IN ANY crisis Tony Benn was always the best person to turn to for an answer. And so it is now.

Europe is faced with the resurgent success of far-right parties. Both the left and centre right struggle for answers. Meanwhile, climate scientists report that we had the world’s warmest May on record (and the 12th consecutive month doing so).

Greece closed its schools as temperatures raced past 40°C. Florida faced 11 inches of rain in 24 hours, sweeping away all semblance of normal life. In Spain, from Murcia to Majorca, the same torrential downpours raced through their streets creating havoc.

Meanwhile, England grumbled about the cold and wet, while Scotland faced its first June snowfalls as Arctic air continued to be drawn across Britain.

These events were not caused by the far right. Nor are they the fault of immigrants, illegal or otherwise. The poor and the displaced are the first victims of the climate crisis, not its causes.

This is what UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres rails about. Faced with an existential emergency, he calls for an era of visionary political leadership — but no-one answers.

Donald Trump and Joe Biden are turning the US presidential election into a version of Nightmare on Elm Street. Emmanuel Macron has thrown France into a knee-jerk election that looks likely to decimate his own support (and create havoc for the Paris Olympics). And Britain is caught up in an election contest that barely grasps how climate breakdown will trump the combined evils and corruption of 14 years of Tory misrule.

So what is it that Tony Benn would be saying?

For a start, Benn insisted that the far right should never be seen as a movement in its own right. Its existence always said more about a failure of the left. It is the absence of a more inclusive, transformative vision offered by the left that gives the far right space for an appeal to the poor. This is where we are today.

Britain will almost certainly pitch the Tories out of office, and not a moment too soon. Even Rishi Sunak seems determined to race his horses over the cliff edge. But if the election revolves around immigration and public spending limits, an incoming Labour government will have the shortest honeymoon ever. Anything that sidelines the climate emergency will be swept aside by it.

‘Events, dear boy, events’

Sunak’s Conservatives are leaving a poisoned chalice for Labour. Large slices of liberal democracy have already been destroyed. Wealth and power has shifted from citizens to corporations. Democratic accountability is at an all-time low.

The richest have never been so pampered, the poorest never so desperate. Labour may promise “no return to austerity,” but living within existing Treasury guidelines would require exactly that. Britain needs a new mindset, not just new management.

On the plus side, outside Parliament an emerging social movement — linking climate scientists, democracy advocates and post-growth economists — threatens to disrupt the whole show. The moving force behind this is climate itself.

Prior to the election, on the day the shadow chancellor gave her Mansion House speech (praising Margaret Thatcher and economic orthodoxy) scientists reported that the Greenland ice cap is melting at a rate of 30 million tonnes an hour; one million tonnes every two minutes!

Most of us struggle to grasp such a figure. But a million tonnes would form an ice cube taller (and much broader) than the Eiffel Tower.

Such news has far more than novelty value. Its impact connects to rising sea levels, increased global heating and a weakening of the North Atlantic Ocean “pump” (AMOC). This pump has moderated Europe’s seasons for thousands of years.

The worst-case prediction is that global warming is so weakening the pump that it could cease as early as next year. If that happens all bets on weather patterns are off.

Like Covid and the second world war, no-one would then ask if government responses to the climate emergency were in accordance with Treasury fiscal rules or Bank of England inflation targets. The call would be for a fundamental rethink of survival economics. And that’s where we should start.

Digging for Britain

Any rethink begins by redefining “growth” around the ability to feed ourselves, warm our homes and keep communities alive. This task is made all the more complicated by a world obsessed with reckless warmongering. Climate breakdown will make food crises universal.

Wherever you live, the disappearance of seasons and the turbulence of weather will force a food and farming revolution. The bedrock solutions will become more localised, regenerative and innovative. Tomorrow’s food solutions will as often be urban as rural. What links them will also involve the ending of a reliance on fossil fuels.

Energy security will follow the same path. In Britain, this begins by jettisoning the current absurd energy pricing mechanism that allows gas to set spiralling market prices.

Instead, we must use the tumbling cost of renewables to drive energy prices down. Sadly, Britain’s general election isn’t even debating this, let alone whether we’d be better off following the Danes by redefining energy as a (not-for-profit) public service.

Post-growth economists would apply the same thinking to every aspect of the economy; making circularity, inclusion and accountability the cornerstones of a new economics of wellbeing. So how could this be paid for?

In place of fear

What the Attlee government did in 1945, Labour could repeat in 2024 … if only it has the confidence.

I am bored by the election interviews where Tories haggle over whether Britain’s debt-to-GDP ratio has gone up or down, then shift into claims it would all be so much worse under Labour.

For the record, the House of Commons library estimate puts the current UK debt figure at 97.9 per cent of GDP. Should we panic? Well, Japan’s ratio of debt to GDP has run at around 200 per cent for over two decades and life there hasn’t imploded.

Which brings me back to 1945.

After the 1945 election, Churchill warned Labour that the country was broke. Britain’s debt to GDP ratio was running at 270 per cent and austerity was the only option … except that it wasn’t.

Labour founded the NHS, introduced state pensions and universal education, built council housing and renewed public transport investment. To do so they instructed the Bank of England to create low-interest debt to finance Britain’s renewal.

Those subsequently employed and trained all banked in Britain paid taxes here and spent money in local shops and services. These also paid taxes. This is how the money-go-round worked. Over subsequent decades we paid ourselves back so successfully that Britain’s debt ratio reduced to 50 per cent.

If we are to end today’s war on climate, nature and ourselves, Britain must do the same again. But it needs visionary leadership, not something marginally better than the crooks currently heading for the exit. And here is the second lesson.

Lessons of war

World War I ended with a similar state of financial crisis. In 1918-19 Britain’s debt to GDP ratio was 149 per cent. What followed, though, was a dive into austerity measures and neoliberal economics.

Disaster. And not just for Britain. The whole of Europe saw austerity driving the emergence of far-right movements that then took us into the devastating upheavals of the second war that followed.

This time around, it will not be Nigel Farage, fascism or free-trade fundamentalism that tears us apart. A refusal to end our war on the planet and climate stability is what threatens us most.

What history tells us is that it’s not the lack of money that is the problem but the absence of vision.

Globally, we may not have a Milton Keynes immediately on hand, but Joseph Stieglitz would do for starters. Mark Carney could put in a shift too. And as British successors to the social policy visionaries, Titmuss and Townsend, you could do a lot worse than David Attenborough, Mariana Mazzucato, Tim Jackson, Kate Raworth and Jonathon Porritt. But the search for a new Nye Bevan is more challenging.

Labour has suspended or excluded those who might fit the bill. John McDonnell would certainly hold the door open but, however much I would love it, Tony Benn will not now walk through. The baton must be passed on. And it is visionaries that we need. The dreamers must rescue us from the schemers.

New Labour had its day when the weather was good and the going was easier. Today, it looks more like a vindictive leftover with scores to settle. It’s obsessions with orthodoxy and expulsions won’t save us from the existential upheavals already underway.

If “Next Labour” is the answer you have to hope its irreverent spirits are even now working on a plan; something bigger and brighter that might survive the climate roller-coaster.

Benn would, of course, be encouraging them. Bevan would be telling them to pull their fingers out. But the rest of us have to know that, when the moment comes, we must be there alongside them.

Those melting, million-ton icebergs no longer wait for us to wake up. In the storms that follow, Britain could end up praying for the arrival of small boats rather than voting for politicians who would sink them.

Alan Simpson was sustainability adviser to shadow chancellor John McDonnell MP (2017-20) and Labour MP for Nottingham South (1992-2010).