What Labour's Growth Obsession means for the Climate

On the 16th of December 2003, the then transport secretary Alistair Darling published a white paper that made headlines. After years of rumours that Heathrow Airport was interested in expansion, and months of anxious speculation about how the government would respond after this was finally confirmed, it was definitive (or so it seemed): the government would, on the condition that certain environmental precautions were taken, support the construction of a third runway at Heathrow.

What followed were nearly two decades of vacillation, during which support for the project was granted and withdrawn by successive (and sometimes by the very same) governments, as political priorities changed in line with external pressures. Since 2021, however, you’d have been hard pressed to find any public figure keen to dredge up the affair, to the relief of many who were glad to see such a costly and environmentally damaging project consigned to the past, and others who had simply found the whole thing a headache. That was, until Chancellor Rachel Reeves decided to revive the project. One can understand the widespread sense of cynical bemusement that followed.

The Chancellor’s decision to back the construction of a third runway at Heathrow - which would lead to 4.4m additional tonnes of carbon dioxide being released each year - was only one of a number of declarations made by the Labour Party before or since which would have catastrophic consequences for the environment. Forgotten, it seems, is the promise to transform Britain into a ‘clean energy superpower’ set to achieve net zero by 2030; in its place is a colossal scale back of Labour’s green investments pledge, attempts to sabotage the passage of a bill that would have made the UK’s climate and environmental targets legally binding, a plan to render it difficult to block infrastructure projects on environmental grounds, and much more. 

Ministers claim that a curbing of environmental ambitions is necessary in order to deliver a badly needed boost to the economy. Yet many of the measures which have been announced deliver anything but. It has been convincingly argued for years that the construction of a third runway at Heathrow would be of little benefit to anyone but society’s richest and the airport’s stakeholders, taking decades to complete, creating relatively few long-term local jobs, and most likely only providing a small boost to economic growth - and that again, only in the distant future. The construction of an oil field at Rosebank - something which the Chancellor is purportedly trying to push through - could similarly end up being more costly than profitable as it risks becoming a stranded asset, in which case it would then fall to the state to clean it up.

Many of the government’s most recent announcements, therefore, do not seem to fit into a genuine, well-thought-out economic strategy. Rather, they seem to have been taken partially in response to taunts from the opposition and from certain media outlets that tend to, motivated by a cocktail of economic illiteracy and bad faith, portray any attempt to protect the environment as economically irresponsible. Beyond that, the government has been keen to appease business leaders after it engendered a fierce backlash by raising Employer National Insurance at the end of last year, in order to meet its campaign pledge not to raise taxes on ordinary people.

That is not to say that none of the measures laid out by the government would boost short-term economic growth; preventing environmentalists from mounting repeated legal challenges would indeed streamline infrastructure projects (which would in turn often have a positive effect on the economy).Yet what is beneficial in the short term can be catastrophic in the medium to long-term. The damage the climate crisis, to which these projects would contribute, would wreak on the economy and human life more generally is colossal enough to render any small boost such projects would deliver in the short-term irrelevant.

Speaking to Europinion, prominent climate activist Dominique Palmer said: “It is beyond comprehension that [the government] would argue for economic growth over the climate - there is no economy on a dead planet. The prioritisation of profit over the wellbeing of people and the planet has gotten us to this point.”

Indeed, various studies have demonstrated that the warming climate, and the ever more frequent extreme weather events which accompany it, have already had an immense impact on the economy, causing crop failure, damage to transport infrastructure, heatwaves (which imperil the health of workers), and so on. Even more strikingly, conservative estimates put the figure for the number of deaths that will be attributable to climate change-induced malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress alone between 2030 and 2050 at 250,000 a year. This figure will only keep rising.

The underlying problem with the government’s approach to the environment - and this not a problem peculiar to Labour or the UK - is that it attempts to marry two incompatible concepts: climate protection and economic growth, consistently abandoning the former for the latter in times of economic turbulence. If you take the purpose of a government to be to deliver justice and to better the life of the average person, however, a focus on economic growth may end up being not only unnecessary but actively anathema to the cause. 

Whilst economic growth refers to an increase in aggregate production, what is necessary for an increase in living standards for the average person would simply be an increase in production in certain sectors, with this being perfectly compatible with a shrinkage in others.The adoption of such a ‘degrowth’ model would require significant economic restructuring, and would of course present several challenges. However, as it has been shown time and again that growth always ends up requiring environmental degradation, it seems that ‘degrowth’ is the best chance we have of mitigating disaster.

There are times in history where politicians have to take sides. On the one hand Labour could persist with this mantra of economic growth above all, which would only truly benefit big business and potentially buy the party a couple of more years in power - or it could remember its roots, and take a stand for the common (wo)man. After all, if the party born out of the trade union movement won’t side with the many, what is it for?

Image: Flickr/Number 10 (Simon Dawson)

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