I'm from Bristol, which has a very prominent Green Party presence, and I'm the son of quite a prominent Green Party activist, so I grew up in and around the party and have been introduced to quite a few of their most high-profile politicians, such as their first and only MP Caroline Lucas. Their current co-leader, Carla Denyer, is someone who I used to stand with on picket lines before she was a politician - back in 2011 we got barred from Costa Coffee together when we protested against them forcing their way in on Gloucester Road (I was going to link to my blog at the time about that, but having given it a re-read I'm embarrassed to! It's in the archives if you want to find it - I apologise in advance for how incredibly cringe it is!)
Suffice to say, I have an awful lot of respect for the Green Party. I've campaigned for them, I've signed their petitions and I've voted for them at the vast majority of elections and democratic exercises since I've been old enough to vote. I also suffer from great anxiety and fears connected to climate change, so the Green Party's priorities are usually my priorities. But having a lot of respect for someone does not make them immune from criticism, and there have been quite a few times that I've also had quite a bit of scepticism about Green Party activity.
2019 was the year that I started getting a bit frustrated by the Green Party, having previously really appreciated their take-no-prisoners attitude towards the right-wing establishment. But when we had a really strong left-wing movement led by Jeremy Corbyn, I felt that this was often undermined by the Green Party. Corbyn was making all the same socialist arguments that Caroline Lucas had been making in Parliament for years, I felt that this was a really opportune moment to build strong alliances with Labour, but I felt the Green Party did not take them. If anything I felt that the Green Party allowed the Tories to dictate the terms of the conversation, continually taking the bait over Leave vs Remain and avoided focussing on the issues that actually mattered. This culminated in Caroline Lucas proposing a completely nonsensical cross-party consensus of all-female anti-Brexit MPs. I was very confused by exactly how this had come about - to this day, I'm still not clear if this was actual Green Party policy that had been voted on at conference, or Lucas' own vanity project. I wasn't clear why this matter had been turned into a gender issue - a lot of the MPs who Lucas approached about this consensus seemed to have been chosen purely because they were female and anti-Brexit, even if their voting records had been profoundly anti-socialist and anti-environment. Also, if Lucas wanted to make this about identity politics, it backfired when it was pointed out to her that all of her handpicked female anti-Brexit MPs were white. I say this as someone who's met Caroline Lucas and has generally been very impressed by her in the House of Commons, and to be fair to her she did later hold up her hands and admit that she'd messed this one up. I found that very refreshing, because most of the time we just hear them bluster around things and pretend their present positions are what they've always held - it's so incredibly rare to hear a politician say, 'I got this wrong and I'm sorry', and it showed an extraordinary level of honesty and integrity on the part of Caroline Lucas. Nevertheless, I still don't know what she was thinking. I feel the time she spent on that project could have been spent forming alliances with politicians who were actual socialists, rather than prioritising being anti-Brexit and being female. I think if she and the Green Party had been a bit more strategic here, it could perhaps have done a better job of overcoming the likes of Theresa May and Boris Johnson.
Come the 2019 election, I felt the Green Party continued to be more focussed on being anti-Brexit than on anything else, which resulted in them seeming more chummy with Jo Swinson and the Liberal Democrats than with Jeremy Corbyn and Labour. I found this an exceptionally harmful and damaging decision, for a few reasons. Firstly, although I voted Remain in 2016, I can respect the fact that the UK voted to leave the EU, and that continually campaigning against a democratic vote is not a good look (I'll also acknowledge on this that I said the opposite for quite a while after the Brexit vote, and campaigned to reverse the outcome. I'm not a hypocrite, but I'm capable of changing my mind and in hindsight I can see that I was wrong - our focus should have been on making sure that all our rights and opportunities were protected after Brexit, and if we'd done that maybe we wouldn't have had such a destructive Brexit as we eventually got). Secondly, I'm of the generation that supported the Liberal Democrats under Nick Clegg in 2010, and we were let down when he took the Lib Dems into coalition with the Tories. The protests over tuition fees at that time were the start of my becoming so politically active in the first place, and Jo Swinson was a part of that Government. She expressly ruled out ever supporting the socialist principles of Labour at that time, but she did not make such a rock-solid commitment to not working with the Tories. I didn't trust the Liberal Democrats then, I still do not trust them now, and the fact that the Green Party tried to make alliances with them was the main reason why, for the first time ever in 2019, I did not vote Green. I voted Labour, for my local incumbent Thangam Debbonaire, in spite of the fact that my friend Carla (the now co-leader) was the Green Party's candidate and in spite of the fact that I hadn't been very impressed by Debbonaire in the past.
