PM puts green jobs at heart of ‘New Deal’

The Prime Minister outlined his 1930s American ‘New Deal’-style plans in an interview with The Observer newspaper and later in a BBC interview on Sunday (January 4).

He said as part of a massive programme of public works, jobs would be created to tackle climate change through investments in green technologies, such as electric cars and wind and wave power.

The Prime Minister claimed that his plans for a green industrial revolution would be bigger than Barack Obama’s planned multi-billion-dollar ‘Green New Deal’, relative to the size of Britain’s economy, according to The Observer.

The 1930s New Deal, launched by President Roosevelt, saw a massive investment programme into public works, such as roads and dams, to pull the US out of the Great Depression.

“I want to show how we will be able to, through public investments and public works, create probably 100,000 additional jobs over the next period of time in our capital investment programme – schools, hospitals, environmental work and infrastructure and transport,” said Brown.

And he added that the environment would not be sidelined, but play a crucial role in pulling the UK out of a recession. “Rather than pushing the environment into a lower order of priority, the environment is part of the solution,” he told The Observer.

Brown said Britain could lead the world in environmental technologies. “We have new investments being made in wind, wave, solar, and obviously nuclear, and then there is the whole question of our homes and our businesses and the extent to which they make the most effective use of energy,” he said.

He maintained that the economic downturn would create, rather than prevent, a situation in which people would want to take the next step towards building a more environmentally sustainable economy.

He also said it was possible to go one better than Kyoto at the UN Copenhagen summit on climate change at the end of this year,  "with America and Europe pushing for similar things”, but he said the big task was to get developing nations, such as China and the India, on board.

The UK Government’s public works investment strategy will be funded by new money drawn down partly from reserves.