Green Party | ukwatch.net

Caroline Lucas elected Green Party's first ever leader

tim — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 14:00:07 +0000

Last night, on September 5th, the Green Party made an historic decision. We elected our first leader. This result, achieved after years of exhaustive internal debate, cannot be underestimated, for three reasons.

Firstly, as I’ve said previously here on OurKingdom, I believe our new leader Caroline Lucas MEP to be the most inspirational, intelligent, passionate and relevant politician in British politics today. Faced with the looming triple crisis of the credit crunch, potential climate catastrophe and a peak in oil production that is causing energy prices to sky-rocket, the Greens are the only Party bold enough to take a stand and say what needs to be said, whether it be popular already or not. Caroline has embodied that spirit for over a decade, spearheading our Party in Europe and increasingly on the national stage.

Secondly, our election of Caroline as Green Party Leader (by a thumping 2559 to 210 margin over her opponent, actor Ashley Gunstock) and of my Norwich Councillor colleague Adrian Ramsay as Deputy should provide electoral momentum within Brighton Pavilion and Norwich South respectively, two of our very strongest target seats prospects. In Pavilion, Caroline’s Westminster target seat, the Green Party took 30 per cent of the vote to Labour’s 25 per cent at the last local elections, a share we need only to hold in the next general election to win, taking the seat from New Labour’s new candidate and finally making the crucial breakthrough into Parliament.

Likewise in Norwich South; in the 2008 local elections, the Green Party came first, with 33 per cent of the vote, fully three thousand votes ahead of Labour, meaning that Adrian Ramsay would be elected, by defeating the deeply-unpopular (and increasingly-desperate – about losing his own seat…) Blairite loyalist Charles Clarke.

Lastly, but most importantly, this is a kind of ‘Year Zero’ for the Green Party. The next couple of years are the biggest opportunity the Greens have had for a generation. This is the time when the Party wakes from its (sometimes) navel-gazing slumbers and takes British politics by the scruff of the neck. Our adoption of a proper leadership structure, and our election yesterday of this superb leadership team, is a clear, visible sign that we have professionalized our presentation, and that we are ready now to step up and deliver what so many voters want us to.

The Green Party offers the electorate the only genuine political alternative to the profit-before-people, public-service-privatising, neo-liberal parties of the post-Thatcherite programme that all three of the ‘main’ Parties largely share. We provide a politics of hope, of ideas whose time have come, of inspiration, and the leadership framework offered by Caroline and Adrian will allow the Greens the prospect of converting the strong support that we have already enjoyed in many local and Euro elections into a step-change move forward in next year’s Euro-elections and a Westminster win the year after. A leadership team of Lucas and Ramsay will – as I have said here before and maintain with redoubled conviction today – change the face of British politics forever.

I cheered to the rafters the result announcement last night; because it is the start of something deeply deeply important and necessary.

Why Greens should vote for Ken

tim — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:31:58 +0000

Whenever I hear cynics complaining that politicians nowadays are all in hock to vested interests and unprepared to show leadership, I respond with two words: Ken Livingstone. London’s mayor has made the UK’s capital a world leader on environmental and transport issues – often in the teeth of determined opposition from the media and the political Establishment. If he loses the 1 May election to the charming Tory buffoon Boris Johnson, it will be a tragedy both for London and for global environmental politics as a whole.

Ken is that rare thing in today’s world: a politician who is prepared to lead rather than follow public opinion. If the congestion charge had been put through new Labour’s focus groups it would never have happened. Opinion polls were dead set against the scheme right up until it became a success, at which point most people switched allegiances or argued that they had actually been in favour all along. In 2004, the Conservative Party’s mayoral candidate, Steven Norris, pledged to abolish the congestion charge – and lost. Now, even Boris says he wants to retain the scheme, although in what form remains unclear. The progress of the congestion charge has been keenly watched from abroad: New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is planning to introduce a similar scheme in Manhattan.

