We can make things better

ON Tuesday MPs will be lobbied by constituents over the climate crisis.

They will be visited virtually by people of faith and none, wildlife enthusiasts, people wanting to keep the clean air we’ve all been enjoying as well as those wanting financial security and jobs.

With the roller-coster of heat and rain we’ve been experiencing, lawns green and allotments thriving it’s easy to overlook the blistering heat in Siberia.

Coming out of the great stop brought about by the pandemic is a chance to ‘build back better,’ putting money into local pay-packets (so needed in Manchester), not into corporations that off-shore profits.

Instead of returning to the bad old ways it should be (re)training craftsmen with useful skills. It should help local traders with smallscale projects like home energy efficiency.

This would not only bring jobs, they would spend the money here and pay taxes back to our Treasury.

This work would cut emissions and energy bills, leaving more cash in people’s pockets (at no expense to the Treasury and tax payer), and bring warmth and health to our old and poor during the winter.

Manchester’s skilled engineers such as those losing their jobs in aerospace, fossil fuel or automotive industries would be ideally placed to re-hone their abilities to developing better turbines and generators and developing the environmentally sustainable packaging we need in a post-plastic world.

You don’t have to be a Green to like this “Green New Deal” and to want to “Build Back Better”– giving economies, jobs and security for the future to the many.

Or we could go back to more concrete, fumes and short-term profit for the few.

I know what I want, will our politicians? Watch their lips, actions and voting record.

As the campaign is entitled: ‘The Time is Now.’

Lobbyer, via email