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Lost in Transition

Ellie Keen — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 22:12:16 +0000

SCHNEWS fails to understand the logic of climate group

As global capitalism and its failing markets threaten to fall around our ears, it must be worth imagining what a different way of doing things might look like. And working towards it.

That’s what the Transition Towns (TT) supporters want to do. TT’s are a ‘think global act local’ strategy for fighting climate change first put forward by an permaculture academic, Rob Hopkins, in 2005/6 in Kinsale, Ireland. It was first exported to the UK in Totnes, Devon – and converts have been eagerly promoting the idea ever since.

And the message seems to be getting through. In the past couple of years the concept (and the leafleting) has been spreading around the country, nay, the world, with over a 100 communities signed up from all over the UK as well as Australia, New Zealand, Chile, the US and most recently, Japan.

The movement has also been hitting the headlines here in the UK recently, with just the other week a small town a few miles down the road from SchNEWS towers, Lewes, proudly launching it’s own currency to much media fanfare.

With such an emergent new force for social change, you’d think we might have mentioned it in SchNEWS before – it’s obviously long overdue for us to put the boot in, er we mean, provide an unbiased and dispassionate rational analysis of the whole shebang.

So what’s the big idea? Transition Towns (TT) make a good case for the need to change. They recognise the pressing threats of climate change and peak oil (OK, well, the end of super-abundant cheap oil we can agree on, at least – see SchNEWS 644). This means that the globalised, air-mile, oil-driven nonsense needs to stop and more locally based, lower carbon living solutions are needed. The question is, how are we going to get there? But they are not calling for major reform or revolution – the clue is in the name, folks! – they are looking for an ordered gradual switch over – a transition. The way they propose this should come about is a somewhat tortuous affair, with the resultant danger that the eco-system or global economic system (or both) may collapse in the meantime.

To start the process of your whole town, or city, being designated a ‘TT’, all that is needed is a small group of well-meaning committed do-gooders, usually PR friendly middle-class types, to form a Transition Group. This group then works on publicising themselves, arranging film showings, printing leaflets and networking.

Once momentum has been sufficiently built, the group can then hold a great ‘public unleashing’ where the plan goes ‘live’. As well as a wave of talks, trades and skills workshops and green-inspired local projects such as tree planting and small permaculture schemes, the main plank of the plan involves gradually formulating a Local Energy Descent Plan’ (LEDP), to map out how the local community might one day become more self sufficient, less oil dependant and much greener. If enough local businesses, people and councillors go along with it, or palatable parts of it, the town can officially adopt the mantle of a ‘Transition Town’ and brand itself accordingly.

Measures suggested include the laudable aims of reducing the reliance on multinational corporations for food and goods production, improving energy use and efficiency, increasing recycling, reducing car dependency and a host of other lefty-green objectives. It’s a ‘big tent’ which allows it to scoop up the efforts of a range of social change groups under one large banner.

So what’s the problem? Whilst it’s hard to be too disparaging – these are all people with the best intentions, attempting to actually take some sort of action as opposed to sitting idly by and waiting for the big collapse – and some change for the good is obviously better than none, there are some flaws in the thinking.

Firstly, TT acknowledge that they have no desire to do away with all the trappings of capitalist society – merely reduce local dependence on it, gradually. They avoid taking on the political roots of all the problems and concentrate on symptoms. A key aim is to get the local council on board. Which many have been surprisingly willing to do…up to a point. Local government itself is charged by central government with working out how to roll out various greenish initiatives, such as to minimise energy needs and increase recycling levels for example, and the LEDP overlaps to some degree with many of their own blueprints for the future – as long as it’s controlled and the results leave the status quo as little changed as possible, with power flowing upwards, private money still in charge of all those recycling facilities and a capitalistic model still underpinning the local economy.

So the council can now use the TT brand wagon to increase uptake of these plans on a wave of public enthusiasm, whilst simultaneously seeming uber green and championing the local over the national. Put this way, its easy to see why many a town hall bigwig are talking up the scheme.

