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“Green ownership is about having a stake in what matters, because how else are people supposed to care?”

“Green ownership is about having a stake in what matters, because how else are people supposed to care?”

– Caroline Lucas, usually described as Britain’s First but never Britain First’s Green MP, and recently elected along with A Bloke to be Green party co-leader.

You may ask what this means.

“It means democratising the economy, with banks to serve the people not the other way round.

Corporate taxation back under control, and financial structures that answer to you, not to the City of London and its shareholders.

We need an economy of, by and for the people.”

You see now? We need an economy by the people. Because how else are people supposed to matter?

27 comments to “Green ownership is about having a stake in what matters, because how else are people supposed to care?”

  • Lee Moore

    I know people like this in the business world. People who can maintain high visibility but keep a low profile. The words pass from arse to mouth, without going anywhere near the brain. But a steady stream of words can be maintained almost indefinitely.

  • Alisa

    Right, business owners are not people. Moreover, anyone who has more than you do is not people.

    Yes Lee, we all know them – but she is not one of those. Her words very much pass through her brain – an organ likely full with similarly brilliant ideas.

  • Natalie Solent (Essex)

    I’ve always cherished this offering from a Guardian article of hers in 2011:

    Some of the loudest voices are calling on the chancellor to scrap the planned fuel duty increase, due in April. But that essentially means using tax-payers’ money to fix a problem that we cannot control – the long-term upward trend in oil prices. And it would result in a significant drain on public finances. A report commissioned from the Policy Studies Institute for the Green Alliance calculates that using a fuel duty cut to bring pump prices back to December 2009 levels would cost the taxpayer almost £6bn in the first year alone.

    Got that? Not increasing a tax is “using tax-payers’ money”.

  • jim jones

    Eco Fascists are a group of people who have no talent but want to feel important, they are constantly expressing their opinions even though no one wants to hear them.

  • Stonyground

    These green types are forever pretending to know things that are impossible for anyone to know. They are so sure that the climate is going to the dogs and is going to kill us all in the process. Of course this impending disaster is all our fault, for finding ways to solve real problems. You would think that people whose predictions have been consistently wrong since the nineteen sixties would be a little less confident about predicting the future now. Yes, I’m looking at you Paul Erlitch.

  • RAB

    I’m currently re-reading Niall Ferguson’s, The Ascent of Money. I could send Ms Lucas my copy when I finish it, but I fear that she would not understand a word of it.

  • Gene

    RAB, I’d be interested to know your thoughts on that book — is it worth my while?

  • RAB

    I did Economics to A Level Gene, so it is pretty straightforward to me. Explains fractional reserve banking, the Bonds markets, insurance etc. Yep worth a read I’d say.

  • David Moore

    “We need an economy of, by and for the people.”

    Translation; “‘the people’ will, of course, need someone like me to control it all on their behalf”

  • NickG

    Mad as a snake – both of them.

  • RAB

    The dynamic duo have promised to…, combat the “fear, inequality and hopelessness” that has arisen since the EU referendum campaign. Just since then, then? Everything was fine before that? What a load of amorphous bullshit!

  • Runcie Balspune

    Strange, because an economy _is_ people. And banks and corporations and financial institutions and the City of London and shareholders, they are all people as well, and it is people who have the pensions and investors of such institutions, and people who put money in the bank in the first place, and all those people servicing the financial structures. All _those_ people, it doesn’t belong to them, they should serve the “other people”.

    The first sign of fascism is to dehumanize a section of society and blame it for all the ills, this is really no different.

  • JohnK

    I think she’s trying to say to business owners “You didn’t build that”.

  • Can we just hang the lot of them already?

  • newrouter

    > the long-term upward trend in oil prices.<

    you're a real trend spotter caroline

  • Bruce

    I may be wrong, but do not the words “Economy” and “Ecology” derive from the same Greek linguistic root, i.e., “oikos” or some such, which I understand to mean “home”.

    The “nomy” bit has something to do with “management” and the “ology” extension of course refers to “study of”.

    In the current popular corruption of language, anything with the prefix “Eco” is deemed to be “good”, except, of course, “ECOnomics”, unless they are “green” or, in reality, totalitarian, sociopathic, “economics”.

  • Tanuki

    Ecology is to Economy as Astrology is to Astronomy.

    [ I wonder what star-sign ms. Lucas is? I suggest Kakistos, the bearer of dung ]

  • Thailover

    What was “discovered” in modern civilization was that free trade, business, is win-win, not zero sum. Yet the lefties keep trying to forget that, asking what is your “fair share” of other people’s created wealth, and how business owners really should “give back”, as if they took something from the people at their expense.
    Banks are in business, (financed via shareholders) to offer a service to customers AND to make a profit doing so…win-win. ‘Never mind that the banking industry is the most heaveily regulated business in existence, even more than nuclear. Yet that’s not good enough for the Marxists, who want to pretend that “the people” i.e. customers own the banks, like they pretend that people own their jobs, “capitalists” be damned.

    And as far as “Green” is concerned, I’d like to see the planet become greener, which means warmer, with more co2, which is currently just a trace gas. Plants love co2, and we love to eat the plants and plant eating animals. The idea that the world will end if it becomes a bit warmer is ludicrous. It’s BEEN warmer, and lusher. We have ice at the polls because we’re not totally out of an ice age.

  • bobby b

    We need an economy of, by and for the people.

    I’ve always believed this and attempted to live by it, but people like her keep finding me and taxing me.

    (There’s a good argument that the growing worldwide sentiment that’s empowering politicians such as Trump, Farage, et al stems from the people rising up to reclaim the mantle of The People from those who have appropriated it for their own benefit.)

  • Trump wants to even further reduce the security of property rights in the USA, via expanding the ability of government to “condemn” people’s property and give it to property developers. The only person Trump wants to empower is Donald Trump. But I get your point.

  • bobby b

    Yeah, if Trump were actually all of the things his supporters think he is, he’d be a mid-career James Madison.

    Sadly, though, he’s Donald Trump. The ideas behind his support bear little or no relation to what he truly is.

  • Leviathan

    Maybe ‘fear’ has gripped some people since the referendum vote but it’s a little early for ‘inequality’ to have increased and, as for ‘hopelessness’, are there significant numbers of people who are more hopeless now than they were before 23 June?
    What a load of cobblers

  • PersonFromPorlock

    bobby b
    September 3, 2016 at 2:17 pm

    Sadly, though, he’s Donald Trump. The ideas behind his support bear little or no relation to what he truly is.

    The idea behind his support is to fire the current establishment. By electing him, we put the Fear of the Voters into establishment survivors and successors; Trump’s qualities are of almost no importance in this.

  • bobby b

    PfP: Completely agree. Best bumper sticker I’ve seen so far: He’s Not Hillary!

  • Paul Marks

    If companies are not to belong to their “shareholders” to whom are they to belong?

    “To the people” – or rather to the people’s representatives.

    To the “Lawgiver” (in the sense of Rousseau) Caroline Lucas and co.

    The “Greens” are watermellons – green on the outside, but red on the inside.