New Labour's Old Thinking

Climate change due to global warming is perhaps the greatest danger facing humanity as a whole at the moment (though others make out a good case for this being the spread of the ability to make nuclear bombs). Environment minister David Miliband wrote about this in the Times (12 February):

"Climate change is, according to Sir Nicholas Stern, the greatest ever market failure, but the answer is not to replace markets. Instead, we need to price pollution into markets and extend market mechanisms so that they work more effectively".

In other words, the Market has Failed, Long Live the Market! This from somebody billed as New Labour's bright young intellectual, though it does show the extent of Labour's commitment to capitalism.

Socialists take a different view. Miliband of course is no socialist (though his father wrote a couple of books -- "Parliamentary Socialism" and "The State in Capitalist Society" -- of interest to them). We say: the Market has failed, so let's replace it with something better that doesn't produce problems like global overwarming.
The "carbon trading" and "green taxes" favoured by Miliband are just tinkering with the market system, whereas if carbon emissions are to be stabilised and the consequences of global overwarming tackled effectively it is the whole market system of competitive production for profit that must go.

Its replacement would be a world without frontiers where the Earth's natural and industrial resources have become the common heritage of all humanity. Only then will a world body capable of taking the necessary co-ordinated global action exist. Only then can the Earth's resources be used to satisfy people's needs not to make a profit for those who own and exploit them.The buying and selling of the market system would be replaced by giving and taking in accordance with the principle "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs".

ALB