Green Tax Switch Rally Speech

Speech by Chris Huhne on Sun 17th Sep 2006

Welcome all of you to the conference rally. This year, the rally is special. As always, we have an excellent line up of speakers to kick off the principal policy theme of the week: climate change and protecting our planet. But this is more than a rally on the main conference theme. It is also the beginning of the campaign for the green tax switch which is the biggest campaign that this party has ever undertaken. Through the rest of the year, we will be stressing that the time for talk on climate change is over, and the time for action has arrived.

We have one key message. We should tax pollution not people. If we are to change our behaviour, it is the role of government to lead us collectively away from our dependence on fossil fuels. We need green taxes not to raise revenue for the state - taxes are high enough - but to switch off climate chaos. By using green tax revenue to take the low paid out of income tax and cut 2 pence off the basic rate, we can nudge our society towards sustainability and strike a blow for fairness and social justice. How much each individual taxpayer saves will depend on their own behaviour. The greener we go, the more we save.

The green tax switch campaign already has its own website on which local parties are reporting their activities during the October action week. We expect to have more than 100 street stalls the length and breadth of Britain, calling on the Government to tax pollution not people, and collecting signatures on a petition to the Prime Minister. There will be meetings and discussion groups. For your local opinion formers, why not hold a green tea? There will be more than 1 million leaflets - a Focus on climate change - going out to households across the land. The campaign pack is free, and everything can be accessed through greentaxswitch. You can download material for focus. There is a mailing to Lib Dem supporters that can go with a conference appeal. The party political broadcast this week will be on our green tax switch.

In short, this is the biggest and best campaign we Liberal Democrats have ever run. It is a campaign with strong and unique themes that can and should run all the way through to the general election.

The objective will be to shift the environmental debate away from talk and onto practical solutions to the problem. The question is no longer whether we have a problem but how we solve it. And we can solve it. We have already successfully tackled one enormous problem - the hole in the ozone layer - by outlawing chlorofluorocarbons. With politics changing across the world - including the United States and China - I am convinced that we can reach an international solution to humanity's greatest threat.

Here in Britain, public opinion is shifting. There is a growing awareness of the seriousness of the problem, and a growing willingness to take the measures necessary to tackle it. All the parties are agreed on targets, but if targets were the solution this would be the best-run country in the world. With our campaign, we become the only party prepared to go beyond generalities and targets and talk about specific plans to change behaviour. Plans to raise duty on gas-guzzling cars. Plans to tax flight emissions not passengers, encouraging full planes. Plans to ensure fuel duty does not continue to wither.

One of the reasons why I am confident that public opinion will go on shifting is the new flow of media attention: David Attenborough's television series, strong reporting in the main media of developments in climate science, and Al Gore's movie, An inconvenient truth. If you have not seen it, go and see it. It is the most important film of the decade, and will have a profound effect on all those who see it. Anyone who does not get climate change when they go in, will certainly get it when they come out. If you have time, you can even see the film this evening, courtesy of Greenpeace, at the climate clinic at the Friends Meeting House not far from conference.

Let me introduce our three speakers. This evening we are privileged to have George Monbiot, the respected Guardian columnist and environmental activist, to talk about the urgency of dealing with climate change. George will be followed by Juliet Davenport, whose experience of running Goodenergy makes her an ideal speaker to explain what we each can and should do to tackle climate change. Last but not least we have Ming Campbell to set out the vision of a sustainable society in which our children and their children matter. In which we hold our world in trust for our descendants. Friends, let me introduce Britain's foremost environmental commentator George Monbiot.