Which explains why Lewes council are so behind the latest big venture in the TT vision of the future – launching local currencies. As people previously used to get hanged for such impertinence as starting yer own money, there must be a catch. And there is.

The Lewes Pound (LP) was unveiled last week with a windfall of media coverage. As global financial markets have been taking a beating, perhaps this was a model for the brave new world? Er, not really. Because it isn’t actually a currency at all. It’s actually an ingenious scheme using existing book token legislation. It involves effectively buying a certain amount of sterling (in Lewes’ case, £10,000) and then issuing vouchers to the equivalent value, accepted in local shops signing up the scheme.

Which many local shops in Lewes were of course only too happy to do – a welcome free boost to trade as consumers voluntarily pledge to spend their cash with them. Who wouldn’t? The idea is that the LP will increase interest in spending more cash locally, which in theory keeps more of the profit generated circulating locally, as opposed to being syphoned out of the community and into the pockets of global institutions (like Tesco, for example) and their shareholders.

Which is great, surely. Well yes, except that the vouchers are redeemable back into cash any time you, or a business-owner wishes – presumably for going shopping at Tesco or making more import deals with third-world tat suppliers.

And one of the stated aims of the year long test project is to get national chains accepting them – which seems a rather strange measure of success and contradicts the whole stated purpose.
Money already spent in local shops will continue circulating with little effect on the outside world. While OK for PR and raising public awareness of the explotation by global corporations, it’s not achieving more than affecting a few better-off people’s spending habits.

In any event, in Lewes, the big launch has not really gone as planned. Whilst there was massive interest and local flag-waving parochial support for the LP, the well-meaning urging of the TT organisers to keep circulating the vouchers and not change them back into cash has not exactly been heeded.

All the LP notes ‘sold out’ in hours… only to be hoarded and swiftly offered on Ebay for up to £40 for one Lewes Pound as the local populace immediately capitalised on the opportunity to indulge in some rampant currency speculation!

They reasoned that as there is a limited supply of individually numbered LP’s, they will in the future be highly collectable – and there have been no shortage of over-the-odds buyers, leaving the whole scheme looking somewhat farcical.

The TT group – having considered but eventually rejected the idea of selling LPs itself for £10 each in order to lesson the black marketeering, have now pledged to print up some more stock – although whether they’ll ever be able to afford to devalue the LP enough to out-bankroll the speculators remains to be seen!

As does the overall effect of the Transition Towns movement itself. Whilst we broadly support many of its stated objectives, we cannot see how failing to plan for the much more radical reform of society needs will really work. Attempting to push the existing power structures into implementing some of the required measures will only ever lead to partial change and speaks mainly to people who want things more or less as they are, only slightly greener.

...But we could be wrong! To judge for yourself (and don’t let us put you off working for more localisation and all things green!), see www.transitiontowns.org

The Trapese collective’s in depth critique of the Transition Movement is available at www.sparror.cubecinema.com/stuffit/trapese

Burying the hatchet

Ellie Keen — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 23:07:01 +0000

If you decided to draw a family tree of the British left, you’d have a bit of a job on your hands. There have been so many splits and splinters that we’ve all ended up as ideological half-sisters or second cousins, surrounded by immediate family who warn us off having anything to do with our scatterbrained relatives.

You could see the Convention of the Left, then, as a sort of family get-together – one thrown by a well-meaning aunt to encourage us all to ‘get along better’. It has the potential to be the most important event for socialists for many years, which is why I’m going to be blogging from it for Red Pepper over the next five days. But can it really work?

Its organisers have certainly picked a good time and place. Setting it up as a counter-conference to the Labour Party’s debate-free rally is a great way to pull in some of ‘Old Labour’, and having the opening session right after Saturday’s Stop the War protest will draw in some activists who might not otherwise have made the journey.

And the convention is not a rushed response to the wipeout the left faced in the May elections, or even to the escalating economic crisis. It was announced more than six months ago: before London elected a Thatcherite buffoon for mayor and a full-fledged fascist to its assembly, and the rest of the country appeared to take a shine to David Cameron; before the consternation about whether British politics was ‘moving to the right’; and before certain over-eager lefties started declaring that the collapse of a few banks means ‘the end of capitalism’ (again).

