Greens can’t see wood for trees backing levy

IT is ludicrous for the Green Party to think that they can solve Leicester’s dire public transport problems by charging 26,000 city workers £550 a year to park at their workplaces.

Just imagine for a moment that the Greens advocated a similar means of raising money to fund our massively underfunded NHS.

A policy proposal that would be comparable to the regressive workplace parking levy (WPL) might argue that every Leicester-based worker in paid employment should pay an additional £550 a year as an additional “NHS levy”.

To be clear, the Green Party do not promote such a health levy as it would be both unfair and selfdefeating to do so. Instead, the Greens call for the immediate removal of all corporate profiteers from the NHS so that health provision

can be provided totally free of charge to all users – a principle that socialists say should apply to our country’s public transport system.

The Green Party point out on their national website that “approximately one fifth of the NHS clinical budget is devoted to treating illness caused by unemployment, inequality, poor housing and pollution”. So, in our thought experiment the millions raised from the extra health levy on workers could be used to improve health provision for many of our city’s poorest and more vulnerable residents.

But the Greens don’t advocate such a measure because they understand – in a health context at least that increasing the tax burden on workers in such a way would not be fair or equitable.

That said, other political parties have historically shown no qualms about generating funding for the NHS in such deeply regressive ways by increasing our National Insurance contributions.

Either way, when it comes to fixing our nation’s dire transportation problems the Greens do support regressive parking taxes like the WPL, which are not really very different from schemes that would increase National Insurance contributions

to fund the NHS. The Greens do this despite understanding the scale of the problems caused by many decades of privatisation (like that faced by the NHS), and they acknowledge that “decades of under-investment in sustainable [public] transport has resulted in commuting patterns that are now more reliant on car journeys”.

The Greens understand why many commuters are reliant upon cars and not buses, as they explain: “The current state of the bus industry is the perfect example that deregulation of public transport leads to a substandard service.”

And the Greens understand that to enable our bus networks to be fit for commuting would require “a revolution” in the way that they are funded.

But the Greens cannot see the wood for the trees when it comes to their support for a regressive WPL.

That being said we should give the Greens a small amount of credit for understanding private finance initiatives must be completely rejected as a means to fund improvements in public transport – as PFI schemes represent an extremely regressive funding mechanism which, it is worth remembering, were used in conjunction with a regressive WPL to construct Nottingham’s famous tram system.

Michael Barker, Campaign Against Leicester’s Workplace Parking Levy stopleicesterwpl.com