Livingstone has been much attacked – particularly by such critics as the London Evening Standard and the NS’s Martin Bright. But Livingstone is by far the best-qualified candidate to run London – and from an environmental perspective, this is even more the case.

While Johnson is on record as opposing the Kyoto Protocol – as the Green candidate, Siân Berry, has repeatedly pointed out – Livingstone helped bring together big cities in the United States to keep the Kyoto flame alive during George Bush’s disastrous presidential reign. Livingstone has forged partnerships on all sides. His London Energy Services Company, which aims to make decentralised energy solutions mainstream across Greater London, is a partnership with EDF Energy, whose parent company operates nearly 60 nuclear reactors in France (Ken is strongly anti-nuclear).

As mayor, Livingstone set up the London Climate Change Agency to co-ordinate the capital’s response to what he identifies as “the biggest long-term challenge facing humanity”. The mayor’s Climate Change Action Plan aims to reduce CO2 emissions by 60 per cent by 2025 – to my knowledge the toughest targets adopted by any major political entity anywhere in the world. These targets would – if emulated by governments internationally – go most of the way towards solving the global warming problem. That written targets are already backed up with practical achievements makes them doubly valuable: London is the only major city in the world to have seen a shift from car use to public transport, and with large-scale investment in bike lanes cycling has increased by a heady 83 per cent. (In the country as a whole, cycle use is still flatlining.)

The contrast with Johnson could hardly be starker. The Tory candidate is still waffling on about recycling and planting trees, suggesting he is stuck back in the light-green era of the 1980s, despite his much-trumpeted credentials as a cyclist. Though he says he will “make London the greenest city in the world”, this turns out to be more about parks than emissions. Johnson’s manifesto says that he will keep Ken Livingstone’s climate-change targets – but there is a lack of both consistency and enthusiasm running through his statements. While both Ken and Boris oppose a third runway at Heathrow – today’s litmus test for climate-change credentials – Boris supports the construction of an entirely new airport somewhere in the Thames Estuary, on the grounds that “London’s airport capacity has to expand”. That doesn’t sound very climate- or environment-friendly to me.

While loyal Greens will no doubt wish to support Siân Berry’s candidacy, I wholeheartedly endorse her and Livingstone’s call for Labour and Green voters to put each other’s candidates down as their second preference.

Let’s keep Boris in the TV studios by all means – he’s a gifted entertainer – but let’s keep him out of City Hall.

Greens On Trial

Ellie Keen — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 22:48:42 +0000

There is a party, ostensibly of the left, that has more than 100 councillors (and rising), holds seats in the European Parliament and London Assembly, and might just drop an electoral bombshell by securing its first MP in the next general election. It’s called the Green Party. But for reasons either of jealousy or good socialist sense, it is regularly hauled up before the Court of Left Opinion, suspected of being overly electoralist, unduly white, middle class, and Not Sufficiently Left. It doesn’t even have factions that hate each other.

Confusingly for the presiding judges of the court, none of this seems to matter too much to the public jury, who are giving favourable verdicts to the Greens in growing numbers. Quietly, unassumingly, the Green Party of England and Wales has been making strides over the past few years, propelled by the ever-increasing urgency of the climate catastrophe.

Nevertheless, Red Pepper proposes a retrial – a trial by media, after a fashion.

A party of the left?

One of the main reasons why the left is suspicious as to whether the Greens _ can be counted among its number is that it contains many people who simply do not associate themselves with the British left and its glorious history of defeat.

One such man is Chris Rose, the party’s national election agent, who points out that ‘many Green Party members wouldn’t like to describe themselves as left. If we positioned ourselves as explicitly left it would be dangerous, with no guarantee of success. We need to keep our reputation on the environment.’

But London Assembly member Darren Johnson, who is not on the left of the party, takes a different view: ‘I’m not a socialist but I feel comfortable about being on the progressive left. Not the far left – we never will be. But we’re the serious party of the left and a potential power broker working with centre left parties, like the SNP in Scotland and Labour in some areas.’

