Imagine Harriet Harman gave a speech in which she stated that there was little chance of the Labour party getting elected any time soon – or at all. Party members would be outraged: what on Earth would be the point?
No such concerns trouble Green party activists. Shahrar Ali, its deputy leader, blithely admits to making jokes of just that kind with new members, in his edited collection Why Vote Green. Never mind that the idea of going into politics is to change things; this is a party in which one and all are free to make light of the urgency of winning power.
Truth be told, it is easy to be intensely relaxed about electoral defeat if you are more than a few policies short of a plan for office. Why Vote Green boasts an array of what, at first glance, you might consider policies, only on closer inspection to realise that they are simply a set of desired outcomes, largely lacking a plan of action. Besides, how many people have time to grow their own veg?
The Greens featured in the book attempt to paper over the policy cracks by adopting a morally superior tone. And, after just a couple of pages, I was convinced that it is no way to win friends and influence people – even if you, like me, agree that decarbonising the economy sounds like a worthwhile ambition. Green politics is described as ‘a noble pursuit’, while we are told that a given issue is ‘worthy of our moral consideration’.
Of course, it would be unfair to argue that it is just the Green party which is prone to preaching lessons in morality at the expense of substance: the Labour party was at its worst, in the 1980s, using a language of values without bothering to translate them into a policy offer boasting popular appeal. Today, the Liberal Democrats are suffering the consequences of having to let go of the ideological purity that can be exploited in opposition. Iain Duncan Smith’s moral mission is such that he is still bent on implementing the universal credit, however disastrous the policy. Values are of little use to politicians – or the public trying to make up their mind on polling day – if they cannot usefully inform policymaking.
So it is unsurprising that the one member of the Green party to be elected to the House of Commons is no longer leader, and that Green-run Brighton council stumbles from disaster to disaster. The party is not serious about power, and, on the rare occasions that it has come into their hands, it is almost hypnotically inept at deploying it.
Unlikely though it is that a swing voter in a marginal constituency will pick up this book, there are surely Greens out there relieved to read that they have the ‘right’ idea of what an economy is for (spoiler alert: ‘growth’ is not the mot du jour). For anyone else, this book is proof that the Green party is in no hurry to move from protest party to party of government – and the media blows it has dealt itself over the past few weeks are not a coincidence, either. The concern for Labour is that all this does not add up to as unpopular an opponent as we might hope for.
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Felicity Slater is head of partnerships and events at the Fabian Society
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Why Vote Green:
The Essential Guide
Shahrar Ali (Ed)
BiteBack Publishing | 176pp | £10
The Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing.
I don’t think the Green Party’s fundamental problem is that they have values but no policies, I think it’s that their claimed values don’t match what they actually do.
They claim to be (almost) Socialist but when they finally get to run a Council what do they do? Attack their workers. They claim to be in favour of public housing but when Labour Councils build new Council homes do they vote for it? No, they demand that the houses have lots of impractical adaptations that are only affordable or of use to well-off people with disposable income and free time, and aren’t built in any actual location, lest it interfere with the amenity of those same well-off people.
In other words, the fundamental problem with the Green Party is their social base, which is the same as that of the Lib Dems. Plenty of “nice” people vote Green in local elections, reflecting their conscience, and Tory in General Elections, reflecting their interests.
The Green Party can claim to be a party with values of social justice all they like, but they’ll never implement those values because those aren’t the communities they work with day to day and whose votes they depend on.
That may seem a bit reductionist, and there are exceptions and qualifications, but in general and from years of experience, it’s fundamentally true.
Does it mention abolishing special schools, banning faith schools, outlawing wildlife parks?
At a fundamental level the politicker Shahrar Ali is not a green representative but betrays core principles of a genuine green policy. Due to this it’s insane immigration policies and the catastrophic effects that this will have on any conception of the sustainability of the United Kingdom (also within the context of their abject failure to even consider the fundamental problem human overpopulation) the party that he misleads is fundamentally THE LEAST GREEN PARTY of any major political group in England and Wales. UKIP and, yes, both the tories AND labour are certainly FAR GREENER.
The unavoidably sad fact is that countries with high population densities (such as many in Europe and exemplified by the UK) already have need to import vast amounts of food simply so as to feed their own burgeoning and inflating populations. Much of this food is already imported from a wide range of countries including those from which people are leaving. Many of these countries, especially in locations from Africa to Afghanistan, have exceedingly high birthrates. This is very clearly illustrated on the map of countries by fertility rate presented at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate .
In comparison, the relatively slow natural population growth of European countries remains much more closely in line with the rate of improvement in food production. Never-the-less, the population of the UK is already way in excess of the environmental factor of “overshoot”. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overshoot_(population) and https://populationmatters.org/documents/overshoot_index_2011.pdf
The UK is already far from being anywhere near a sustainable situation. This in even in a situation in which we use a relatively very small proportion of our agricultural area for the production of fuel. Our sustainability situation will be critical in any conceivable situation in which we may imagine the UK as being beyond its dependency on non-renewable resources. In short, we already have way to many people. Until we are in a situation in which we stop importing food, It makes no sense to import yet more people.
In comparison rates of population growth in many of the countries that people are leaving are way in excess of rates of improvements in food production techniques.
It also makes absolutely no environmental sense to take people from countries where per capita resource use is low and allow the import of such people into countries where per capita resource use is high. It makes no sense to import both people and food into the same densely populated areas. People should have support and opportunity in their own countries of origin. Destabilizing and prejudiced regimes that prompt attempts at migration should be opposed. Population concern organisations (such as at http://www.populationmatters.org/) should be urgently referenced and supported.
If anything potential migrants should be informed of the relevant facts regarding the global economic and environmental situation because, every migrant that makes it into countries like the UK, just adds to the problem of the global situation. Problems need to be solved at source. High stands of general education needs to be encouraged with particular attention given to the education and equal empowerment of women across the world, both because these issues are of fundamental importance for human rights as well as because the education and empowerment of woman has been proven to check the spiraling growth of population. Groups that oppose these principles and who act so as to displace populations, themselves, need to be opposed.
For the related David Attenborough documentary search on: How Many People Can Live On Planet Earth
Quote: ‘Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist.’ Kenneth Boulding
Whether we like it or not there are limits
I am a passionate green but I can’t stand back and see this wholesale ecological idiocy of this anti-green party. These anti-greens need to either return to practically environmental agendas or leave the party to those that will.
This man’s outputs have a notable absence of environmental content. Why the hell does he think he has a place in a group called the “Green Party”?