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What is Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘green jobs revolution’?
Labour leader lays out plans for economic and environmental revolution during conference speech today
A Labour government would “kick-start a green jobs revolution” designed to overhaul the post-Brexit economy and cut the UK’s carbon emissions, Jeremy Corbyn has told members in his closing speech at the party’s conference.
The Labour leader pledged to create 400,000 skilled jobs by building thousands more wind turbines, insulating millions of homes, and installing a solar panel on every “viable” roof in Britain.
“There is no bigger threat facing humanity than climate change. We must lead by example,” Corbyn told delegates today at the conference in Liverpool.
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“Our energy plans would make Britain the only developed country outside Scandinavia to be on track to meet our climate change obligations. Labour will kick-start a green jobs revolution.”
Corbyn also vowed that a Labour government would commit itself to reducing net carbon emissions to zero by 2050.
Much of the money to pay for the policy “will come from the public purse”, reports the BBC - including the £12.8bn Labour says it will set aside for subsidies to insulate homes in their first term. The party says this policy alone will create 160,000 new jobs.
There will be further subsidies for offshore and onshore wind and solar energy, “paid for in part from the party’s plan to borrow £250bn”, according to The Times.
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Corbyn promised “a host of new clean energy jobs in areas hit hardest by deindustrialisation, or in other words, low-carbon jobs for Brexit voters”, says the New Statesman’s Stephen Bush.
The proposals are part of the Labour leadership’s plan “to do one better at the next election by squarely pitching themselves at people who voted to Leave”, Bush adds.
Whatever the party’s motives, Greenpeace has praised the proposals, saying Corbyn’s plans for a “low-carbon Britain” show “real leadership”. Labour was taking the issue “as seriously as is needed to have any real prospect of avoiding the worst impacts of climate change here and around the world”, the environmental charity added.
However, speaking on BBC Radio 4’sToday programme, shadow business secretary Rebecca Long-Bailey was forced to deny claims that the latest environmental policies were the same as those promised by Ed Miliband in 2009.
Corbyn’s wide-ranging speech today also included a pledge to offer 30 hours a week of free childcare for all two- to four-year-olds, regardless of whether their parents are in work.
He described the plans as a “radical plan we need to rebuild and transform Britain”, adding: “The old way of running things isn’t working any more.”
In what HuffPost says will be seen as “a swipe at Gordon Brown’s handling of the crisis”, Corbyn claimed that “the political and corporate establishment strained every sinew to bail out and prop up the system that led to the crash in the first place”.
