Left Unity conference: against the amendment on the environment
Talks2010sAlan Thornett, co-convenor of Left Unity's ecology commission, in the environment debate on the first day of the party's policy conference, 15–16 November 2014. The conference adopted the commission's policy statement. Recording on the LeftUnity UK YouTube channel; transcript corrected from the automatic captions, 10 Oct 2026. Square brackets mark words supplied or not clearly heard.
A corrected transcript of the recording. The recording is the authority.
00:00 Alan Thornett: Yeah. Alan Thornett, from SR. I'm also, along with [name unclear], the co-convenor of the ecology commission of Left Unity. And we hope that the ecology commission can get more members, and then it can become more active, and it can give a very
00:30 strong eco flavour to everything that Left Unity does. I want to speak against the amendment, but I'm not against everything the amendment says. Just one or two things. I've really only a problem with point one. If you go to point two, for a huge expansion of renewables, and everything for a planned shift away from fossil fuels: agree with all that. And also for the socialisation of the petrochemical companies, et cetera, et cetera, no more deep oil wells, an end to all involvement in carbon trading at international level: completely agree with all that.
01:00 But the problem, and this is a debate within the environmental movement, and the left of the environmental movement: it's all right to say [that]. The way I read [name unclear]'s text is that it could hardly be stronger. Anticapitalist, after you read it, it could hardly be stronger. But this amendment tends to suggest that the only answer is socialism, or that we can't do much until socialism is achieved. Now, the response to that is a problem,
01:45 because we have to do a lot of things before socialism is achieved. Of course we all want socialism. I've been an anticapitalist activist for 55 years; I'm not about to change. But the point is, it's just not a matter of proclaiming that socialism is the answer. We've got to have answers so that we can change things, because there's no guarantee of socialism worldwide in the next 20 years. We've got to have answers in the here and now, and we've got to have policies that lead us towards that in the course of the struggle for socialism. So it isn't just a matter of proclaiming socialism. Thank you.