Open Left: The Future of Progressive Politics by Andrew Gamble

Author:Andrew Gamble [Gamble, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786609083
Google: bFOuswEACAAJ
Goodreads: 43361045
Publisher: Policy Network, London
Published: 2018-01-15T11:47:46+00:00

Action to achieve such a complex goal as energy security will require concerted international action, but it also needs a domestic strategy. Green growth will need to be embedded in national economic plans, and will have to develop through many experiments and initiatives, particularly at the local level. The whole society needs to be enlisted in finding solutions to the environmental challenge, because democratic consent will be vital. It can already be seen in small ways like the campaign to reduce the use of plastics, which contaminate rivers and oceans. While governments need to be active in creating legal and fiscal frameworks to encourage changes in behaviour by domestic households and businesses of all kinds, they also need to intervene much more directly to determine outcomes. The sociologist Tony Giddens has pointed to the paradox that because the dangers posed by global warming are not immediate or visible to most people they ignore them in their daily lives. At the same time, waiting for them to become visible and immediate before taking serious action will by definition be too late. This is one area where a much more interventionist state seems inevitable. But there is another paradox. Such a state will only be accepted by citizens if they become convinced of the need to change their own behaviour and want help from the state in doing so. This is an area like seat belts or bans on smoking in public places where the state has to take a lead, for example by investing in renewable sources of energy and speeding up the introduction of electric cars.

A new economic model also needs a strategy for marking the boundaries of the market. Competitive markets in a globalised trading sector are a key part of a successful economy, but if not carefully regulated they tend to invade spheres from which they should be excluded. The idea that everything is potentially for sale has to be rejected. Three decades of the economic liberalism which became the new orthodoxy in the 1980s has pushed the boundaries too far. Outsourcing and privatisation have invaded the local economy, creating a number of predator private monopolies, like Carillion in the UK, which serve their shareholders rather than local communities, and load extra costs on to households and the local economy. The idea of the commons – protected public spaces applied, for example, to knowledge and scientific research, and to the genome and public service media – are also of vital importance. There are many areas of life where competitive markets have no place and are harmful. Apart from some Chicago economists few would think it a good idea to make personal relationships in the family subject to the price mechanism and market exchange. Where the boundaries are to be drawn precisely at any one time is a political question and there is an important principle too. There are certain spaces, including the family, households, many key goods and services in the local economy, and the public domain, where market forces should not hold sway.

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