One thing is beyond doubt. Whether or not they see themselves as left, the Greens have a manifesto as radical as any other, based on sustainability and equality, which if implemented would constitute nothing short of a revolution. Their espousal of an end to economic growth is unique, and has resulted in attacks from parties who believe in either capitalism or the traditional Marxist model of growth leading to a world of plenty. Instead, the Greens promote economic localisation, and say wealth should be measured not in GDP but in overall wellbeing.

And the party’s policies stretch far wider than the environment. They would (if they could) make income tax more progressive; replace VAT with eco-taxes; replace benefits with a non-means tested citizens’ income for everyone; increase the pension; nationalise the railways; welcome asylum seekers; stop the privatisation of council housing; reverse the privatisation of health and education; scrap PFI; scrap prescription charges; scrap tuition fees; scrap ID cards; scrap nuclear weapons and scrap wars.

Coalitions

So far so good. But other leftists squeal that when it comes down to electoral politics the Greens can be bloody uncooperative, as when they refused to make a pact with Respect before the last general election. Darren Johnson is defiant: ‘We often get criticised by left groups for standing against them, but they can’t even sustain coalitions with each other! It would have been a disaster if we had had a coalition with Respect – look where they are now.’

But hang on. The Greens do form alliances on councils – and have even been known to work with Tories. Most controversial was a coalition with the Conservatives and Lib Dems on Leeds City Council. The Greens eventually pulled out over plans for a new waste incinerator in 2006, after two years, but in many other places the Greens co-operate informally with other parties, including Tories.

Chris Rose doesn’t care: ‘We say none of the mainstream parties are worth anything. So, if the situation demands it, it doesn’t really matter which one we work with, just what the outcome is. We can’t sit on the sidelines forever.’ Others on the left of the party, like the party’s male principal speaker Derek Wall, are much less keen on such arrangements and are clearly embarrassed by the Leeds example, but in a decentralised party they have had to learn to live with it.

The potential for such unholy alliances goes further than just the council level. In December David Cameron announced that he wanted a ‘progressive alliance’ with the Lib Dems and the Greens to push for decentralisation. They rejected the offer as a publicity stunt, but it pointed to a new and unexpected problem for the Greens – they’re suddenly very popular with the other parties.

For Caroline Lucas, MEP for South-East England and the party’s female principal speaker, this is a double-edged sword: ‘If the mainstream parties really were going green we’d react with delight, but there are no signs that it’s anything more than words. In fact it’s dangerous that they are using the rhetoric without taking action – just look at Labour with coal-fired power stations.’

‘But on the other hand, look at how our vote has gone up since Cameron started talking green,’ she says. ‘I think people are savvy, they see through the empty words, but they are alerted to the issues and go looking for the real Greens.’

Darren Johnson believes the existence of the Green Party over the years has contributed to people taking the environment seriously, but that this is not enough. ‘We have put pressure on the other parties to green up their act,’ he says, ‘but we aren’t just a pressure group. In terms of making things happen you need Greens elected – not necessarily in government but in a position to really push the agenda.’

Concrete green advances

For Chris Rose, what matters is the outcome – the ‘need to make concrete green advances’. He points to Kirklees and London as examples.

Five per cent of all the solar energy generated in the UK is concentrated in Kirklees, the west Yorkshire borough that includes Huddersfield. The Greens hold four of the 69 seats on the council, which is under no overall control. This position has been sufficient to put some of their ideas into practice. Their latest success is a scheme for 30,000 homes to receive free cavity wall and loft insulation. The policy was voted through on a combined Green, Conservative and Lib Dem motion and means households will receive £400 of insulation measures free of charge. The project is funded jointly by the council and private company Scottish Power – something that might alarm many on the left, but which most Greens seem comfortable with.