On reflection, I believe I was wrong to vote Labour, and I've discussed this before. Thangam Debbonaire has proven a big disappointment, and until I moved out of the constituency last year I regularly wrote to her with various frustrations I had with her actions. I believe that I should have swallowed my pride and voted Green, in particular because the issues I had with the Green Party in 2019 were not Carla Denyer's fault (I don't know if she even approved of them). I've been delighted to see Carla become co-leader of the party - truthfully, I can think of no one better.
Having said that, I'm still not desperately impressed by the Green Party's tactics for election. It was recently announced that at the next election, for the first time, they plan to stand a candidate in every constituency seat in the country. I'm very glad to see them standing in more seats, and given how poorly both Labour and the Conservatives are performing at the moment, I genuinely hope to see them win more than their sole seat in Brighton Pavilion (which Caroline Lucas is standing down from anyway). However, standing in every seat in the country is in my opinion a complete own goal, and fails to take into account the circumstances of each seat. As I've written about previously, I believe that party politics is dead, and I'm a big supporter of OCISA, a campaign group that seeks to stand really good socialist independent candidates against establishment politicians - most particularly in Holborn St Pancras, where Andrew Feinstein intends to stand against Keir Starmer. If the Green Party would get behind campaigns like Andrew's, it would go some way towards making up for the fact that in 2019 they failed to support what was at the time a valid socialist alternative. If the Green Party seeks to split the anti-establishment vote in constituencies like these, I believe this could become a major obstacle towards their goal of climate justice.
Actually, my problem with the Green Party is the polar opposite of my problem with the Labour Party. My issue with Labour (its present incarnation anyway) is that it is run as an absolute top-down endeavour, where no one is allowed to express any opinion other than those which have been sanctioned by the leadership. The Green Party has the opposite problem - the politicians who represent it vary hugely in quality. As long as someone believes in taking immediate action on climate change, their views on other things can be wildly different from one another. Through our campaigns to improve services for the disabled in the Monmouthshire area, my partner and I have interacted quite a lot with Green Party councillor Ian Chandler, and I've written in the past about the difficulties I've had with Councillor Chandler's attitude, which has often felt quite dismissive of the needs of the most vulnerable (to be fair, they do now seem to be a lot more supportive of my partner's work than they have been in the past, so I'm really hoping something has improved there). But it's indicative of my point that although action on climate change and environmental matters generally is quite rightly the Green Party's core aim, that is not enough. It's possible to be in favour of these things, and still have views that harm the most vulnerable. In particular, there are some kinds of environmentalist whose views can slip into what is called 'eco-fascism' - the belief that the world is overpopulated, and that in the interests of dealing with climate change it would be good if large swathes of humanity died out (which is incredibly unfair, as the people who stand to lose the most from environmental degradation are those who have done the least to cause it).
Am I in support of the Green Party as a political organisation? Yes. Will I vote for them again in the future? Probably. Do I think it stands to improve a great deal under its current leadership? Absolutely I do - I have great respect for Carla Denyer, both from knowing her personally as a human being and from her political work, which includes causing Bristol to become the first city in the UK to declare a climate emergency. I don't know as much about Adrian Ramsay as I do about Carla Denyer, but I have faith that he's a very good person as well. However, that does not mean that the Green Party is always run especially well - in fact at times, I think it's been run abysmally. If something is worth doing, it is worth doing well, and the Green Party's work is more worth doing than that of any other political party in the UK.
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