Twenty seven years ago, on this day, January 22, 1995, John Major was given an opportunity to have a legacy that wasn’t a cones hotline or sleaze. Oh well…
“THE PRIME Minister’s own advisers will this week publicly challenge him to introduce green taxes to ‘radically change the way society works’. They could even replace income tax. In their first annual report, experts appointed by John Major urge him, as a priority, to put environmental protection at the heart of government economic policy. The panel, headed by Sir Crispin Tickell, warden of Green College, Oxford, and Britain’s former ambassador to the United Nations, will argue that conventional taxes on wages and employers’ national insurance contributions should gradually be replaced by taxes on the use of energy and natural resources by industry and consumers.”
Ghazi, P. (1995). Go for green tax, says Major’s team. The Observer, 22 January, p.5.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 360ppm. As of 2023 it is 418.
The context was that the UK government had signed up to the UNFCCC at the Rio Earth Summit, and there was rhetoric flying around about not merely stabilising emissions but reducing them. This was underway because coal plants were being closed, but some people were trying to get longer-term thinking going, including Crispin Tickell, who had been trying to get the British state to take climate seriously since the late 1970s… To be fair, their task was that much harder because of an attempt in 1993 to dress up a VAT increase as an environmental measure, which had poisoned the well (see a blog post in March for more details…)
What I think we can learn from this
Possibly good ideas have been lying around for decades. Getting any of them implemented requires more than just mandarins (i.e. mandarins are necessary but not sufficient).
What happened next
Nothing significant
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Do comment on this post.
References
Ghazi, P. (1995). Go for green tax, says Major’s team. The Observer, 22 January, p.5.