London (Parliament News) – The Greens call on voters to support their ambitious proposals, contrasting them with Labour’s “more of the same” approach. Their manifesto includes higher taxes on the wealthy, public service improvements, and bold environmental policies.
The Greens have undertaken their election manifesto with a plea to voters to help them into parliament as a challenge to what they termed the unambitious, “more of the same” approaches of Labour.
Will higher taxes on the wealthy fund public services?
Setting out their projects in Brighton and Hove, the location of one of the party’s fundamental target seats, the co-leaders, Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay, expressed their proposals for higher taxes – mainly on wealthier people – were the only realistic path to improve public services and undertake vital environmental policies.
“This manifesto isn’t more of the identical,” Ramsay told a crowd of activists at the Sussex County Cricket Club ground. “It’s a look at what things could be like – and soon if we’re willing to invest at the rate necessary and to be bold and ambitious.”
He said: “We reject the pessimism of the other parties who don’t believe we can safeguard our publicly funded health system, [who think] that we can’t provide warm and secure homes for everyone, that tackling the climate crisis is too challenging for us.”
Can Green Party proposals outshine Labour’s approach?
Setting out concepts including a four-day working week, the nationalisation of water and energy companies, and mass-scale plans to construct new homes and insulate existing ones, Denyer expressed the UK should not accept “an economy when most people are working harder and yet getting poorer”.
She blamed the Conservatives and Labour for “a race to the bottom on tax”. She stated: “They think that people don’t cotton on that this means even more devastating cuts to public services, like the NHS, that we rely on every day.”
Can Greens’ tax changes improve public services?
Other approaches set out in the manifesto, titled Real Hope, Real Change, contain a maximum 10:1 pay gap ratio for public and private organisations; rent controls; a ÂŁ49bn investment programme over the next five years to protect homes and public buildings; and a program to let councils requisition vacant properties or ones without proper insulation.
The projects would be financed by tax changes, including a capital levy of 1% on individual taxpayers with investments worth ÂŁ10m or more, rising to 2% for those with support above ÂŁ1bn. Capital profits tax would be aligned with income tax, and higher earners would spend more on national insurance.
Ramsay was questioned if the party was comfortable requesting people to pay more national insurance on earnings above £50,000. He said someone on £55,000 would spend an extra £5 a week, calling this “a mediocre amount that’s affordable”. Denyer expressed that the Greens were “the only party being genuine that that’s the level of investment needed to get the kind of public services we need in this country”.
The Greens in England and Wales – the Scottish and Northern Ireland groups are largely independent – are operating a heavily focused election movement based around four key seats. Poll projections indicate they are on course to win two, which would double their number of MPs.