BRITISH ECONOMY TRASHED…while 1.5C SMASHED! Article by Ed Gemmell, Leader, Climate Party

The BRITISH ECONOMY TRASHED…while 1.5C SMASHED!

While California burns the World has blasted through 1.5C – the safety threshold set in the Paris Agreement.

The global temperature last year was 1.6C over the preindustrial levels.

This is existentially dangerous. There have been multiple scientists warning us that between 1.5-2C we will see the breaching, probably permanently, of global tipping points. The most worrying of these in my opinion is the accelerated melting of the ice sheets and permafrost which will lead to a huge release of methane gas. This methane gas heats the planet 85 times faster than CO2 in the first decade (THE critical decade! from 2025 to 2035) so is extremely dangerous. Some scientists have talked about this methane release having a very rapid warming effect (within a few years from release) which has the potential to warm the planet by big fractions of a degree or even more than a degree almost immediately.

At the same time as the dangers from Climate Change have massively ramped up, we have heard about how Britain’s economy continues to falter if not is actually crashing. The British government’s borrowing costs have risen to the highest in decades and so called 'experts' are warning that this means the government will need to either raise taxes or cut our outgoings.

See this article from the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jan/09/cuts-tax-rises-and-doing-nothing-rachel-reeves-options-to-tackle-economic-woe

This article from the Guardian is a case in point - it's full of more of the depressing same non-fixes, no guts, no innovative thinking - in fact the executive quoted at the end of the article gives his supposedly wise (Not!) advice is do nothing! Ugh! That is what we have been doing for decades! No! We need to act decisively and now!

If we need to cut our outgoing that will mean cutting down on public services – take your pick of what you want to see less provision for?

Who is for longer waiting times in the NHS? ... anyone?

Apparently, we are tracking with the USA in terms of increased borrowing costs. That is unlikely to be a coincidence but coincidence or not we need to get our own economy back on track.

Trump has the usual short term fixes ‘oven ready’ for the USA – fire government staff (reduce your overheads through a smaller state wage bill), get rid of immigrants/control immigrants coming in (reduce your overheads on health, social security etc) and go back to what we have done well in the past (drill baby drill). These so-called solutions have all been heard before and have only a short-term effect if any (any potential benefits might last for one term in office if Trump is lucky and does he care about anything longer than that – I doubt it). Farage is making the same mistake in the UK.

Having criticised Trump are we doing any better? Well Reeves (as she is in charge) and co (there are some other minor players in this including Keir Starmer) are more timid in most areas. She does have her fiscal rules – aka austerity – which will enable her to manage our economic decline very professionally, but she clearly has no big economic or industrial plan.

Britain has been in the doldrums for decades; our industry is a shadow of the shadow of our once proud industrial heritage (industrial manufacturing has dropped from a third of our economy in the 70s to less than 10% today). We have been losing money every month for over a quarter of a century as we export less than we import – even taking into account our excellent financial and legal services – running a trade deficit.

We have no money to pay for anything.

We need a national vision, a real ‘Industrial Plan’ which will grow our productivity and our economy. So what is this plan? How can we do this?

As a country we need to follow… let me re-phrase that, in fact, ‘we need to LEAD’ …. in one of the world’s megatrends just like we did when we led the Industrial Revolution. What are these megatrends?

For a clue on one of them take a quick look above at the topic at the start of this article… ?????

Climate change. Or more precisely the race to get to ‘NET ZERO’!

As we noted at the start the World is in peril and we need to solve that. Many 0000s of companies and 000000s of people are working on this already and the numbers are sky rocketing. Almost all governments are working on this with varying levels of enthusiasm – already 93% of the World’s economy is under a net zero commitment.

Net Zero, and the industrialisation of the race to get there, is the biggest commercial and financial megatrend in the World (yes, ok, I hear you … AI is big too, but they overlap).

You do not have be a rocket scientist or an economics PHD from Oxford to understand that if Britain leads this new Clean Industrial Revolution there will be a massive payback and a growing economy is ensured but, and it is a big but, we need to be FIRST!

Britain needs to get out in front of every other nation, we need to be determined, roll up our sleeves invest and innovate at speeds only ever seen in times of emergency (such as WW2, Covid, the space race) where innovation cycles were accelerated by 5 to 50 times and previously dreamt of breakthroughs became the norm.

To do this we need to bring forward our national net zero target to 2030 (after all we are already planning to be 81% there by 2035). Our whole economy and every part of industrial machine needs to be focussed on reaching this goal first - smashing the tape at the end of the sprint well in advance of our competition. Once Britain gets there in 2030, we will have two decades of selling our innovations, patents, systems and expertise on to the rest of the World. Our exports will rocket, our trade balance with be healthily positive and our borrowings will disappear. More money in the pocket of every child, woman and man in UK, enough money for our NHS, our social services, our defence and critical infrastructure. If Britain wins the race to Net Zero in this period yours and my economic future is assured - plus we will have played our part in securing a liveable planet for the future of our children and children’s children!

#netzero #cleanindustrialrevolution #rachelreeves #economy #britisheconomy #gilts #netzero2030 #netzero2050 #2030 #2050 #climateparty #industrialrevolution #tradedeficit #donaldtrump #labour #conservatives #nigelfarage #reform #greenparty #climatecrisis #californiafires

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