of climate change in his 2009 Ralph Miliband Lecture, in which he defined the common good as that which ‘goes beyond the satisfaction of immediate wishes to treat citizens as citizens, speaking honestly about the tough choices we face’.32 Ippr’s Matthew Lockwood summarises the approach as being ‘to confront the public with the toughness of the problem [of climate change] and… appeal to people’s sense of collective responsibility and fairness, especially to future generations’.33 In values terms, a common good frame clearly resonates strongly with intrinsic and self-transcendence values, such as equality, justice and community feeling, and would reinforce the other three frames discussed above. Greens can take from it a sense of collective purpose in tackling the huge challenge of climate stabilisation, and an affirmation of the importance of commonly held environmental goods (such as the Earth’s atmosphere, sometimes referred to as the ‘global commons’). For progressives, it appeals to people’s faith in public services and works to strengthen that support. To encourage environmental feeling, stronger analogies could be drawn between environmental common goods and existing public services; both constitute a shared resource, a safety net for all, require society-wide investment and are worth protecting even in hard times. A promising chance to develop this frame has arisen in the wake of the debacle over selling
32 Ed Miliband, ‘The politics of climate change’, Ralph Miliband Lecture, 21 November 2009, www.clickgreen.org.uk/ big-interview/interview/12892ed-milibands-ralph-milibandlecture-he-politics-of-climatechange%E2%80%99.html. 33 See ‘A tale of two Milibands’, Political Climate, 23 September 2010, http://politicalclimate. net/2010/09/23/a-tale-of-twomilibands/.
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off English forests, a case where environmental good and public ownership neatly coincide.
Conclusion These frames are suggestions only. To be successful, frames must be widely accepted, speak to a shared understanding, and constantly repeated in order to gain cultural currency and build political space for action. Reframing an issue is also, of course, only the first step in generating the politics and policies that may eventually help resolve that issue. I hope, therefore, that this article will generate debate, and lead to the refinement or replacement of these suggestions with better ones. But that debate is a vital one to be had if we are to develop shared frames for a red–green politics – and build a lasting alliance based on values, not political convenience. Guy Shrubsole is a writer, researcher and activist, and has written for the Guardian, the Ecologist, Left Foot Forward and Open Democracy. He has previously worked for the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the New Zealand Ministry of Agriculture (MAF), and is currently director of the environmental think tank, Public Interest Research Centre (www. pirc.info). He is a member of the Labour Party, and writes here in a personal capacity.