Anna Shepard
I used to write a column for the Saturday Times called “Eco Worrier,” advising readers on how to green their lives. Yet now I find myself questioning its worth. While I still class myself as an eco-optimist, I can’t help wondering how much difference I have made composting my kitchen scraps, diligently sorting my household waste and installing gloomy low-energy lights. When set against the huge task faced at Copenhagen, there are moments when I suspect my daily actions are irrelevant.
Like others, I’m suffering from green fatigue. New research by the IPPR concludes that while most people believe in climate change, many are bored of hearing about it. “It’s one of those things you think about for a few minutes, get depressed and move on,” said one respondent. Not enough people are taking the green living advice—turning their heating down a degree, cutting back on short-haul flights—to make a big enough difference.
We’ve also begun to mistrust the ways that companies try to look good by flagging up their green credentials—known as “greenwash.” With an increasingly sceptical media and a host of NGOs and campaigning bodies such as Greenpeace and Ethical Consumer magazine, greenwash is not the problem it used to be. But the perception still exists that the green movement has been taken over by PR froth.
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Brian Semple
This year's joint overall winners: Philippa Stroud, director of Centre for Social Justice (L) and Robert Chote, director of the Institute of Fiscal Studies, on either side of David Willetts MP
Richard Reeves of Demos accepts the "one to watch" prize
James Crabtree
Last night Prospect held our 9th annual think tank of the year awards, Britain’s most pointy-headed award ceremony, at the RSA in London. The awards are decided by a bi-party panel of six judges over a series of meetings in the months prior to the awards, a process greatly helped by the willingness of nearly 40 think tanks to fill in our various nomination forms.
David Willetts MP, shadow secretary for innovation, universities and skills gave the evening’s key note address, making two striking statements. First, having joked that progressive think tanks like the IPPR faced a choice of whether to become part of the “official opposition” he called on traditional tanks of the left to work with an incoming Conservative government, rather than against it. Then, in a neat turn of phrase, he argued that British think tanks (as opposed to their more staid American counterparts) were the policy equivalent of hedge funds: entrepreneurial, lightly regulated, and prone to taking risks in search of headlines.
Then, following Willetts remarks, we unveiled the winners, which were:
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Brian Semple
Brown's decision on Trident trident is unlikely to satisfy pro or anti nuclear campaigners
Gordon Brown’s announcement that Britain will replace only three of its four Trident submarines has reignited the nuclear weapons debate, with pro-disarmament campaigners seeing the moving as a step in the right direction but not far enough, while sources within the armed forces argue the cuts will compromise Britain’s naval capabilities. It is an apt moment to revisit Prospect archive pieces from either side of the debate.
In December 2005, defence expert Lewis Page argued that failing to replace Trident without international unilateral disarmament would amount to suicide, and presented a vision of a Trident-free Britain in the case of a future nuclear attack:
Regrettably, 20 years earlier Britain decided that it would not keep a nuclear arsenal. The last British Trident submarine was phased out in 2025. The prime minister has no button to press. The missiles fall, gutting the sceptred isle. The PM turns to the remaining western nuclear powers for help: America and France. But the aggressor nation still has missiles left, and it is clear that in the event of any retaliatory strike, Washington or Paris will share the fate of London. France declines to act. In America the debate is longer and harder fought, but in the end the result is the same. The US missile defence system still doesn’t work reliably, and the US is unwilling to lose cities purely to avenge the British. The attackers knew this would happen: this is why unarmed Britain was the target.
However two years later IPPR’s security analyst Ian Kearns described nuclear disarmament as “one of the great historic missions of any progressive government,” and argued that Britain also needed to prioritise decommisionig nuclear stockpiles across the globe:
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