(This text was circulated for the ACR members meeting on August 28th 2025 called to discuss the proposal for a new left party).
Alan Thornett 27th August 2025
The most important statistic of last July’s general election was that Labour secured 64 per cent of MPs in Parliament with only 33.7 per cent of the popular vote. The message this sends to an incoming Prime Minister is that he or she had better look after their friends because they have an awful lot of enemies. Starmer chose to ignore this and has suffered as a result.
The Zack Polanski challenge in the Green Party election is a separate but related issue. A Polanski win would be a step forward for the Greens and make them far more of a campaigning party. It is not about a new party of the left, however, but building the Greens — and so it should be. They suffer acutely from the First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) voting system — as would a new left party. At the last general election the Greens got four MPs when they should have got forty — which speaks volumes.
The FPTP electoral system was always undemocratic (the only other country in Europe that uses it is Belarus) but once elections become multi-party events (as opposed to two-party events) the distortion becomes even worse. One important lesson which comes out of all this is that we need a new campaign for a democratic voting system based on proportional representation.
A new party of the left
The jury is still out on whether conditions exist for a new party to the left of Labour. The Socialist Alliance, Respect, and to some extent Left Unity, failed for reasons that could well be repeated. This is that the new party becomes the battleground for longstanding differences between its component parts. In any case, time is of the essence and the lack of urgency being displayed by the potential leaders speaks volumes.
Although four years away the next general election is already shaping up like a ‘stop the fascist’ event. Unless things change Labour is heading for a heavy defeat by Nigel Farage. A new party of the left — if it exists with significant influence by then — could well compound this by taking votes from Labour —this would be an unmitigated disaster.
Starmer’s policies with his, nuclear power, nuclear bombers, and dictatorial methods, are unsupportable — as are the banning of Palestine action or the picking off of dissenters in Parliament.
The cost of living crisis is a key driver in this situation. Labour Hub claim that over two fifths of UK households are struggling with energy bills and spending more than 10% of their household income on gas and electricity, based on the research by the University of York. Of these, almost 5m households spend more than 20 per cent of their income on energy, meaning they are in deep fuel poverty.
Unless Labour is able to show that it has made major improvements to British society, including a rising standard of living for the poorest people, rising wages, collective bargaining rights, and rising public spending, they will be in trouble. The problem is that the Labour leadership is incapable of defending their own policies — even when those policies, like the energy transition itself, is crucial to the future of the planet on which we live.
Fortunately, Ed Miliband is completely committed to the energy transition. His position is not whether we can afford to carry through the energy transition but whether we can afford not to. He has been Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero since the Starmer government was elected. (He was a member of Gordon Brown’s cabinet as energy and climate secretary and leader of the opposition and of the Labour Party from 2010 to 2015).
He has radicalised, on environmental issues in particular, in recent years and the battles he is conducting are absolutely crucial to the future of progressive politics in Britain. In particular linking the cost of living crisis with the energy crisis and seeing one (the energy crisis) as the solution to the other.
The 2022 Labour conference
It was at the Labour conference in 2022 — in opposition — that Starmer first set out a position on the energy transition. It was as unexpected as it was remarkable. He pledged to make Britain a clean energy superpower, decarbonise the national grid by 2030, and spend £28bn a year for 10 years on renewable energy. He also pledged to establish a new nationalised energy company (GBE ) with £8.3bn of initial capital.
Solar power would be tripled, offshore wind quadrupled. The de facto ban on onshore wind lifted, and new and alternative sources of clean energy exploited. Licences for new developments on the North Sea would be refused once Labour was in office. Fracking and coal mining would be banned completely and incentives would be introduced to change boilers to heat pumps and subsidise electric cars.
Whist there have rightly been disputes over the Rosebank oil and gas field and the Jackdaw gas field the direction has been away from the North Sea and the concentration has been on renewables. Which has been much criticised by the SNP.
Starmer’s proposals were set out as Labour policy in a pamphlet that can be found here.
Red Green Labour ran a campaign to stop Starmer reneging on his commitments. It went down like the proverbial lead balloon — a lead balloon — with knobs on — both inside and outside the party. Few regarded Starmer’s speech as of any consequence at all. In fact there was even less discussion of the environment in the Labour party after the speech than before.
