Our planet is burning. That’s the sincere reality. And so, with some urgency, we have to ask who’s holding the matches.
It isn’t unusual folks, merely making an attempt to get by. It’s the billionaires, the boardrooms and the damaged system that enables the hoarding of utmost wealth on the expense of all else – together with our planet.
The distinction between Greens and Labour is that we all know this to be true and act on it. Labour is aware of this to be true after which wines and dines those self same vested pursuits for donations. Proper now, billionaires and companies are hoarding wealth and sources, polluting our planet and stoking division in our communities. Whereas unusual persons are selecting between heating and consuming, the super-rich are cashing in on disaster after disaster and getting richer and richer.
Final yr alone, billionaires added £35m a day to their fortunes. That’s obscene. Nevertheless it will get worse. 5 fossil gasoline giants, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP and Complete, made greater than $100bn in revenue between them. In the meantime, households see their power payments double, and thousands and thousands are being pushed additional into poverty.
This isn’t simply an financial disaster, nor even simply an environmental one, but in addition an ethical one. And it sits on the coronary heart of how we do politics on this nation. The identical greed that drives inequality is identical greed that’s torching our planet. And it’s this similar greed that’s funding an excessive amount of of politics.
Many people really feel we will not afford this inequality. That the super-rich have to be paying extra. And, because the chief of the Inexperienced Celebration, I’m right here to say that the planet can also’t afford these ranges of company greed any longer.
Labour says it desires to guide on local weather, but it surely’s laborious to take the get together critically when it’s scared of upsetting the billionaires and fossil gasoline barons who bankroll our destruction. Labour promised £28bn for local weather motion however walked away from that promise on the first trace of opposition. It waves by way of Rosebank whatever the environmental affect and calls it “realism”. However realism means dealing with as much as what’s actually taking place. That this method, because it stands, is incompatible with a habitable future.
You possibly can’t resolve a disaster with the identical considering that prompted it. Meaning taking up the profiteers head on. Forward of the upcoming Funds, we’re calling for wealth to be taxed correctly, for loopholes to be closed, and for that cash for use to insulate properties, spend money on inexperienced jobs and rebuild public companies from the bottom up.
Britain wants an actual opposition. In the meanwhile, the one folks talking out towards Labour’s center administration of decline are figures like Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson who need you to consider the issue is migration, or folks on local weather marches.
It’s a lie designed to divide and distract us. The actual menace isn’t folks looking for asylum, it’s the billionaires and large oil donors funding Farage’s marketing campaign to maintain issues precisely as they’re. True patriotism isn’t about flags. It’s about equity. About standing up for the individuals who truly make this nation work, and defending the one planet now we have.
So, after we say it’s time to make the mega-rich pay their fair proportion, we are saying this not simply because it’s financial justice, however as a result of it’s an ethical necessity. As a result of you possibly can’t shield the planet whereas defending the earnings of these destroying it.
Forward of the Funds, the Inexperienced Celebration will maintain saying what others received’t: the time has come to make them pay. To fund an financial system that serves everybody, not simply the rich few. That is how we shield our planet and the way we make hope regular once more.
This text first appeared in Highlight on Vitality and Local weather Change, November 2025