In London, the Greens’ two Assembly members have found themselves in a pivotal position. Since Labour lost four seats in 2004, mayor Ken Livingstone has had to rely on the Greens to get his budgets through each year, giving Darren Johnson and Jenny Jones great bargaining power. They claim the credit for tripling the cycling budget from £21 million to £62 million and increasing the climate change budget for greener homes from just £100,000 to £12 million in four years.

Electoralist?

So the Defence can present the court with evidence of creditable achievement. But now the Prosecution brings a new charge: electoralism. Chris Rose still doesn’t care: ‘We need to ensure that in everything we do we make the maximum electoral advantage. I’ve been on plenty of demos but I’d rather put people in power who don’t need to be demonstrated against.’

Even some on the left of the party, like health spokesman Stuart Jeffery, would prefer more electoralism: ‘I do a shed-load at grass-roots level in Maidstone, like Keep Our NHS Public and community groups. We’re not wholly electoralist. We’re probably not electoralist enough. We should be more targeted and systematic.’

Perhaps one of the reasons why many Greens aren’t too bothered about being called electoralist is that they’re getting pretty good at it. In last year’s local elections the party increased its number of councillors by 20 per cent to 110. This year, in May, the party expects a further 10 per cent boost to that number, and is looking to increase its London Assembly representation from two seats to three.

But what the Greens are most excited about is the prospect of their first MP. Their sights are set on Norwich, where they are likely to be the second biggest party on the council after May; Oxford, where uber-activist Peter Tatchell will stand as a Green candidate in the next general election; and most importantly Brighton, where Caroline Lucas stands a real chance of winning.

In the Brighton Pavilion constituency at the last general election, Keith Taylor finished third for the Greens with 22 per cent of the vote, only marginally less than the second-placed Conservatives. Support in the city has been increasing ever since – 27 per cent in the European elections; 30 per cent in the locals; and 41 per cent in the last council by-election before Christmas. Added to that, the incumbent Labour MP is standing down.

‘In theory 26 per cent would win it,’ says Chris Rose, who really does care about this. ‘The big worry is that the Tories will come through. So we need to convince progressive people in Brighton to vote Green not Labour.’

Greens hope the Brighton electorate will be inspired by the significance of the choice before them. On Caroline Lucas’s election leaflets the appeal ‘Help us make history’ is emblazoned across a picture of the Houses of Parliament. ‘All the evidence suggests that once you get the first Green elected to a council or authority, you break the credibility barrier and more follow,’ Lucas comments. ‘Remember Labour’s first MP was elected in 1900, and by 1924 they were forming a government.’

First past the post

One of the reasons why the Greens have so far failed to break through that credibility barrier at the national level is the first-past-the-post voting system. In Germany, and more recently in Ireland and Scotland since devolution (where there is a separate Green Party), the Greens have fared well under proportional representation. Ironically, the experience of these successes suggests that the barriers erected by the electoral rules might be one reason why the English and Welsh Green Party tends to be more left than its European cousins, which have often been sucked into the prevailing system.

But ideological purity has limited appeal against success, so in Brighton the Greens are thinking tactics. The obvious response is to throw resources at the city. This will happen, but the Green version of targeting is less severe than that practised by, for example, Respect, which focuses relentlessly on a few core areas. At the last general election the Greens stood candidates in more than 200 constituencies.

Part of the reason is that the Green Party is more decentralised. Its 170 branches all sign up to national policy but retain a high degree of autonomy. But it is also a deliberate decision. Chris Rose explains: ‘In the British political system you’ll be laughed at if you only stand ten candidates. Unlike Respect we’re a proper national party.’

The first-past-the-post system is also forcing the Greens to tailor their political message. ‘The threshold is so much higher that we have to think about how we appeal to people who don’t see themselves as Greens,’ Caroline Lucas says. ‘We need to be far more creative in the way we communicate to win in a first-past-the-post election.’

