Bristol’s Greens have declared war on the bargain

Share this article

A century ago you had to be rich to get any kind of choice over your clothes. And if you weren’t in the upper echelons of society you could forget going on a foreign holiday. Today, mass production ensures there is an abundance of clothes to choose from at all budgets, and cheap flights have brought trips abroad within broad reach. This is a miracle for the consumer, but the Green Party disagrees.

In Bristol, the Green-led council is cracking down on promotions for ‘fast fashion’, flights abroad and other ‘high-carbon advertising’. Airlines and clothes brands will face new restrictions on using council-owned bus stops and billboards to promote deals on their products and services. But the policy is wrong both in principle and in practice. And if the party’s proposed new restrictions on ‘socially harmful’ economic activity are anything to go by, then this is just a preview of what the Greens will do if they gain more power.

The Greens already have a dangerous amount of power for a party so determined to control how people spend their money. To Heather Mack, Deputy Leader of Bristol Council, advertising is ‘the art of manipulation’ while Green MP Carla Denyer lambasts promotions that ‘do not align with our community values’.

But much advertising helps people choose between products they already want to buy. If there wasn’t demand from ‘the community’ then there would be no point promoting them in the first place.

This is also a bit rich coming from a party that claims to want to reduce the cost of living. Indeed, party leader Zack Polanski has lamented that people can no longer save for a summer holiday because so much of their money goes on getting by. The Greens just want to make it harder to find that affordable trip in the first place.

Adverts are also designed to persuade consumers to switch to buying a new top from Next, say, instead of Primark, or to jet off with TUI instead of Ryanair. Stopping these brands from advertising deals simply makes it harder for less dominant players to make people aware of their offers and thus compete with larger firms. This just pushes up prices for everyone.

A 1972 study found that glasses cost about a quarter more in US states that prohibited advertising than in those with more liberal regimes. More recently, a 2021 study examined Dutch hotels that restricted booking platforms from buying search adverts against their names. Those hotels charged higher prices on their own websites relative to the platforms, which the researchers linked to customers finding it harder to discover alternative deals.

The Bristol rules also create some weird incentives. They target fashion campaigns offering limited-time deals and big markdowns. But neither of these has anything to do with emissions on its own. A retailer could slash its emissions and still face the same advertising penalty as a competitor who pollutes twice as much. Nor, incidentally, is cheap clothing necessarily disposable. Researchers at the University of Leeds tested 65 items of clothing ranging from under £5 to about £150 in price. They found that a T-shirt costing less than £5 was more durable than another costing 10 times as much.

And worst of all, Britain already challenges the assumption that lower emissions must mean lower consumption. Between 2007 and 2023, the UK’s consumption-based carbon footprint fell by 29%, including emissions embodied in imports. Over the same period household consumption itself grew by 18% after inflation. So we are already in the process of decoupling consumption from emissions. Those figures give us little reason to treat discouraging consumption as an environmental necessity.

Abundant low-carbon energy (think the nuclear plants that the Greens also oppose) and greater production efficiency are the routes to higher living standards and lower emissions. A war on discounts will make people worse off while weakening the competition that makes better products affordable.

Affordable clothes and foreign holidays are part of the improvement in living standards that economic progress has delivered. A party serious about making life more affordable should welcome competition to bring those things within reach of more people. For the Greens, it seems, the cost of living only needs to come down when they approve of how you live.

Share this article