The Green party plays no part in Labour’s progressive politics
No sensible observer of British politics in this election year is making a firm prediction about who will form the next government. There are at least half a dozen possible outcomes, before factoring in the vagaries of fate and the capacity of politics to confound clairvoyants.
However, there is a settled opinion that the outcome will not be a clear election win for either David Cameron or Ed Miliband. No Labour figure will publicly admit it, but the prospect of Miliband serving in No 10 is likely to rest on the support of other, smaller, parties and individual members of parliament.
The experience of the last 10 years should prove to all but the hopelessly naive that Respect, Plaid Cymru, the Scottish National party, or the Liberal Democrats are not part of some great unified ‘progressive tradition’. Labour exists, in part, because each of these other parties is wrong. In reality, each has demonstrated strong anti-Labour sentiment and performed political acts inimical to the people Labour serves. So any kind of arrangement which depends on the support of Liberal Democrats or nationalists must be clearly defined, and not rest on misguided belief that somehow we are all on the same side really. We are not.
But what of the Green party of England and Wales? In the tightest of election outcomes, the one Green MP may be an essential component in the Labour whips’ nightly calculations. As in 1976-79, each majority may be cobbled together with the parliamentary ‘odds and sods’, passing temporary but hugely disproportionate influence to each odd and each sod. Caroline Lucas, if she wins her Brighton seat again, may hold direct influence over a Labour government.
Of course there is the purely tribal argument against the Green party: every Green MP means one fewer Labour MP. The Green party campaigns against Labour and wants to see us defeated. They are not our friends.
Then there is the practical argument about the Green party’s judgement and capacity for reform. If we assess them on their actions in Brighton, where they run the council, they are revealed as incompetents and fools. Ask any resident of rubbish-strewn Brighton, with its pathetic recycling rates and gridlocked streets, and they will tell you what happens when a bunch of placard-wavers get put in charge of a major city.
But the most important argument must be about politics. Lucas is 1980s protest politics personified. To say her politics is unreconstructed is an understatement. She went from the exclusive private Malvern girls’ boarding school to Exeter University, graduating in English in 1983, just as Michael Foot’s Labour party was demonstrating the dangers of being out of touch.
How she must have shocked her Conservative parents back in Worcestershire! From her position of privilege she headed to Greenham Common, to CND, to the Green party and to every other fashionable 1980s cause. And then, and this is the important point, she stayed there. No political journey for Lucas. No compromise with modernity. She is the same T-shirt-wearing, getting-arrested, placard-waving student protestor she was 30 years ago.
There is nothing ignoble about being a campaigner, but you cannot be a protestor and part of a government at the same time. Government is about subtle statecraft, necessary compromise and the art of the possible. Being a Green is about ideological purity and impossible demands.
As Labour MPs looking for an end to austerity policies become more coherent, as exemplified by the recent joint demands on Miliband, Lucas becomes a greater danger. While she might not be the leader of her own party, she could in a minority or coalition Labour government be the leader of a rump of far-left 20 or so Labour MPs that hold the government to ransom in a way the United Kingdom Independence party tendency has Cameron. In arguing for an agenda that keeps Lucas’ one vote onside with the government they will be implicitly threatening the vote of all 20.
Australian Labor prime minister Julia Gillard faced a similar situation after 2010 when she signed a pact with the Greens in return for policy concessions. The problem was not merely that the tail wagged the dog, but that Labor MPs used the deal with the Greens as cover for their own unrealistic desires. Fear of upsetting the Greens and bringing down the government was a powerful argument for policies which Labor MPs knew were unpopular with their own constituents.
John Major showed, with his anti-European ‘bastards’, what happens when extremists and cranks wield influence over a weak government. It not only skews government policy away from the mainstream, it also creates splits and rancour which can last for decades. Remember that since Major called his anti-European MPs that rude name 22 years ago, the Conservative party has not won a general election.
It would be a disaster if Miliband as prime minister is reliant on such a deal, drawing his programme onto the rocks of extremism. The ensuing internecine battles over nationalisation, nuclear disarmament and economic growth would put Labour out of the game of serious government for a generation. If the lunatics are given a key to the asylum, we should not be surprised if the voters are less than impressed.
The best option is for Labour’s candidate in Brighton Pavilion, Purna Sen, to defeat Lucas on 7 May, and for Labour to win a working majority. That is what we are working for, and what remains possible. But, failing that, the Labour whips should view Green MPs just the same as Ukip MPs or Ulster Unionists: as political enemies belonging to a tradition alien to Labour, not friends sheltering under a slightly different banner.