But does this mean a compromise with electoralism, that the programme will be sanitised and weakened in the fashion perfected by New Labour? Lucas claims not: ‘Our roots are so strong in the social movements that there is no risk that our policies will be watered down. We offer integrity in our policy package, which is entirely decided at party conference. That’s what people buy into when they join the Greens. It’s just about how to communicate those policies.’

Leadership

This feeling that the Greens need to communicate better with the public and the media was the main factor behind an upheaval in autumn last year. In a referendum the party decided by 73 to 27 per cent to change its structure and adopt a leader, replacing the strictly non-hierarchical system of two principal speakers.

The debate echoed previous divisions between ‘fundis’ (fundamentalists) and ‘realos’ (realists), terms first coined in relation to splits in the German Green Party in the 1980s which have since been used to describe similar conflicts elsewhere. On the ‘fundi’ side was one principal speaker, Wall, and on the ‘realo’ side was the other, Lucas. ‘The leadership question was simply about how we get the message across,’ Lucas says. ‘Social change is still also about building on the ground outside parliament, but having a leader, a recognisable figure to articulate our views to the public, is not in any way incompatible with that.’

But others saw the move as substituting ‘the “eco” of serious ecological commitment with the dreary “ego” of conventional, shallow, careerist British politics,’ as Green Party London Assembly member Jenny Jones put it in the heat of the leadership battle.

In response Lucas insists that the Greens ‘should always be involved in non-violent direct action and consciousness-raising’. This, she says, is not in conflict with her own aspiration to be an MP. ‘Having a Green MP would scale up the impact of what the social movements and campaigns do outside parliament. It would be an incredible breakthrough. It would send shockwaves through the political establishment.’

Factions?

In any other left party such a fundamental question as whether to adopt a leader would have been marked by fierce faction fighting. But the Green Party is curiously lacking in this department. It has survived for more than 30 years without splitting up into five different sets of acronyms.

The closest thing to a faction in the Green Party today is a group called the Green Left. Conceived by, amongst others, Derek Wall, Peter Tatchell and Green mayoral candidate Sian Berry in 2006, the group’s job is to reach out to the wider left and link up with other socialists, with the added hope of bringing more left activists into the Green Party.

Through its email list the Green Left also loosely coordinates action in the party. It comprises hundreds of eco-socialist activists, but represents nowhere near a majority in a party of 7,500 members. Nevertheless, as Wall points out, he has been elected to the principal speaker position twice on a platform of ‘eco-socialism without apology’, suggesting that the group does have some organisational strength.

On a practical level Wall believes that Green Left has been ‘very successful in bringing through policies and bringing socialists into the party’. He believes passionately in forging links with committed activists of the Labour left, Respect (both versions), the Communist Party of Britain, the Socialist Party, and beyond to what he sees as the eco-socialist movements of Latin America, especially in Venezuela and Bolivia.

The unions are a particular focus. In February, Wall and Green MEPs Caroline Lucas and Jean Lambert addressed a trade union conference on climate change. The Green Party supports the TUC’s proposed trade union freedom bill, which would roll back Thatcher’s anti-union laws. And unions that are not affiliated to Labour, like the FBU and the RMT, have already funded Green Party activities. But Wall aspires to the example of Australia where Green-union links are far more developed, to the extent that construction unions have imposed ‘green bans’ and refused to work on certain developments on environmental grounds.

White, middle class academics

One obstacle to closer relations is the suspicion in the trade union and labour movements that the Greens are just a bunch of white, middle class academics. A cursory glance around the Green Party’s conference in Reading in February revealed that delegates were indeed overwhelmingly white and well-spoken; many of them boasted a Dr before their name; and an improbably high proportion of members seemed to have a perfect grasp of the most intricate details of green energy technologies.

But this is unfair. Something similar is true of most party conferences (with the exception of Respect), and the Greens had a higher proportion of women than is usually seen.