Labour takes office
When Labour took office in July last year they found that the Tories had been sitting on dozens of major projects with no intention of processing them though the planning system. These ranged from projects like the Abingdon reservoir to ground based solar farms in the East Midlands to the Botley West solar farm in Oxfordshire. (My article on this can be found here).
According to the Energy Advice Hub: “Secretary Ed Miliband promptly approved three large solar farms in Suffolk, Lincolnshire, and Rutland, which together will generate 1.35GW of power, enough to supply around 400,000 homes. This approval, which happened the first weekend after the election, reverses previous blocks set by the Tory administration and marks a significant boost to the UK’s solar capacity.”
Ed Miliband also said he wants to ‘unleash a rooftop revolution,’ adapting planning rules so that builders and homeowners have better access to the installation of solar panels. That change is still to be seen but it has clearly been set out on the Labour agenda.
This includes not only the upgrading of the national grid but minimum standards for new houses such as improving energy efficiency and carbon reduction for new houses include enhanced fabric efficiency, low-carbon heating systems, electric vehicle charging infrastructure and better ventilation. This includes heat pumps and solar roof panels and additional insolation on all newbuild houses.
The aim is to ensure that all new homes will achieve an EPC rating of C or above by 2035. An EPC (Energy Performance Certificate) rating is a measure of a building’s energy efficiency, ranging from A (most efficient) to G (least efficient). To do that, the focus is on reducing heat waste, and improving the efficiency and insulation in homes. That means using improved heating and hot water systems as a starting point.
Miliband understands the implications of the solar revolution and the massive reduction in the price of wind and solar renewable energy which has been taking place for energy prices.
Starmer’s Tory policies
Starmer undoubtedly had a set of Tory policies ready when he took office last July. At the centre if these was a long-held bipartisan position between Labour and the Tories over immigration which had been the basis of state racism for many years. It involved crating a hostile environment for migrants and asylum seekers and refusing to install safe routes to make the small boat crossings from France the south of England unnecessary.
Migration between countries with completely different economic conditions is inevitable in an overcrowded world and Britain takes far less than its fair share of refugees heading for Europe. For example Germany, France, Italy and Sweden take more in proportion to population size than the UK. You would not know this from the tabloid press.
U-turns
Soon after the election Starmer made several major U-turns on ecological policy. In January 2025 (6 months into government) he caved in on airport expansion including a third runway at Heathrow and in February the £28bn was finally scraped. The mayor of London Sadiq Khan is particularly embittered about this. (My article on the cancellation of the £28bn can be found here).
In July 2025 he took the insane decision to back the Sizewell C nuclear power plant. It is eye-wateringly expensive (as well as extremely dangerous) and would not come on stream for 20 years — i.e. 15 years after Labour’s target to decarbonising the nation grid — which is broadly on track.
He also doubled down on Carbon Capture and Storage. He is committed to spending £21.7 billion over 25 years to support what they are calling the East Coast Clusters, with the first projects expected to begin this year. The last 20 years has demonstrated that CCS does not work at the scale that makes it useful and nuclear energy misses Labour’s crucial deadlines by many years.
Despite these retreats, however, Labour still has an environmental policy that is superior any of its rivals, including the Green Party when it comes to carbon emissions reduction. We cannot define Labour just by its retreats but what it still stands for as well and where it leaves us. Also what it is doing in practice to save the planet from catastrophe.
The plummeting cost of renewables made the scraping of the £28bn easier than it would have been.
Battle lines
The battle lines are now drawn inside the Labour party. The self-imposed fiscal limits are being challenged by Labour MPs whilst ecological policy is being defended by Ed Miliband around the pledge to decarbonise the national grid by 2030. This is not only achievable but is of global significance in the battle against climate change and a climate emergency.
Only Denmark, Canada, and New Zealand currently match or exceed the UK in this, despite the backsliding. According to Australia’s Climate Council 11 countries are ‘leading the charge’ on national grid decarbonisation with the UK at the top of the list. You would not know this from most media outlets.
The National Grid itself puts it this way: “The Great Grid Upgrade (as they call it) is the biggest overhaul of the electricity grid in generations. Our infrastructure projects across England and Wales are helping to connect more clean, affordable energy to your homes and businesses.”