The immediate issue it plans to tackle is not the rise of the right or the twilight days of that system we all love to hate – it is the collapse of the left, in the broadest sense. Labour’s support is a fraction of what it was even in Blair’s day, with the ‘core’ voters and the diehard members finally pushed over the edge by Brown’s head-in-the-sand tricks, and yet the left-of-Labour parties have somehow spectacularly failed to grow. Without going into the controversial details (we all know them anyway), it seems clear at least that we never managed to harness the energy of the anti-war protests five years ago into anything long-term.

Today, the left has another chance. It is only the Westminster system that makes it look as if the public somehow desire woolly centrism tied to fetishes for privatisation and war – in poll after poll, voters support the parties on the basis of ‘lesser of two (or three) evils’ politics while roundly rejecting their actual policies. The economic crisis has exposed the absurdity of having three neoliberal parties and no alternative: no-one can seriously maintain that the City is an ‘engine of growth’ when people are losing their homes because some speculators decided they’d make good casino chips in their game of roulette.

You don’t have to think very hard about bankers getting multi-million pound rewards for failure while food prices and energy bills go through the roof to come to some notion of nationalisation or ‘production for need’ (even if you don’t necessarily call it that). In an age when an economic crisis can get halfway around the world before the central bankers have even got their boots on, anyone can see that the problem is the system – the economic Wizards of Oz have suddenly found their curtains drawn back, exposed as the selfish frauds they always have been. The free market has stopped being simply unpleasant and started actually not working on its own terms. New Labour, the New Tories and the Cameron-lite New Lib Dems have no answer to that.

I’m not saying that ‘the revolution is upon us, comrade’, but it certainly seems that people are casting around for an alternative. The point of the convention is to organise a forum where we can see what unites us and how we can make tentative steps towards unity that will really work – the broad support the convention already has is an encouraging sign. I just hope the left will use its convention as a chance to bury the hatchet, not as a venue for that most destructive of socialist sports: sectarian point-scoring.

Need for a new social alliance

Ellie Keen — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:59:14 +0000

Interview with Susan George

FLORENCE, Jun 3 (IPS) – A global alliance of human rights activists, environmentalists and ethically run small enterprises is needed to save the planet from self-destruction, says Susan George, chair of the Board of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. The institute works “to contribute to social justice.”

Susan George, author of several books on development, now focuses on neo-liberal globalisation mirrored in the World Trade Organisation talks, international financial institutions and in North-South relations.

“Even if committed to the social and environmental challenges, none of these groups individually will be able to save our future, which is dominated by powerful economic forces that have a short-term view and, if allowed, will continue exploiting and destroying the planet,” George says.

We must recognise, she says, that change does not happen at an individual level. “Yes, I can change my light bulbs or reduce my carbon footprint, but we need a radical revolution that cannot be achieved individually.”

IPS Italy correspondent Sabina Zaccaro spoke with Susan George at Terra Futura, an exhibition of ‘good practices’ in social, economic and environmental sustainability held yearly in Florence. In its fifth year, Terra Futura was dedicated to strengthening social alliances — and trying some audacious ones such as alliances among private citizens and financial institutions.

IPS: Will the political-economic system really allow these alliances to happen?

Susan George: The market ideology works to separate people, it is a model that separates people on a competition basis. Social contact is the only response to economy that works all the time to prevent this.

People do not have to abandon their own field and commitment, but become used to working together. We are free agents, and if we understand that there’s an interest, that the vast majority of people can often no longer see where their interests lie — and that is part of the political fight that we have — then it is possible.

If you show to people that they have an interest in alliances, and this is true for farmers, trade unionists, small medium enterprises…then yes, I think it possible to make those alliances.

IPS: And who sets the rules?

SG: It is hard to get binding rules, it could be easier at the level of the regions. In many places this is not possible because of corruption, or because the will of the government is to prevent this kind of thing and allow transnational corporations to do whatever they like. I would say that that’s what the European Commission is there for — to allow finance capitals and transnational capitals to operate as freely as possible.

IPS: Can the ethical argument alone convince business?

