33
‘I was frustrated’: The woman who told Labour it didn’t need to spend £28bn on green investment
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
33 points (92.3% liked)
UK Politics
3023 readers
104 users here now
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both !uk_politics@feddit.uk and !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
!ukpolitics@lemm.ee appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think a case could have been made for it. Borrowing to invest is allowed by the fiscal rules, and it would've been popular with a large set of the electorate. Weighing it against the electoral impact to the presentation of the party as being fiscally responsible would've been a tough needle to thread though. Many folks point to Corbyn's WASPI payout policy and nationalisation of BT as being among the key things that killed his campaign back in the day for much the same reason.
The way the lady in the article speaks though, it sounds like there is maybe a case for pursuing private funding as a better option. I've read elsewhere that even a modest public investment over the long term can encourage tons of private investment due to the certainty it provides. If the planned ~£15bn public investment ends up attracting enough private money to get up to a similar amount to £28bn and comes with tons of consequent economic activity around the edges then this may end up having been the better approach.
On the other hand, if it attracts hardly any — perhaps due to the Tories pledging to scrap GB Energy and the NWF, thereby removing the long-term certainty around the whole thing — then it may turn out to be a massively consequential and disastrous route to have taken. I think we'll have an inkling long before 2029 if that's likely to be the case.