Most of these policies went into the 2024 manifesto along with a pledge of net zero by 2050. It is by far the most ecological manifesto that Labour has ever had on carbon reduction — including 2019.
As Ed Miliband puts it, clean electrical power by 2030 tackles three of the biggest challenges we face today:
- maintaining a secure and affordable energy supply in an increasingly unstable world
- creating new industries and investments around the country, and
- protecting the environment we live in from the most damaging effects of climate change.
The right-wing
The Tories are out of the picture for the next election. They have been backpedalling on climate change since the Hillingdon East byelection when Sunak announced climate denial as his big idea. They were also caught filling our rivers and beaches with human excrement. Neither the reputational damage to the Tories, or physical damage to our rivers and beaches will go away for a very long time.
They are also the architects of the “migrant crisis” in that they stopped processing asylum claims knowing that this would result in a backlog which could be exploited for right-wing campaigning purposes.
It was they who first campaigned on tax payers money being used to put asylum seekers in hotels whilst knowing full well that this was being paid for (despicably) from the already inadequate foreign aid budget.
The dominant right-wing forces, however, have now regrouped as Reform UK, which is rapidly evolving from Trumpian into an openly fascist party. They are even more hard-line in their climate denial than the Tories and more vitriolic (and despicable) in their hatred of migrants.
Their main targets are refuges and asylum seekers in small boats and asylum hotels that were the deliberate creation of the last Tory government in order to give themselves a campaigning platform from which to sow division. Reform UK have stepped in and taken over the whole thing.
Racism
The Tories are doing their best to catch up. Both Robert Jenrick and Chris Philp already sound like Reform mouth-pieces, spewing out hatred, or stirring the pot, every time they get the chance. The scope for this in England in particular, which is basically a racist society, is very great. Racism is something that neither Labour of the Tories has been prepared to tackle for many years, preferring instead to make it the bipartisan basis for state racism.
It is remarkable that Farage, Mr Brexit, the architect of the biggest and most costly failure in British politics for a generation, which has reduced economic activity of the UK by at least 15 per cent, and has managed to blame it all on Boris Johnson, has a chance of winning the next election. The key to this is racism. Whoever is prepared to be ruthlessly and explicitly racist can get a hearing in Britain, particularly in England.
Whist not every member of Reform is a racist, most are, and the organisation definitively is. Farage’s speech implying ‘let them die in the channel’ in which he accused the RNLI of being ‘a taxi service for migrants’ is one of many hard-line interventions designed to fan the flames of racism and hatred in a bid to win the next general election. He is already following it up with promises of mass deportations under a Reform UK government.
Paul Mason says: “The UK is drowning in a sea of racism. It is supposed to be about asylum seekers, and the hotels that live in whist their claims are processed… but it is not”. And I agree with him.
Farage openly endorses Trump (he just laughs when it is raised) has tactically distanced himself from Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk because he is trying to make himself electable. His politics, however, are compatible with both. This has its roots in the British Empire, and Enoch Powell, and the rivers of blood speech, and the marches in his support by the London meat porters, the National Front and its base in Leicester.
The lesson to be learned for the left is clear. Be bold, innovative and radical. Defend democracy, reject compromise, insist on a democratic electoral system, and play a central role in saving the planet and eradicating poverty. Such a program can attract young people in large numbers.
A new reservoir in the South East
Despite the population increase in the region — along with a general increase in the amount of water used per person — there has not been new reservoir built in the South East of England since privatisation in 1992. The long-proposed new super reservoir, two or three miles from where I live in Abingdon, is a case in point.
The new reservoir has been opposed since it was first mooted in 1996. The most significant group being The Group Against Reservoir Development, or GARD. Note that they oppose reservoirs in general not just the Abingdon one.
Most of GARD’s campaigning points are in any case things that need to be campaigned on in the here and now: stopping water leaks, stopping the pollution of our water ways with sewage, recycling waste water, more water meters, and the education of water users. Now that the reservoir has government approval (and with a water crisis in the South East) GARD have pledged to ‘fight on’. (My article supporting the new reservoir can be found here)
The Botley West Solar farm
The same with the Botley West Solar Farm which will be the biggest solar farm in Britain, at 840 megawatts, and is expected to be seek final governmental approval sometime next year.