SG: No, not at all. They say how green they are, how caring they are, but it’s rubbish to believe it…Corporations and transnational organisations preach self-green regulation; ‘we will bring the proper solution’, they say, but it is totally illusive.

IPS: So, what can be a convincing argument?

SG: The right arguments are the arguments of force you cannot argue with, you don’t discuss; you don’t say ‘please’. When you are in a position where you are able to dictate.

IPS: How?

SG: Well, through alliances! At a much larger scale, at a big scale…the problem is scale. Alliances must be as broad as possible. Economic power is way ahead of us, so to me the problem is, can we go fast enough, become important enough in order to put a stop to that, to escape the current impasse.

IPS: Does politics have a role in that?

SG: If it would be just politics, I would not be that worried, since things due over centuries sort themselves out; but with the environment we don’t have that kind of time. I don’t say it often in public, because I don’t want people be in despair, but I am often in despair.

IPS: Are you totally pessimistic?

SG: I am hopeful; the only thing you can work on is hope. Generally, politicians are the last to move, but we need to make alliance with them.

When politicians have an interest in something, they show that they are able to listen. Look at what happens with prices…and scarcity. Politicians and business do listen to that, they listen to the price of oil — they bring the wrong solutions, but they listen to price signals.

IPS: Can oil be replaced with agro-fuels?

SG: It’s criminal. There’s a lot of talk about using plants that are bio — but any plant is bio. I’ve just read that some of the species they’re intending to use are invasive species, they take over, and then will spread all over and take all the water out of the ground, and so on.

So, it’s always the same thing — you cannot have just a techno solution because there’s the entire environment that you have to consider. I am not an agronomist, but I would refuse any introduction, any crop until the impact of that crop on the rest of the environment has been studied. You cannot just say ‘Ok, this is good, we will harvest it, and we will do ethanol out of it’, because you don’t know.

That’s also what’s wrong with GMO (genetically modified organisms) seeds. They only look at the plant and what that plant is supposed to do, to repulse insects or whatever, but they don’t look at the whole of the environment, it’s not their task.

Scientists are perfectly able to make a plant that can repulse insects, but they have no knowledge at all of how the birds, the butterflies, the worms, the bacteria, will react. (END/2008)

Susan George is a Fellow and Chair of the Board of the Transnational Institute. Her latest books are La Pensée enchaînée: Comment les droites laïque et religieuse se sont emparées de l’Amérique [Fayard, 2007], to be published in English as: Hijacking America: How the Religious and Secular Right Changed What Americans Think [Forthcoming, Polity Press 2008], and We the peoples of Europe [Pluto Press, 2008].

Race History Made 36 Years Ago

Ellie Keen — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 22:10:03 +0000

On a balmy evening thirty-six years ago, a motley crew of suited businessmen, Black power activists, academics, journalists, community activists, members of the Lords and Commons and tellers from the Electoral Reform Services made their way down the narrow steps into the basement room of Wren’s church, St James’ on Piccadilly. An hour and a half later as the businessmen, Lords and MPs slunk defeated into the night, the staff of the IRR and the membership, who had defeated the board of management by 94 votes to 8, made merry in the IRR’s annexe offices above the Chelsea Cobbler (the kind with one pair of hand-made boots in the window) on Sackville Street.

The vote of IRR’s members on 18 April 1972 to support the IRR staff’s execution of IRR’s aims and commend the coverage of its magazine, Race Today, was one of the most significant steps in British race relations.

Till then the study of race relations had been firmly in the grasp of the establishment, under the political sway of government and the economic control of big business. The number of writers on the subject could be counted on the fingers of one hand. There were no departments in universities, no equality programmes in local authorities, no Black people to be seen in the media, politics, church or civil society.