Away from conference, Greens insist they have been picking up support in ethnic minority and working class areas. The best example of this is Lewisham in south-east London where the Greens occupy six of 54 seats on the council. Darren Johnson, who has been a Lewisham councillor since 2002, as well as a London Assembly member, tells how he ‘started campaigning in Lewisham in the mid-1990s. By 1998 we got 30 per cent in my ward. That was the Guardian-reading middle classes, but it proved enough of a base to then widen our support. The big difference now is that we’re getting votes on the council estates, which make up about a quarter of the ward. You can’t get 50 per cent in Lewisham without significant support from ethnic minorities and the working class.’

Meanwhile, Stuart Jeffery thinks the class accusation is outrageous. ‘We’re not middle class idiots,’ he barks (as your intrepid questioner ducks for cover). ‘That’s quite offensive. I don’t mind being called an idiot but don’t call me middle class.’

The verdict

Back in the courthouse both sides have finished presenting their arguments. The judge bangs his gavel and addresses the court. ‘Members of the jury, it would be difficult for any leftist to read the Greens’ last election manifesto (Exhibit A) and not agree with the vast majority of it. At the heart of the party’s policies is a desire to stop all exploitation, not only of the planet but of the people too.

‘Yet the Greens will clearly never satisfy some on the left. They do have an electoral slant, they do encompass a range of political traditions and they do take a pragmatic attitude that, while refreshing, can lead to alliances with Tories.’

The jury retires. In the public gallery, Derek Wall looks nervous. Chris Rose still doesn’t care. In the visitors’ section, a fight breaks out between a member of Respect and someone from Respect Renewal.

The jury returns – it has failed to reach a verdict. The judge declares a retrial … by you, the readers.

Red questions for green solutions

JamieSW — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 17:34:55 +0000

Peter Tatchell argues that green is the new red and that socialists should join the Green Party. I agree that the green issue should galvanise socialists. Capitalism ‘trumped’ socialism by its seeming capacity for unlimited growth, even promising that through the market, everyone would eventually benefit and have their share of ‘people’s capitalism’. The ecological crisis has removed this illusion.

Where resources are limited the question of who benefits and who loses cannot be passed off as a by-product of the ’hidden hand of the market’ or failure of will, risk or effort. Within a resource-limited system, even if those limits are far off, the cruelties and inequities of global capitalism and its rather coyly admitted ‘market failures’ cannot be justified. In a limited system the case for the private ownership and control of resources is much more difficult to sustain.

Democratic control of the economy is at the heart of the socialist project. At its most basic, socialism represents the view that human well-being is the collective responsibility of society as a whole. Green socialism would extend the notion of well being to all other species and the ecosystems of the planet.

A common base

A major difficulty for the green movement is that while it unites around a critique of the abuse of the natural environment it does not have a common political position on which to base an alternative. Ideas have ranged from a return to hunter-gathering through local economies to market solutions.

From a socialist perspective both market and pre-modern solutions would be unacceptable, the former because they still retain a capitalist system, the latter because they are unlikely to be suitable for large-scale populations. Non-capitalist solutions at the local or community level are more possible but suffer from a lack of clarity about how the ‘local’ would be defined.

Geographically it is hard to say what is local (neighbourhood, city/town and hinterland, regional ecosystem, sub-national region, nation, sub-continent, continent?). Socialists are also internationalists (as are many greens) and human populations are now highly mobile, so the social focus of the local may be difficult even if it can be defined in ecological terms.

The economics of the local is also an issue for socialists. How would production be organised? Would there still be private ownership and waged labour? How industrialised would a local economy be? What would be the pattern of land ownership? Would there be a welfare system? Would there be a system of taxation?

How would the market, if any, function? Would a green economy reform market capitalism, exist alongside it, spread through it like a virus or confront it directly? What is to happen to the millions of people now living in the cities? These are practical questions that have been asked many times before but they all seem to point to a wider socio-economic solution than the green small scale.

