Welcome to the Green Alliance podcast.

We are the charity and think tank that is all about achieving ambitious leadership for the environment.

I'm Robbie McPherson, Environment APPG coordinator and political advisor at Green Alliance.

In this podcast, I speak to Paul McNamee, director of the recently founded Labour, Climate and Environment Forum about his work with LSEF and the Labour Party's relationship with climate and nature policy.

Paul, thank you so much for joining us. Tell us a little bit more about LSEF. What should we expect from it?

And is it basically a Labour version of the Conservative Environment Network, which some people have suggested it might be?

Yeah, LSEF launched officially last month. It's a brand new organisation. It's an independent company outside of the Labour Party, not affiliated with it,

looking to work with the entire Labour movement across the sector to basically raise ambition across that movement on climate and environmental issues.

So whilst the setup might be compared to the Conservative Environment Network in that it is this independent organisation outside of the party, but kind of working with it, I think politically and strategically where it's coming from is from a very different place.

Both sides of the political divide, left and right, have their own problems, have their own opportunities.

And I'd say kind of what LSEF is trying to solve are two major issues at the minute, are not solved,

but to address. One is this kind of hangover that still exists across the labour movement,

that climate and environment is a policy area that's a little

bit of a nice to have that's kind of like a bit of a middle class issue that gets away in the

kind of the real fight for social justice whereas I think people who have been working in the

sector know that actually climate and environmental action is absolutely key to social justice, it's absolutely key to

economic prosperity, and as such, should be viewed as a core labour value. Things have got much,

much better in the last 10 to 15 years, and obviously there's many, many in the movement

in the party now who don't think that, but I do think in some sectors, there is still that

kind of view, and it's Elsa Fons to work to kind of address that and prove that that is not the case.

The second one is just on a pure capacity issue, particularly at Westminster, Labor's at its

lowest levels that it's been for some time. Politics has been quite busy for the past number of

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