In a sense the battle at the IRR – over how it was funded and what knowledge it produced – could be seen as part and parcel of the battles that had raged through the universities during the sixties. But in another sense the IRR’s struggle was unique in that Black people’s experience of racism was so obviously at odds with the focus of the IRR, it had to bring about the collision. Black people were being criminalised by the police (the Mangrove trial had just taken place), Black children were being systematically failed by schooling (Bernard Coard’s How the West Indian child is made educationally subnormal in the British school system had just been published), racial violence, especially ‘Paki-bashing’ was rife, stories about brutality were being smuggled out of prisons, the patriality clause of the 1971 Immigration Act was overtly racist. But the Institute of Race Relations, aloof in its Jermyn Street headquarters, was still speaking the language of the gentleman’s club.

It was incumbent upon the IRR to be impartial, said the Board of Management, to give both sides of any argument. When, after much discussion, we managed to get a representative of Frelimo (fighting for independence in Mozambique) to speak at a lunchtime meeting, we were forced the next week to invite the Portuguese Ambassador. Similarly when we carried stories about police excesses in the monthly magazine, Race Today, we had to offer space to a senior policeman to put his point of view. The staff were neither seen nor heard by the Board. Only the director, his assistant and Company Secretary were present at Council meetings. After strong representations by the staff, heads of departments were admitted to meetings, though still without speaking and certainly without voting rights.

Though there were one or two staff members, particularly in the international research unit, who fought the IRR’s battle on a high ideological level – we must not take money from the capitalists, especially when they were committed to things like the Cabora Bassa damn project on the Zambezi. Eventually the terrain on which the staff united to fight were the liberal values of free speech and freedom of expression. At a meeting of the Race and Neo-imperialism Section of the British Sociological Association, an IRR researcher read a paper in which he critiqued the basis of Colour and Citizenship, the book from the IRR’s ten-year Survey on the basis that it served to make the power elite more powerful and the ‘subject (immigrant) population relatively more impotent and ignorant’. In future he suggested that immigrants being ‘surveyed’ should simply tell IRR researchers to ‘fuck off’. The book had been a best-seller, it contained all the recommendations for lobbying the government, and, its principal author, who was also the owner of Westminister Press, sat on IRR’s board. The board closed ranks and decided the researcher had to be sacked. When the staff persuaded Hugh Tinker, the director, not to sack him on the grounds of freedom of expression, the Board turned on the director as incompetent himself.

Meanwhile, Race Today had published an issue whose cover, according to the board, had cost its fund-raising programme thousands of pounds. The offending cover had on the back an advert for an anti-apartheid demonstration and on the front a picture of Lord Goodman (then negotiating for the British government with Rhodesia) and the caption ‘five million Africans say no’. The editor of the magazine should, the Board said, be sacked, the staff said no way. And now the staff took the issue to the general public by cultivating support in the press on the grounds of press freedom.

(It has to be remembered, that, in the tradition of its forebears the Indian Civil Service and the Royal Institute for International Affairs, the IRR was run by and for its Board of Management. The staff were seen and treated as minions, without voice or volition, carrying out the bidding of their masters, who, though technically answerable to a membership, were in effect, their absolute rulers.)

On 20 March 1972 the board summoned all its members to a meeting which was to sort out all the recalcitrant staff once and for all: the director was to be sent on study leave and Race Today shut down. The staff members present asked for a discussion and were refused, whereupon they summoned the whole body of the staff, who, conscious that the future of IRR was at stake, had stayed on in another part of the building after hours. Imagine the horror of Lord Boyle (former Tory minister), Michael Caine (head of Booker Brothers), David Sieff (of Marks and Spencer), Sir Frederic Seebohm (of Barclays Bank), and other luminaries of the business world as ‘their space’ was literally invaded by a horde of some forty angry staff (mainly women) who perched themselves along the side of the polished boardroom tables as they leant over to make their points. The ‘Lords of Human Kind’ had no experience of this kind of dogfight, they were never face to face with the hoipolloi like this. But their struggle to control the gaggle was to founder completely when the phone rang. It was the Financial Times, they were going to press and needed the story that they had been promised. The staff realised that they had been stitched up, the Board realised that their pre-emptive decision looked undemocratic, the Chairman decided to take the matters away from the board and present them instead to a meeting of all the Institute’s members at an Extraordinary General Meeting.

So that is what happened on 18 April 1972.

