawed or unconvincing, and his vision occasionally downright dangerous, his book represents the clearest manifesto yet presented by a modern British green advocate.  In a few years time, when the current recession begins to fade in the public’s memory, Goldsmith’s policies will being to find more takers again, and so it is worth being prepared, whether you love or hat his ideology.

This book is also interesting for another reason: unlike many of the author’s earlier pre-Tory writings, The Constant Economy is couched in a remarkably reasonable tone. He quotes Edmund Burke; he dissociates himself from those he now dismisses as the ‘darker’ greens at the movement’s radical fringe; he claims that his outlook has changed.  Mucho f what he says is almost mainstream, certainly among the left-liberal middle class. it is a testament to how successful the green lobby has been that its ideas, at least when presented as they are in this book, no longer sound especially far-fetched.

Even I found myself occasionally agreeing with some of Goldsmith’s analysis.  He is right that subsidies for pollution should be abolished, even if his definition of a subsidy is often a flimsy one.  It makes o sense that the taxpayer picks up the tab for pesticides to the tune of £300m a year; he is right that oil is often in the hands of countries we cannot always rely on.  It would be good to harness market forces to use more solar energy, and electric cars must surely eventually be the way forward.  But his prescriptions for achieving these goals are far to dirigiste

Every so often, Goldsmith true anti-growth agenda rears its ugly head.  He claims that there is an ‘overwhelming bias is the current tax system’ for the ‘indiscriminate economic growth’.  Apart from being untrue (we have very high taxes exactly sensitive in a year during which the economy has shrunk by 6 per cent, putting hundreds of thousands of people out of work. He repeats the claim that we consume three times more than we can afford, though he unconvincingly insists that this doesn’t mean we need to be there times poorer.  Yet if that statistic were indeed true, then there is no way that hiking VAT on new homes by a few percentage points or creating tax benefits for homeowners to rent out spare rooms (to reduce the need for construction) would make any difference.  Only a massive reduction in all our outlays, forced upon us by the state, could possibly chance anything.  That is the problem with Goldsmith’s book:  it is torn between advocating revolutionary change and the constraints of political reality.  On the one hand, he downplays the benefits of economic growth, as commonly measured; on the other hand, he argues that his policies on food security, green energy, public transport and tax would not harm our prosperity.  This doesn’t add up: while his policies would create plenty of subsidised ‘green jobs’, they would kill off far more in other parts of the economy.  He calls for a constant economy, but what we would get is a stagnant economy at best and constant regression at worst.

Green taxes are at the heart of Goldsmith’s toolkit for re-engineering society; he wants a sharp increase in levies on what he calls ‘bad’ activities and a commensurate reduction in tax on ‘good’ activities.  He then goes on to cite figures apparently showing that green taxes have dropped from 9.4% in 1997 to 7.7% today (of what he unfortunately fails to say, but one must assume he is referring to the total tax take) and therefore, need to rise substantially.  The trouble with his argument, however is that it is not based on any rigorous estimate of the real cost of pollution and that is excludes many of the main green taxes, namely fuel duty and vehicle excise duty.

When one compares how much we are already being asked to pay with estimates of the social cost of Britain’s carbon footprint, it becomes immediately apparent that green taxes are already excessive – in other words, that they yield far more that the social cost of pollution not already factored into the prices paid by consumers or companies.  Economist Matt Sinclair has calculated that Britons already pay between £7.9 billion and £21.8 billion annually in excess green taxes, equivalent to between £316 and £872 per household (there is a lot of uncertainty over the social cost of emitting greenhouse gases, hence the gap between those two figures).

Goldsmith’s attack on airports is equally flawed, his claim that they contribute to Britain’s trade deficit suggests that he remains a protectionist at heart. The same is true of his support for locally grown agricultural produce.  His call for gardens to be protected from home extensions will be popular in some quarters; but it is easy for those who already have large homes to call for new laws preventing the less fortunate who cannot afford to move, from extending their living space.

For all the flaw sin his vision for Britain, there is undoubtedly something endearing about Zac Goldsmith.  His single-minded dedication to his principles is an attitude that is increasingly rare in modern British politics, especially in the Conservative Party.  Its will be fun to see how he fares if he is elected as one of their members next year.