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I’m not sure sneering at women in CND t-shirts is going to win over many activists. Attitudes like this from the Labour right are one of the reasons so many activists are deserting labour for the greens (and oh, the voters of Brighton are going to re-elect Lucas, polls strongly suggest, so this argument doesn’t really stack up either).
Starting to sound a bit paranoid here. Even the party that is closest to Labour ideals is now the enemy.
Any Green supporter that reads this will probably think: “brilliant. Look how much power the Greens could have over Labour if they win more seats.”
Caroline Lucas steered the EU Timber Regulation through the Euro Parl, in agreement with 28 member states. She did that by making compromises with big business in order to create a workable piece of legislation that now impacts world trade.
So she’s not exactly the unreconstructed diehard nutter that you’re painting. But a grown up politician who can get things done, and on the world stage. Compare that to someone like, well, John bloody Prescott.
A bit of basic research might have helped your character assassination attempt!
Admittedly I’m no Labour activist, but our country really is a bit fucked if this is what passes as trenchant political analysis.
“Being a Green is about ideological purity….”
What a ludicrous statement.
The Green Party are as much opportunists now as the Labour Party, hence I quit them in October 2014 after 11 years.
As you have pointed out, their minority administration in Brighton has been a disaster. Union-bashing in alliance with Labour and Tories, making cuts in services and supporting the outsourcing of NHS services.
Hardly ideological purity.
And in the Greenwich branch I was a member of, selecting 2 parliamentary candidates for the two seats in the borough with a combined membership of less than a year and zero track records of any green activity. But one is a token ethnic minority candidate. The other candidate just touts his services as a candidate to which ever party will have him.
Again, hardly anything that constitutes “ideological purity”.
The Green Party has changed a lot in recent years, and is now no more than a liberal bourgeois opportunist party, in the mould of the old Labour Party I was a member of in the 1980’s.
The old quote about the Labour Party not being a socialist party, just a party with socialists in also applies to the Green Party.
Many socialists, like myself have left, just as they have the Labour Party. Lets hope many more come and help build a real party of the Left.
This article just shows why Labour are in danger of going the same way as PASOK in Greece, PSOE in Spain and possibly Parti Socialiste in France. In fact Labour is already facing extinction in Scotland.
The Green Party’s unpopularity in Brighton is vastly exaggerated. When people outside Brighton assert this unpopularity they forget there is no actual statistics that bare this out. There is vocal anger towards the council in The Argus, a local paper similar to the Daily Mail. Usually over cycle lanes and 20mph. The Green’s probably will lose the council but this doesn’t mean the Green vote has evaporated here. The Green vote in the European elections held up.
The latest Ashcroft poll puts Caroline Lucas 10% ahead in Brighton Pavilion. Even in Brighton Kemptown and Hove either side and within Brighton & Hove City Council boundaries, the Green vote has doubled in the polls.
Comparing the Greens to the 1980’s old left is to completely misunderstand the appeal of the party. The Greens are abandoned the ‘big government’ centralising tendencies of old Labour in favour of a more ‘inclusive’ decentrist approach to socialism. Rest assured modern Greens understand political messaging, framing and how to spin a populist message (they have all read the New Labour playbook inside and out) – you are not dealing with the same haphazard, one man and his dog operation the Greens used to be.
A citizen’s wage plus legalised drugs equals a great programme – for anyone wanting to avoid work, live in a squat and smoke dope. At the risk of seeming hyper-critical, there may be some downside for the rest of us. The Greens are a real threat to the Monster Raving Loony Party. How will Howling Lord Hope come up with sillier policies?
“Govt is about subtle Statecraft”…intimating that anyone voting Green in May or who doesn’t agree with the prescriptions given in this article is ” an insensible observer, hopelessly naive, an extremist, a crank, or a lunatic” is getting a bit too personal and aint very subtle in my book.
You may just as well say they are a bunch of bastards and have done with it.
Who wrote this? A school kid?
This bleating from Blairite neo-liberals is getting tedious. The Green Part aren’t offering any extreme left policies, the problem is that Labour (especially Progress) have moved so far to the right, the Greens are simply filling the void
“Foe”, “odd”, “sod”, “not our friends”, “incompetents”, “fools”, “pathetic”, “a bunch of placard wavers”, “unreconstructed”, “extremists”, “cranks”, “lunatics”
Maybe someone at progress should have a think about why they let this author anonymously publish personal insults?