The changes to the internal workings of the IRR have been fundamental and enduring. And the impact of those changes will be celebrated later this year when IRR has its 50th birthday event on 1 November 2008. But what is important to recognise is the way in which that struggle so many years ago was to change the parameters of debate, policy, research and representation around race throughout the country. It is hard to convey now, in a context where the race scene is so diverse, how the IRR’s struggle influenced every quarter – trades unions, academic departments, newspapers, churches, the burgeoning race relations industry, social workers and other NGOs. In internal meeting after meeting, groups voted to support the IRR’s staff and held special meetings to discuss the issues thrown up.

Essentially the struggle at IRR challenged a multitude of race relations shibboleths: the ‘problem’ was not Black immigrants but White society; the government was not part of the solution but part of the problem; it was not a question of educating Black and Whites about integration, but of fighting institutional racism; it was not race relations that was the field of study, but racism; racism was a moral and political issue which necessitated taking sides; it was those who experienced racism who should be in command of the fight against it.

The reason that the battle at the IRR caught the public imagination is because it showed, too, that it was not necessary in the words of A. Sivanandan, who became director in 1973, to be ‘paralysed by our histories’. ‘We do not have to be at the barricades to be revolutionaries’, he wrote in the preface to Race and Resistance: the IRR story, ‘we do not have to be grassroots to be radical. To apprehend the social consequences of what we ourselves are doing and to set out to change them – is in itself a revolutionary act.’

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.

From Casino to Catastrophe

Ellie Keen — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The staggering display of unrepentant cheating, exploitation and avarice revealed in Robert Peston’s BBC2 documentary, Super Rich: the Greed Game shows just how dysfunctional the British economy has become. But this gilded age of selfish individualism is destroying itself. The US treasury has unveiled its plans to regulate Wall Street. Cautious it may be, but the message is clear, the casino economy is over. The neo-liberal version of capitalism that for three turbulent decades has been restructuring the British economy and society is coming to an end. The dream is dead, says Martin Wolf in the Financial Times: “the US is showing the limits of deregulation”. In Britain, the Bank of England chairman, Mervyn King says Wolf, “strikes a chord”. The problem of the credit crunch is not down to a few bad apples. It arose, he says, “out of the heart of the financial systems in the main financial centres”.

Britain will face acute problems in recovering a more equal, sustainable and fairer society. Large areas of the country have suffered social catastrophe and lost their economic base. Employment in these areas is sustained by high levels of public spending and is vulnerable to a change of government or an economic downturn. The Tories and New Labour, heavily influenced by economic liberalism, drove the process of restructuring the economy and society further and deeper than other European countries. We need education, health and welfare for social recovery, but their institutions have been damaged by market-based reforms. Staff are demoralised and their organisational cultures risk averse. Public service values such as care, trust and human relationships are marginalised by targets and measurable outcomes.

The crisis in our public institutions is reproduced in the political sphere. Political parties are held in contempt and MPs are accused of being self-serving. The weakness of our political culture and economic reliance on the City, makes it much more difficult to neutralise its political influence and damaging social consequences. As a predominantly service economy we cannot shift our priorities back to production in order to create stable and more equitable forms of economic development.

For the middle classes who have gained the most from the last few decades, the benefits of consumer affluence are now offset by anxieties over debt, the growing pressures and costs of education, the prospect of falling house prices, and the threat of economic recession. The fear of impoverishment in old age, and the burdens of caring for aged relatives, extend across the population. Compounding these is the threat of global warming. For the great majority of people, there are no individual, market solutions to these problems.

The Labour government’s response to the excesses of the super rich and the insecurity of everyone else is to fight the next election on the themes: “on your side” and “at your service”. The first is banal and vague, begging the question, whose side is the government on? The second sounds like a dull remake of Are You Being Served, a tawdry customer focused sitcom that no one will watch. If this is all it can manage then it’s going to lose the next election.

We need an alternative. It should focus on four issues: the economy, social justice, democracy and ecology. There has to be a new kind of relationship between social justice and security whose principle goal is ending poverty and reducing inequality. The principle of social insurance that was rubbished by government and markets alike now looks like simple common sense. The tax system needs reform to redistribute wealth.

