A Land Valuation Tax is a levy on the value of the land unimproved by buildings or other enhancement. The method is already used by insurance companies each year when they calculate your home insurance premium - they separate the cost of a total rebuild of the property from the value of the land itself.

The unpopularity of raising corporate or personal income tax has been a straight jacket constraining Labour's thinking on how best to invest and grow the economy.

Most people are surprised to find out that the myth of the crowded little island is just that - a myth.

Public demand for better services requires increased revenue, but international market competition for capital and labour drives down the ability of any one country to raise either corporate or personal income tax.

If government is so keen to let local people have a veto in stopping wind farms, why does it not allow local people to say no to fracking?

Understanding government can be a complex business. The stated reason for a policy and the real reason for it are rarely the same.

The degradation of natural resources such as forests and freshwater has removed much of the resilience that societies formerly enjoyed.

Climate change brings pressures that will influence resource competition between nations and place additional burdens on economies, societies and governance institutions around the globe. These effects are threat multipliers.

We as politicians have to understand that the greatest threats to our security are no longer conventional military ones. You cannot nuke a famine.

You cannot send battleships in to stop the destruction of a rainforest. But you can spend money on clean technology transfer that enables countries to bring their people out of poverty without polluting their future.

It is hard to imagine a world without bees. It would be even harder to live in it.

When I was a child my mother used to pay me half a crown - 12.5 pence - to wash her car each week.

Climate change is a threat to the conditions in which our economy can function at all.

Like air pollution, flood risk is a threat that government should be protecting us against.

The less money you have the more likely you are to live close to polluted roads. Most of us cannot choose to move further away from a main road or add another 40 minutes to our commute so that we can live in a quiet, clean, leafy street.

Years of government inaction on air pollution has got people thinking that the state cannot even protect basic public goods like clean air.

Climate change is real and anthropogenic; and the 5th Assessment Report of the IPCC has left the deniers little room for manoeuvre, but they are swiftly morphing into a new breed that accept the climate is changing but like to suggest this may have positive benefits.

Whilst the developed world may say it wants to see much greater commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, this may only be politically feasible if there is strong support for adaptation measures in those countries at greatest immediate risk.

Adaptation is the forgotten word of climate change.

The media when it focuses on climate change at all, does so in terms of carbon emissions and how to reduce them. Only rarely do our leaders advance arguments about adapting our environment and our economy to the effects of climate change that are already inevitable.

We all know the principle that the polluter pays? Well one day I got to wondering why it is that the polluter seems to get away with it quite so often! Then it occurred to me that if the polluter is going to pay, somebody needs to tell him how much. The proper valuation of natural capital will enable us to say how much.

GDP has been a con perpetrated upon the poor of the world: a measure of economic activity and not of actual wealth. What it masks is the way in which we transform their natural capital into our consumption through international rules that regard the ecosystem services upon which they rely as mere externalities.

Making the most of global trade opportunities does not mean transitioning to a low-tax, deregulatory, 'Bargain Basement' economy. It means developing a robust Industrial Strategy intertwined with a strong trade agenda.

We want trade agreements that aid development and increase prosperity, growth and productivity at home and in our trade partner countries.