AS all eyes focused on Labour’s first Budget in 14 (long) years, barely anyone saw fit to link it to events in Valencia, the Amazon or the heat dome over central Africa. Yet these are the bigger issues around which global politics, economics and national Budgets will increasingly revolve.

Droughts in South America and central Africa might seem too remote for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to be juggling with. But the images from Valencia ought to have intruded somewhere in her Treasury conversations.

More than a year’s worth of rainfall hit Valencia in eight hours. Torrents swept through the streets, turning them into impromptu scrap yards of displaced cars. Over 150 people have died. Dozens more are missing.

Such disruptions are not confined to eastern Spain. Wild weather events are becoming the norm in a world that has, for too long, chosen to disregard the warnings of its climate scientists. Now, we must live with the consequences … and learn to Budget for them too.

Labour has been right to talk of a broken economy. This doesn’t just apply to the NHS. Every aspect of the political economy Labour inherited is broken. All of the answers will have to come in the form of replacement, not repair. Yesterday’s economics are no answer to today’s greatest threats. And this is where Labour gets stuck.

It was a tough starting point for the new Chancellor. The wait for a Labour Budget had been far too long, the inherited gaps between rich and poor too wide, and the looming crises around the planet too frightening.

But these are the realities that governments everywhere are having to face. What makes the process harder is the progressive undermining of a belief in democracy itself. In this, the left bears as much responsibility as the right-wing fantasists and conspiracy theorists who now oppose them.

It is easy to look across the Atlantic and think it is only there that the lunatics have taken over the asylum. Trump supporters claim that it is the Democrats who are responsible for tornados devastating southern states.

They argue that the White House is behind it all, seeding clouds that specifically target Trump-supporting areas. This may sound completely bonkers, but “false news” plays to the alienation that is a by-product of globalisation.

Democracy at the crossroads

Once Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan launched their shift from production capitalism into finance capitalism, privatisation and deregulation became the twin pillars of policymaking. The arc of privatisation began with the systematic underfunding of public institutions.

As services declined, public trust in them diminished. It left the door open to claims that the private sector could do it better. What we now know is that the private sector was simply much better at looting.

Even those running today’s privatised institutions know they are not the real owners. They, too, must dance to the tune of speculative financial interests that call all the shots. For the public, the loss has not just been one of ownership but of accountability, too. What is the point of democratic processes if they cannot deliver decent services?

When Donald Trump puts it down to the White House (and centralised control), his public is often too remote, too disenfranchised, too downtrodden to take issue. He gives them an easy target to blame. False news, fabrications and a farage of lies just embellish their anger and alienation.

And speaking of Nigel Farage, this is exactly what happened in Britain’s Brexit debate. Any nonsense claim was acceptable as long as it played to the myth that this was about taking power away from the centre and returning it to the people.

The government’s “don’t spoil it” line meant nothing to communities in northern England and the Midlands, stripped of shops, amenities, work and hope. Brexit became a “sod you” vote against the political elite. This is the disillusionment upon which the Reform party has built its house. And like Trump, they will embrace all the conspiracy theories and false news the media will let them run with.

Already, all the evidence that Brexit was a complete disaster has little political impact. The study by Cambridge Econometrics put the current cost of leaving the EU at £140 billion (rising to £311bn over the decade ahead). But so what? The erosion of political confidence has made Brexit a complete “no-go” area, just as neoliberalism intended.

None of this plays to the advantage of either Labour or democracy. What remains of the Tory left would probably offer the public a second vote, but Labour (and much of the left) remains silent.

The Chancellor and all her Budgets will tiptoe around the Brexit issue. She will do the same in avoiding the simplest, cheapest and most direct ways of bringing privatised services back into public ownership.

The planet will fare no better. Instead of increasing bus fares, she could have reinstated the fuel price escalator. All fossil fuel subsidies could have been shifted into energy-saving programmes.

Contracts for difference could have been restructured to end the windfall profiteering by utility companies when renewables push the real cost of energy down. But corporations (and their lobbyists) are still calling all the shots. Challenges to the speculative economy are not yet on anyone’s political agenda.

What our society has failed to grasp is that globalisation was about the destruction of internationalism, not its enhancement. Sovereign power shifted from nations to corporations.

Institutions gave themselves human qualities — “the good corporate citizen” — and then superior human rights, including the right to sue citizens or governments intent on pursuing policies that interfere with corporate profit-taking. What we now understand is that this includes a host of measures that might prevent us from going over the climate cliff edge.

At this stage, Labour still clings to the notion that a more humane administration might yet turn yesterday’s economics from “public bads” into “public goods.” But as long as we flirt with freeports, fossil fuel subsidies and obsessions with “growth,” all we will do is seed the same disenchantment that Trump exploits.

Rebuilding trust and accountability

Neoliberalism has so disenfranchised the poor that it isn’t clear they see democracy as worth defending any more. Without a radical re-empowerment of the local (and accountable), many of Labour’s noblest of aspirations will flounder. Without allowing circular economics to replace growth delusions, there isn’t a chance to ride the climate roller-coaster we have unleashed.

The Chancellor’s opening Budget was one in which good intentions began to be matched with the resources needed to repair and rebuild. But unless it is the precursor to something much more transformative, we will be overtaken by the same climate disruptions taking place everywhere. To talk of the need for a new “survival economics and climate politics” is no longer visionary, just necessary.

Time is not on our side.

Alan Simpson is a former Labour member of Parliament (1992-2010) for Nottingham South.