It is to be built on land ninety-five per cent owned by Blenheim Palace, and currently leased out to farmers. Thirty-eight per cent of the land is defined as the “best and most versatile agricultural land”, and seventy-five per cent is green belt. The developer is Photovolt Development Partners (PVDP), a German company, which specialises in such projects, particularly in the UK.
It has been opposed at every stage by the local authorities involved and in particular by the Lib Dems, which are very strong in the county. Yet it would generate enough electricity for the whole of Oxfordshire for all usage or a city the size of Leeds.
Claims that the new reservoir will reduce biodiversity are misplaced. Farmland is already seriously biodiversity deplete whist wild life will be attracted towards a new stretch of water, which will be stocked with fish, witch, along with myriad other aquatic creatures that will live in the reservoir will provide greater biodiversity than the equivalent land use for farming.
Chris Goodall, a writer on ecological issues and the Green Party candidate for Oxford West and Abingdon in the recent general election, is very clear about this when writing about the Botley West solar farm.
“Intensely farmed agricultural land (he tells us) has truly awful levels of biodiversity. Large, over-cultivated fields with few hedgerows are always terrible for nature. Unfortunately, much of the land that Botley West will use has been farmed excessively and will benefit from a switch to hosting solar panels; ploughing will stop as will the use of fertilisers and pesticides.”
My article supporting the solar farm (from which the above paragraphs are taken) be found here.
The planning and infrastructure Bill
The planning and infrastructure Bill — which is crucial to the structural changes that Labour are proposing for British society— had its first reading in the House of Commons on March 11th 2025. Its purpose is to streamline the process for delivering major infrastructure projects and other priority items.
Currently every such project in England (in particular) from new reservoirs, to the restructuring of the national grid, to onshore and off-shore wind and ground mounted solar is opposed as a matter of course, and usually by a small minority of the people involved. It is called Nimbyism.
The Bill introduces the concept of Nationally Significant Infrastructure projects (NSIPs) and makes it possible to take decisions on the 150 such projects currently proposed before the end of this Parliament. In other words to build 1.5 million homes, upgrade the national grid, and — as the hyperbole has it — make Britain into a clean energy super-power.
The Planner Magazine that covered the first reading of the Bill put it this way:
“The government has announced that ‘dozens’ of clean energy projects will jump to the front of the grid connection queue under measures to be included in the planning and infrastructure bill.
“Getting wind and solar projects connected to the grid forms part of the government’s aim to achieve clean power by 2030, as set out in the Plan for Change. Clean energy projects currently face connection waits of up to 10 years because the connections process is “out of date”.
The harsh reality is that we can’t build a modern society, let alone an ecosocialist one, by saying no to everything.
George Monbiot
George Monbiot, who speaks for a big section of the left in ecological issues, shoots from the hip on such things, and he has done so with a vengeance in this case. He wrote an article for the Guardian of April 24th 2025 (soon after the first reading) in which he described the Bill as “Labour’s great nature sellout”.
It would be, he said, the “worst assault on England’s ecosystems in living memory” and “the kind of anti-scientific, pro-corporate scrubbing of expertise we see in Donald Trump’s US”. Just as the US is captured by a billionaire death cult, he says, “our government is opening the door to the same forces”. He is comparing Labour party policy on the environment with Trumpism — which is the total denial of and kind of human induced problem with the environment.
His conclusion is that Labour is worse than the Tories when it comes to the environment and that the nearest comparison is Trumpism in the USA is indefensible. George should think again on this before he creates any more confusion in the movement.
Starmer defeated on welfare cuts
In July 1st 2025, after a year in office, Starmer suffered a shock defeat in the House of Commons over a flagship policy — targeting Personal Independence Payments (or PIPS) — that was designed to provide extra care for disabled people. Despite the late concession, there were 49 Labour rebels, the largest revolt so far of Starmer’s premiership.
It prompted a shift to the left with some form of wealth tax being predicted in the budget and 26 Labour MPs are calling for a vote on a wealth tax in advance. The danger for Starmer is that Labour MPs begin see this as a one term government, and that if so they may as well go down fighting for better policies.
Labour MPs refused to be voting fodder for Starmer and in doing so lifted 100,000 people out of poverty — a half of them children. They were quickly looking for more blood, and Starmer’s decision to recognise a Palestinian state was partially a result.
