I struggle to understand why environmental politics are traditionally regarded as left-wing.  They are not.  The environment is the only place that we have.  The place where we live matters to us; in our local communities and in the wider world.  It is all about respect and stewardship.

Disputes about the science of manmade climate change may be rife, but they are entirely irrelevant.  It might be suggested that only a brave or very foolish person (or a publicity-seeker) would take issue with the consensual opinion of the world’s leading scientists – but in the end this too is irrelevant.

The point is this:  waste of any kind is a bad thing, so we must stop wasting energy, food and material resources.  Fossil fuels are finite, so we must find ways of being less dependent upon them, and sooner rather than later.  Natural resources are limited, not limitless as we in the West have implicitly regarded them for two-hundred years, so we must start trying to obey the laws of Nature.  If Nature goes bust, there will be no bail out.

Conservative-minded people can embrace our current environmental challenges wholeheartedly, passionately and with every confidence in a right of centre political inheritance and vision.

We believe in the merits of order and security: two benefits of civilisation, which are threatened by environmental disruption and the pressure of global population growth.

We recognise the responsibility of stewardship.  We respect the past, and hold the present in trust for future generations.  As Margaret Thatcher said: “Mankind has no freehold on the Earth, only a full repairing lease.”  We need to look after the place where we, and all other creatures, live; not just for ourselves but for those who will come after us.

We understand the need for global action and diplomacy in order to ensure advantages at home and around the world.  In world affairs the conservative approach is pragmatic rather than ideological.

We believe that local actions, in our own communities, rather than Big Government initiatives, can help make changes for the better. The environment is both local and global, and a passion for local solutions can help build and strengthen our communities.

Finally, the conservative understands that whilst politicians have a vitally important role in shaping the framework for action on green issues, only the market can deliver the results.   The paradox is inescapable; it was the power of the market which, through driving unsustainable growth, created the problems mankind now faces. But it now offers the only sure way out of them.

Meeting the various challenges presented by environmental pressures is already creating huge market opportunities for those with the vision, technology and access to capital to seize them. According to HSBC, global turnover in low carbon goods and services last year overtook the value of the defence and aerospace industries. This is no cottage industry.

An unhelpful tendency exists to lecture people on the need for “behavioural change”. Of course those who have made changes in the way that they live in order to reduce their impact on natural resources should be applauded; people who, for example, have determined to drive less, recycle more, buy ethically sourced products, install micro-renewable energy systems, or switch off the lights when leaving a room. I have tried most of these things myself; but we are part of a small minority which has, by and large, made a deliberate political or social choice.

Human behaviour will only naturally change on the massive scale required when change is cheaper or more convenient than sticking with the status quo. Most people don’t want to make deliberate political or social choices; and why should they? It’s what they elect politicians to do. If heroes are to emerge from the battle to manage and defeat environmental damage they will not be eco-warriors, but engineers, physicists, designers, inventors and entrepreneurs. The true friends of the Earth are gradually emerging, and they are not those who spend their time screaming at the capitalist system. They are those who respect our duty of stewardship over the natural environment we have inherited, and embrace capitalism as the most powerful tool for change on the planet.

You can visit the CEN’s website or join their Facebook group

Governments are under enormous pressure especially in Britain where both main political parties are pressing for immigration to be an issue at the next general election with a race to the bottom of who can impose the strictest controls. They face conflicting pressures: significant levels of resistance to increased immigration in public opinion on the one hand, and sound economic and social rationales for the relaxation of entry barriers on the other. By creating a true property-owning democracy, Margaret Thatcher ensured that the vast majority of us have an active interest in a Conservative ideology. A masterstroke. What we must not allow to happen is the likes of Nick Griffin redefining the narrative – contrary to the evidence – around immigration.

The massive inflows associated with European Union accession led neither to the displacement of local workers nor to increased unemployment in the UK. Simulations following the European Union accessions of 2004 suggest that output levels in the United Kingdom and Ireland, which allowed large-scale inflows from the new member states of Eastern Europe, would be 0.5–1.5 percent higher after about a decade, and the net fiscal figure for the United Kingdom at the present time is ± 0.65 percent of GDP. Given that the recovery of our economy is so fragile, it would be madness to place more restrictions on immigration, and it isn’t the reason we have a legion of NEET’s across the country – it’s Labour’s failure in education that has let a generation of young people down.

It is easy to make cheap platitudinous statements defending the Labour government’s abysmal record in education (remember its slogan Education, education, education), but the hard work of the pupils and teachers is irrelevant if it is directed (by the government) toward means that give them and the country so little benefit.

Can anyone say that more choice, more competition, more efficiency, more responsiveness to parents and more resources spent on actual teaching wouldn’t be the best thing to do? Because that’s what would happen under a Conservative Government.

Students don’t get suitable careers advice and end up not picking suitable A-Levels for their choice of university/career/life simply because no-one told them what the implications of their choice were. Can anyone tell me how Conservative policy isn’t the right thing to do instead?

The Labour party’s response to the crisis in education is simply to extend the pain by raising the school leaving age in an attempt to delay the consequences of their failure to live up to expectations they set in 1997. As a way to improve educational standards, and to act as a cure for unemployment evidence shows this to be suspect. Is it any surprise that social mobility has decreased under Labour?

We have the plans to fix a broken education system, it’s time to tell that to the people on the doorsteps. We must not pander to populist calls for more restrictions on immigration.

Posted by Administrator on behalf of Thomas Byrne; you can visit his personal blog here

On Friday, the Office for National Statistics raised its estimate of the economy’s growth in the fourth quarter of last year from 0.1% to 0.3%. This is, of course, good news, but the most interesting growth question at the moment is not “Are we up or are we down?” but “How likely is it that the economy will expand enough in 2010 to prevent big rises in unemployment?” Unfortunately, there is no reason to think anything more than “unlikely.”

