The Prime Minister has given in and announced the moratorium on taxes desired by the ‘yellow vests’.
For Laurent LANQUAR-CASTIEL, “the end of the five-year term has just been marked by yielding to the pressure of the yellow vests.”
Emmanuel Macron yields faster than François Hollande! Like Hollande’s five-year term, where any possibility of reform was destroyed after the ‘red caps’, it will now be difficult for the government to undertake fundamental reforms. Only superficial measures will therefore be considered.
Just as with Jean-Marc Ayrault in his time, a way out will need to be found for Eduard Philippe: with the municipal elections in sight.
Only measures benefiting the most affluent have been implemented: a term for the rich and ‘at the same time’ for the powerful.”
The Government confirms its anti-environmental shift: France is ‘Reversing’. France is embarrassing itself and losing all environmental credibility by trying to lecture others, turning its back on COP24, failing to meet its commitments, and being unable to foster a popular ecology, an ecology of solutions, relying solely on carbon taxation.”
It must be said that the environmental policy was poorly initiated, serving only to hide a tax increase without any ecological commitment in return. We are still waiting for the ‘historic decisions’ promised by the executive. To be acceptable, the tax increase should have been counterbalanced by strong proposals for the neglected middle classes.
But none of that was considered: no development of alternatives to cars was proposed: neither improvements in daily trains nor public transport, nor economic incentives for alternative modes (tax credits, tax reductions, positive taxation…), nor facilitation to encourage using cars less (carpooling, teleworking, public transport pricing…), nor holding companies accountable for their employees’ travel. In short, a vast emptiness: in these conditions, ecology is necessarily perceived as punitive and fuels the most reactionary and dangerous attitudes.”
The environmentalist laments: “The Government is regressing environmentally: it locks the change in mindset and confines the working classes to carbon-dependent solutions, preventing them from anticipating any transition towards a post-carbon society.
Yet the message to convey is simple: ‘we encouraged you to develop models with no future today, like ‘all cars’ or intensive farming; we will support you in this necessary transition, and we must determine the solutions to be implemented together.’”
But consultation is indeed the last quality of this Government, decidedly technocratic and disconnected from society.
Laurent Lanquar-Castiel, Departmental Secretary of the Environmentalists.