The way to challenge the power of the market over society is through democracy. Electoral reform, enlarging individual freedom, promoting trade unionism and devolving power back to local government would re-energise individual and collective political agency. Climate change is the major challenge of the era. Tackling climate change and the end of oil will require a new green deal, a major development of our productive economy. It will need new hypothecated green taxes. Mutuals and pension funds could be used as investment sources. Over the longer term we need a green economy in transport, consumerism and new industries in recycling, insulation and renewable technologies.

The paradox of climate change is that the size of its threat is the size of the political opportunity to create a collective sense of purpose toward a common good. In a cynical age, a bit of idealism can go a long way.

Parties, Movements and Radical Change

Ellie Keen — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 14:28:24 +0000

I am constantly struck by the failure of the radical left to explicitly seize the moral high ground. The right (especially the evangelical right) are not averse to doing so when it suits them, yet socialism, internationalism, ecological sustainability, feminism, anti-imperialism all have very strong ethical foundations. Appealing broadly on key issues to a very basic humanity and compassion potentially connects us to audiences that for some years have been removed from radical left politics- the many people in various religious and moral camps.

This may cause some on the left to question long-held beliefs, such as on the use of violence, but that’s no bad thing. The enormous success of the London Citizens movement in bringing together trade unions and religious groups should be a lesson to us all. We tend to focus too much on detail and not enough on the big ethical issues underlying our politics. For example, half the world’s GDP is routed through tax havens which means half the potential tax revenues are lost. This is so grotesquely unfair to people who pay their taxes that it allows us to explain to them that there is enough money in the world- it’s just who’s got it and the tax systems set up to protect them that’s the problem.

Identify the issues

We need to identify the issues where there is real possibility of a broad anti-capitalist, anti-establishment consensus emerging in the UK (and internationally) and focus on these.

It is possible to change mass consciousness on certain issues in a relatively short space of time. They key then is to turn this into a permanent (or near to permanent as possible) step forward, ideally framed in law as well as in the popular consciousness. It’s been noted in other contexts how social attitudes to drinking and driving changed dramatically in a generation to one of outright hostility to such selfish and dangerous behaviour. The same is now happening on global warming and living within environmentally sustainable limits. Radical left activists must build the broadest possible unity around such issues and be at the heart of arguing for such transformations, using them to explain the links to other social, economic and political issues.

Respond rapidly and create permanent resources

Insufficient time and effort goes into translating successes into permanent acquisitions, not just ideologically but also physically and virtually. To be able to respond rapidly and effectively, the radical left needs embedded resources and infrastructure. This will take many forms such as resource centres, websites, socio-political networks and funding sources. Rather than forming another party or newspaper a shrewder investment may be to create and sustain permanent resources for the range of needs the radical left needs for its activities.

Remove the barriers

There are some structural issues that are critical barriers to progress for radical left politics. The most obvious is the electoral system. Proportional representation is no panacea but crucial if radical left politics is to enter the mainstream electoral and political arena. Another barrier is the party system and elections. The party system, especially in local elections, is a major barrier to making radical breakthroughs at a local level. The radical left needs to develop proposals and campaign to make it much easier for independent candidates and small parties to stand in local, national and European elections.

Recognise opportunities

As Hilary Wainwright hints in her article it is also crucial to seize any opportunities to create and sustain forms of local democratic debate and accountability as ongoing spaces. For example, for its own reasons this government has decided to promote participatory budgeting but is it just a panacea? No, current developments in Porto Alegre show this.

To incorporate local processes of structured debate and discussion about what needs to be done and how money should be spent locally would represent a huge step forward for the UK. Potentially it could raise debate about the need for structured discussion of the national budget and priorities, weaken the power of the traditional local parties to have exclusive access to this discussion and help reawaken interest in politics.

The crucial thing is for the radical left to recognise such opportunities when they arise and to seize them rather than sneer from the sidelines at the government’s motives.

This article is one of a number, in what Red Pepper describes as ‘not so much a debate as a collaborative inquiry’ on Rethinking Political Parties. Join the debate here.