Since the recession started many firms have asked their employees to work fewer hours or take pay cuts. This bargain has been underpinned by employers hoping that demand for their goods and services would pick-up again, and that their staff needed to take the partial and temporary hit of a poorer job in order to avoid the big hit of not having any job.

In the jargon, someone who is working but wants to do more hours is “underemployed”. There will always be people who want to work more, but there has been a big rise in their number recently. In the year to the third quarter of 2009, 605,000 extra people declared that they were underemployed when the Office for National Statistics asked them about their job status. It is this group that is under threat from growth not being good enough to keep them in work.

This is worrying, not least because many of them will have to claim unemployment benefits when they do fall out of work. As a Policy Exchange report out this week will show, they will fall into a welfare-induced poverty trap that can make working look like a bad idea. Some claimants will, when they see how their benefits are withdrawn when they move into work, realise that they are likely to end up working for less than £1 per hour. Would you work for that?

Lawrence Kay is a Research Fellow in the Policy Exchange Economics Unit. “Escaping the Poverty Trap: How to Help People on Benefits in to Work” will be out this week.

An audience of around eighty or so gathered at the British Library to listen to Dr Anthony Seldon, biographer of Tony Blair and Master of Wellington College, and Toby Young, author and Swedish-style free school activist, discuss Bright Blue’s second theme of the year, “What are we educating for?”

Young began by bemoaning the rise in vocational qualifications and the dumbing down of traditional academic rigour, leading so it would seem, to a collapse in social mobility and the entrenchment of privilege for those still allowed access to a “proper liberal education”. He spoke of a culture of indoctrination, whereby knowledge is transmitted rather critically digested, and welcomed the prospect of schools being freed up to allow the value of subjects, subject knowledge and subject specialisation to return.

Characteristically, Seldon was controversial and to the point: the great experiment of state education had failed and in such a homogenised system, where teaching to the test was allowed to dominate, we were failing our children. It was time for a new national conversation on education, a freeing up of schools, a move away from central state control, greater choice, the empowerment of teachers as professionals not technicians, and ultimately the restoration of the pursuit of knowledge, and the love of learning, at the heart of what schools are about.

The audience were not completely converted, and there were those keen to point out the progress made in the education system since 1997 brought about by increased investment: renewed and rebuilt buildings, more diverse, more market-appropriate skills being examined and tested, and improved access to higher education.

Others focused on the role of discipline, the failure of the examinations system, the potential for a de-politicisation of the education field, and with it a strengthened role for universities and employers in policy. For some, divisions between state and independent education and the extent to which money drives choice was most important; for others the definition of “success” in education and whether that can be agreed upon. One audience member simply asked the panellists to define education in a single sentence.

But overall, the tenor of the debate was positive, constructive and engaged, with broad agreement on the crucial role that schooling plays in creating opportunity and with that the potential for overcoming inherited inequality. “Would either of the front benches have the balls – forgiving the pun – to do something about improving education after the general election?” Yes, the speakers agreed, Michael Gove would.

James Marshall is part of Bright Blue, committed to promoting a fairer, more socially just Britain in the next Parliament and beyond.

You can also watch some of the discussion:

Anthony Seldon at Bright Blue

Toby Young at Bright Blue

The murder of army cadet Joseph Lappin suggests that there is something very wrong with the way we tackle anti-social behaviour. Despite having breached sanctions more than 40 times, his attacker was never sent to jail – and was free to kill Joseph, an innocent bystander, outside a Liverpool youth centre in October 2008. Although the particular consequences of the criminal justice system’s failures were exceptional in this instance, our research released this week suggests that the case is worryingly indicative of wider, systemic failings.
 
A State of Disorder, published last week, reveals that between 2002 and 2007, just 14 people were imprisoned for breach of an ASBO. The Government officially claims that more than half of those who breach their ASBO are imprisoned, but they are actually being locked up for other criminal offences at the same time. The figures expose the myth that ASBOs are being used as a stand-alone, preventative tool to protect the public from repeat and serious anti-social behaviour. In reality, any sanction for breaching an ASBO is merely an addendum to an already blossoming criminal career.
 
The scale of anti-social behaviour is such that the ongoing national debate about ASBOs often misses the bigger picture – especially the needs of victims. One of the most prevalent problems for them is persuading local agencies to take anti-social behaviour seriously. As the Home Secretary has admitted, victims of persistent antisocial behaviour find themselves bumped from one agency to another, when all that they want when they report it is simply for the behaviour to stop and for them to be dealt with by the council and/or police in a satisfactory way. But there is, for instance, no measure of victim satisfaction with the action taken by local agencies and no indication of the success rate of cases. Last year, the Government did consider creating a new national indicator – but the measure was inexplicably dropped.
 
 We need radical police reform to ensure that local concerns are taken seriously.  First, we need the police to be more accountable to local communities – through the introduction of directly-elected local police commissioners. Proper local accountability would drive a radical change in policing culture, making sure that community concerns (especially anti-social behaviour) are prioritised. They would also chair the local Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership, driving multi-agency working and ensuring a coordinated approach is taken.
 
This must go hand in hand with comprehensive steps to free the police from the performance management regime which has prevented them from doing those unseen things – mediating, problem-solving, prevention, protection, setting community standards – that real community policing should be all about. One recent example highlighted in a Government review told the story of a police officer who reduced crime and disorder on one estate by 90% over six months through a problem-solving approach. His only reward was criticism for not meeting personal arrest targets. This kind of performance management must be stripped away if we are ever to make an impact on a problem which blights so many of our most deprived communities.
 
Max Chambers is a Research Fellow in Policy Exchange’s Crime and Justice Unit.