Shadow Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs and Environment

Check against delivery

Conference

When the Labour Party was formed over 100 years ago the challenges faced by ordinary people were so different from the challenges we face today.   Labour was formed to give people living and working environments so that no matter where you lived, you would have clean air and water and your health wouldn’t be endangered by lack of wealth.   

Yet that ambition remains for us today.   It is part of our core values. Our vision is that Labour wants everyone to live in a high quality environment – whether they live in urban Scotland or rural Scotland.   The language might have changed but the values have stayed constant.

Labour understands the issues that concern people in our rural communities - jobs, housing, decent transport, health and education.   But even though we are on their side on all of these issues and in government made significant improvements to people's quality of life - they don't always associate those changes with the policies that Labour has pursued or the investment that we delivered.

So we need to redouble our efforts to work with local communities and to listen to their concerns about how to improve the quality of their lives and services.  We need to persuade them to support us if we are to be successful in our aspiration to serve them as the largest party in the Scottish Government.   

In the Borders we don’t have a single MP MSP or councillor.   So I will be setting up a special Borders Forum to make sure that we have regular dialogue with community representatives.

We need to work harder to demonstrate we understand rural concerns and show people we have the commitment to work with them.

We are utterly opposed to the SNP’s proposals to abolish the Scottish Agricultural Wages Board.  That mechanism for ensuring a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work has served Scottish agricultural workers well since Clement Atlee introduced it, and we will not stand by and let Richard Lochhead and Roseanna Cunningham abolish it.

And we need modern apprenticeships to provide vital skills for our rural communities as much as we do in urban Scotland. Our rural communities are suffering hard from the recession.
 
People living in poverty in rural areas are being ignored by the SNP and unemployment is rising faster in rural areas than in urban Scotland.

But it is in their proposals to privatise a quarter Scotland’s public forests for 75 years that the SNP have shown their true colours.  The proposals were dreamed up by Rothschilds – Thatcher’s favourite bank.   So the SNP walk where even Thatcher feared to tread.    Even the Scottish Tories now agree with Labour that privatising a quarter of our forests is bad news.  

These proposals would threaten rural jobs, impact on climate change, and exclude us from our own countryside.   The proposals are so bad they have embarrassed SNP members.   

The SNP’s position is now completely untenable. Thousands have signed up to petitions demanding the proposals are dropped.   Conference these proposals have been universally condemned and I predict there will be another humiliating climb-down within hours.

For the sake of our wood processing industries and for the sake of rural jobs I demand that the SNP admit they were wrong all along and dump these proposals this week.

There’s a better way forward - Labour’s agenda for forestry.   

•    Forests accessible to people,
•    Support for our fantastic biodiversity and woodland heritage
•    Making the best of our forest resource by using wood to build our next generation of new homes.

Our timber industries are vital to our rural communities – and to Scotland’s economy. And there are new opportunities that should be grasped.

•    Using wood to create green energy –
•    Local biomass heat plants and joint renewables ventures – where the FC enters partnerships with renewables companies raising money for new forest planting.  

A real virtuous circle – green jobs helping to keep our rural communities alive and help us tackle climate change.

Climate change has got to be a challenge for all of us.  And the SNP talk green but don’t deliver.  Simply saying you are going to make Scotland greener won’t make it happen. They just aren’t doing enough and on the environment as on other areas many of their promises now lie in tatters.

Their targets for climate change don’t kick in for another decade – far too late to get us on track to meet the long-term target of 80 per cent carbon emission reductions by 2050.  Not fast enough to make the serious reductions we need to save the world from dangerous climate change.

•    Labour wants Scotland to be in the vanguard of tackling climate change.   
•    We can be – but not without political will.  
•    We will seek to amend the SNP’s Climate Change Bill to make it more effective, and are building support across Scotland for that.

Tougher targets to drive down emissions in the early years, incentives to deliver energy efficiency and renewables, and appropriate duties for the public sector.

It is not words and exaggerated claims that will tackle climate change - we need practical policies now.  We will play our part in developing radical plans to let us make the transition to a low carbon economy.

We believe that investment in green jobs is vital, and the SNP plans are timid. Their green jobs strategy is just a press release.  Labour is more ambitious because we know that that environmental technology jobs can help us through the recession and help us save the planet.
 
The challenge to governments in our time is having the vision to look to the future and bring people with them.  That means being honest about the scale of the challenge - not making empty promises and failing to deliver.

And there are enormous challenges.   What looked like really radical, left field policies 10 years ago now look unambitious and timid in the light of climate change.  Our challenge as a Labour movement is to find solutions to the challenges of climate change.

So we need to be radical and bold - but we also need to get it right.  It is simply not good enough that the SNP’s Climate Change Bill targets don’t kick in for another decade.   

If the last decade has seen our knowledge about the dangers of climate grow and concern us – how much more so as the reality of flooding and ice cap melting begins to bite and the impacts cause environmental and humanitarian tragedies.

The last few months have shown the extent to which we live in a global economy – but the solutions to our economic crisis have to be linked to our global environmental challenges.  Otherwise we will come out of recession only to plunge into a new global crisis.

It is no accident that one of President Obama’s first priorities is to put in place a green jobs revolution as part of his fiscal stimulus package.  He’s not alone.  That’s what countries like China are doing too.   So there are opportunities – others are seizing them and we need to step up to the mark.  

John Park talked about investment in public transport to expand services and make it more affordable, greener vehicles, new walking and cycle routes.

Why aren’t we starting with the easy things first that tackle climate change and fuel poverty together?

•    Household energy efficiency and renewables – turning the buildings that many people cannot afford to heat into warm homes, putting energy back into the grid.
•    Creating thousands of local and manufacturing jobs.

England and Wales are streets ahead of us and Scotland needs to catch up urgently. But it needs to be a national programme – not drawn up on the back of a fag packet to get the SNP through their budget negotiations.

Labour in the Scottish Parliament was demanding urgent action from the start of the recession.   Had we been in power we’d have already passed legislation to give householders money off their council tax to reward them for acting on energy efficiency.

We need to act now deliver new decentralised energy projects for communities.   They can make real a difference – there are now hundreds of local projects particularly in the Highlands and Islands – made possible by our leadership when in government.

Scotland has big scale opportunities for green jobs too.   And again the SNP are simply not ambitious enough. We left them a powerful legacy – we met our electricity from renewables targets 2 years early.  Their handling of proposals to cut red tape from householder renewables has bordered on farce.   

Only last month they bizarrely excluded air source heat pumps and mini wind vanes from their proposals.   They just don’t seem to get how damaging this is for Scottish manufacturers – we have an industry ready for a mass market and it’s been killed off for another year.  

Embarrassingly, Scotland will fall further behind the rest of the UK and Europe. SNP plans for green jobs are staggeringly unambitious. Last month they proudly announced their target of creating 16,000 jobs.   

So how come, if Scotland has 25% of Europe’s wind power, 10% of Europe’s wave power and 25% of Europe’s tidal power – the SNP are limiting their ambitions to a mere 10% of the UK’s renewables industry for their total green jobs potential?

It is more back of the fag packet calculations - not the serious hard graft we need from our government in Scotland. The next 10 years are critical if we are to play our part in tackling climate change.  

Scotland was the birthplace of the industrial revolution – we need to be the birthplace of the renewables marine revolution.  If we don’t get moving others will leapfrog past us, leaving us in the slow lane.

Conference, the policy paper that we are debating this morning sets the ambition that we will work with others to develop a green jobs strategy.  

We should use that work to campaign for action now and to build a vision that will build a wave of support for the next Scottish elections.   

We need to be ambitious – the challenges facing us demand nothing less.