Local News

01 October 2009 by Steven King

The Constant Economy

Zac Goldsmith brings plenty to the party – but what about his chosen political party, the British Conservatives?  After all the Candidate for the winnable (currently Lib Dem) seat of Richmond Park in leafy west London once famously claimed the only way he would vote Tory is if someone drugged him first.

A high-stakes poker player with a prodigious capacity for cigarettes, it would be easy to discuss Zac Goldsmith as a political playboy with too much money and time on his hands.
 
That would be to underestimate him, however, for he is a serious, full-time environmentalist, a former editor of The Ecologist and deputy head of the Conservative’s green policy review

Some of his political positions are classically right-wing; pro-hunting, Euro-sceptical and so on.  But reading The Constant Economy, it is clear that he is a political iconoclast.  His stances on nuclear power and the expansion of Heathrow airport, for instance, might one day put him on a collision course with a government headed by David Cameron, even if Conservative policy currently is neutral about further reactors and opposed to a third runway.
 
His ideas – some better than others – are set out in extensive detail grouped into 10 sections, ranging from how democracy can be enhanced by use of frequent referendums on major decisions, to how we can transport the way food is produced, energy is generated and transport is organised.

Instead of measuring everything in purely financial terms, he proposes a Progress Commission which would report every year.

Is this just the personal manifesto of a man seeking to move out of the shadow of his father, or is he really on to something?  Voters will decide his political fate in just a few short months time.  If he gets their nod, expect to hear a lot more about Zac Goldsmith – and not just in the social diaries.