Some green solutions may appear to challenge the status quo but mimic market solutions. For example, buying plots of land and aiming for self-sufficiency would seem to be a radical solution. However, buying land is an individualised response based on access to money or credit. In a limited system it is also highly unlikely there will be enough land for everyone.

’Natural’ virtue

Socialists would also question whether the fairly widespread green view of ‘community’, the local, the regional, the human-scale as having ‘natural’ virtue is justified. Historically human societies have shown a range of behaviours from benign to violent, open to restrictive, egalitarian to hierarchical, and most show evidence of male domination and a sexual division of labour, if not outright repression of women.

Much green thinking, implicitly or explicitly, proposes a ‘natural’ basis for action. From the deeper green perspectives to some relatively shallow ones there is an assumption that humans have strayed from a natural path of harmony and balance with Nature. In order to return to the true path it is necessary to draw lessons from natural systems, from indigenous peoples, from unpeopled wilderness or from some spiritual insight associated with natural conditions.

From a socialist perspective any naturalistic approach to human actions must be questioned. Why should there be harmony and balance in nature? It is perfectly possible to see humans as existing within constrained physical limits without assuming that there is any natural answer to guide human solutions. To paraphrase Marx, humans must understand the dynamics of their condition in order to be able to change it.

This is not to make the human-centred assumption that humans can ultimately change the conditions of their existence, but it is also not to assume there is a natural answer. Natural conditions are constraining but not determining. Human responses to them must be open to social debate and analysis, to a politics of human existence in nature. Socialists must maintain their materialist analysis that there is no (super) natural power in nature.

Socialism is about analysing the sources of inequality and ecological destruction humanity faces and looking for new ways of living that would enable people to democratically control their means of sustenance in a way that minimises human impact on the natural world and enables each individual to express their own creativity. Certainly a case can be made that socialists should join the Greens, but I do not think it is yet proven that Greens are the new Red.

Green is the new red

JamieSW — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 00:00:52 +0000

For two decades, the Labour left has been marginalised and on the defensive as New Labour has ditched socialism and the trade union movement. The Labour leadership has sacrificed socialist values and policies for short-term political gain; seeking office at the expense of social change. It has pandered to prejudice and irrationality on issues like asylum, drugs, terrorism, Europe and crime.

Internal Labour Party democracy is largely destroyed and members have no meaningful say about anything. Labour’s annual conference has been neutered, no longer deciding policy – every key decision is now determined by Gordon Brown and his inner circle.

This is autocracy, not democracy with party members reduced to cheerleaders and election fodder. Labour is now beyond reform, even if a majority of party members wanted a socialist agenda, the leadership would veto it. The era when Labour was the party of the left is over – forever.

New Labour has never been committed to the redistribution of wealth and power, the gap between rich and poor has widened since 1997 and Gordon Brown, like his predecessor Tony Blair, spends more time with millionaires than with trade union leaders. In the name of the ‘war on terror,’ the government is curtailing freedom and liberties on a scale unprecedented in peacetime. The snooping, surveillance state is fast becoming a reality, with ID cards, CCTV and widespread email and phone interception.

Labour’s great, historic achievement was the creation of the NHS and the Welfare State but Gordon Brown is gradually dismantling it. This creeping privatisation of health and education is something that not even Margaret Thatcher attempted. Blair and Brown have out-thatchered Thatcher.

The only alternative?

This poses a huge dilemma for the many good socialists who remain inside the Labour Party. Why stay with a party that isn’t even democratic, let alone socialist? What is the alternative?

The most significant left alternative to Labour is Respect, but it is politically compromised. Following in New Labour’s footsteps, it has an authoritarian, command-style leadership that has declared it is not a socialist party. They even support the monarchy!

The possibility of securing socialism through New Labour or left alternatives like Respect is zero. There is only one left option left – the Green Party, which is why I joined and why I am standing as the Green Party’s parliamentary candidate for Oxford East.

The Greens are now the most progressive force in British politics. With our radical agenda for grassroots democracy, social justice, human rights, global equity, environmental protection, peace and internationalism we are well to the left of New Labour and the Liberal Democrats.

Green is the new red

Green is the new red – an empowering political paradigm for human liberation which offers the most credible alternative to New Labour and the best hope for radical social progress.

Unlike the far left sects, the Greens are winners with a wide base of national support. We have dozens of local councillors and elected London Assembly and in the Scottish and European Parliament members. In the last European elections, the Greens won 6.2% of the vote in England, a promising and growing base of support from which to build an alternative radical politics.

If more leftwingers and progressive social movements united together in the Green Party, the Greens could do even better. We have the potential to become an influential electoral force, with the likely election of the first Green MPs soon.

A substantial and growing Green vote at local, regional, European and Westminster elections would pressure New Labour and the Liberal Democrats to adopt more left-leaning and pro-environmental policies. Perhaps, one day, the Greens might even hold the balance of power in parliament.

The Greens are not obsessed with elections and parliament, we are also committed to grassroots direct action protest and community empowerment. As Labour has moved from left to right, the Greens have shifted from centre-left to radical left, now occupying the progressive political space once held by left Labour.

The Green Party’s Manifesto for a Sustainable Society incorporates key socialist principles. Rejecting privatisation, free market economics and globalisation, and it includes commitments to public ownership, worker’s rights, economic democracy, progressive taxation and the redistribution of wealth and power.

The Green’s synthesis of ecology and socialism integrates policies for social justice and human rights with an agenda for tackling the catastrophic dangers posed by global warming, environmental pollution, resource depletion and species extinction.

The Greens recognise that preventing ecological cataclysm requires constraints on the power of big corporations. Profiteering and free trade has to be subordinated to policies for the survival of humanity. In other words, we need controls on business for the common good. Public interest must come before private profit. This sounds like socialism to me.

A red-green alliance

True, the Green Party includes people who are not on the radical left. The past political alliances and policies of some elected Green councillors have been a big mistake. Green Party members recognise these errors and are working to make sure they don’t happen again. There has never been a perfect left-wing party and there never will be but the Greens are our best hope.

Left-wing critics complain that the Greens are not a pure socialist party and are not working class-based. But look at the implications of what the Greens say; their goals and policies are often similar to the left’s – without the left-wing jargon. Despite a different way of expressing things, what the Greens advocate is, in essence, socialistic.

The Greens are building links with organised labour, we have a Green Party trade union group and Green conferences and public meetings increasingly feature trade union activists. Local Green councillors have been in the forefront of supporting union struggles, including the NHS and postal workers. With more leftwingers inside the party, the Greens would undoubtedly strengthen their ties to the labour movement.

Cooperation with the unions has great potential. Working with the Greens, the Australian construction and transport unions enforced ‘green bans’ on environmentally destructive big business developments that threatened inner-city working class communities. This shows how workers and greens can cooperate for the betterment of all.

The great virtue of the Green Party is that it is a grassroots democratic party, controlled by the ordinary membership with no power elite or embedded hierarchy. It is not a top-down, centralist party like New Labour.

Thousands of socialists have left New Labour in despair and disgust, many have already joined the Greens helping accelerate our leftward trajectory. If more socialists joined, the Green Party would move even further left.

Unlike New Labour, the Greens value idealism and principles. We have a vision of a radically different kind of society, which makes us receptive to left alternatives.

For all these reasons, the most effective way to advance the left nowadays is to join the Greens. Fusing the best of the red and the green would strengthen both strands of progressive politics, offering a powerful, united challenge to neo-liberal orthodoxy. The potential is there. Seize it. Now is the time for reds to go green.

Further information regarding Peter Tatchell’s campaigns www.petertatchell.net and www.greenoxford.com/peter