Green politics is transformative or it is irrelevant
Yesterday the media was alive with reports on Green Party Leader Natalie Bennett’s interview performances.
This was, of course, entirely unrelated to the fact two senior politicians from the corporate controlled political parties had been caught offering to sell influence. Still, the interviews didn’t show Green politics in its best light – focusing on how a massive programme of house building would be paid for. And they were a platform for the usual mainstream attacks on Greens: that our politics would require too much of a change from the system we’ve got.
This morning on the Today programme the line of attack was that “Greens should be just that: a party about the environment”. Of course this ignores the reality that Green politics has never been so one-dimensional as to be just about the environment. More importantly it is an attempt to force the Green Party away from the fundamental heart of Green Politics: that you can’t divide environmental problems from social and economic problems. We know that the solution to the environmental crisis is the same solution as that to social and economic crises: a fundamental change to our economic system that puts people first.
The attack from much of the media is that we can’t tell them exactly what the world would look like after we’ve freed ourselves from corporate control. It is the same attack used on the Yes side in the Scottish Referendum. Could we answer 500 questions about what the world (not just Scotland, the world) would be like after a Yes vote? And of course we couldn’t. The fact that many of the questions couldn’t be answered about the world after a ‘No’ vote was irrelevant, if you want change you need to be able to provide precise details of what effect that change will have. And for a while the Yes campaign, and particularly the SNP played along with this. Scotland would be exactly the same as it is now, only with lower corporation tax. One senior member of the Yes campaign told me that we couldn’t say we were anti-cuts, because that was ‘activist language.’
By trying to win independence with a marketing campaign saying that change would mean no change, we lost the referendum.
Greens must avoid that trap. We must learn from the period in the referendum when the Yes side gave the British establishment an almighty fright. This was the period when the Yes side talked about how Scotland could be different, and how the world could be different. We know that Green policies are popular. And everyone knows that we need more housing. These are transformative policies. They can’t be explained in the terms of the current system. But everyone (outside the bubble of corporate controlled politics) knows that the current system is broken.
There will be voices calling for a retreat from bold and popular policies like Citizens’ Income and a massive programme of investment through house building. Many who feel more at home with Greens boxing ourselves into our comfort zone and talking exclusively about allotments or cycling will argue that is what we should do. The result will be a return to the periphery, to the comfortable margins. This election offers the biggest chance for change in decades. That change will be transformative and we must not shy away from that. Greens need to be at the heart of politics and the heart of change.
We need to keep championing the changes we really need: an end to austerity through investing in much needed housing, a £10 minimum wage, and taking the railways and utilities into public control. A media used to politicians bought by corporate interests won’t like it, but the electorate will. More importantly the people on the brunt of austerity need us to stay true to our principles. We have to build a new politics, free from corporate control that can solve our economic, social and environmental crises. Now is the time for a transformation. The case won’t be easy to make, but we must not stop making it.
Why hasn’t anybody noticed Caroline Lucas going around making things worse for Natalie? She did this with an extremely unhelpful interview on the Radio 4 Today programme harmful to both the GPEW and Natalie. Regarding Basic Income, Natalie has been taking much of the grief from the media to defend this party policy; this is what Lucas said, “The basic income is not going to be in the 2015 general election manifesto as something to be introduced on May 8th. It is a longer term aspiration; we are still working on it.” Later in the same interview Lucas even claimed that the Greens were a “small party” and only really existed to put pressure on Labour to be more progressive. So folks vote Caroline Lucas in Brighton Pavilion and Labour everywhere else.
So she got brain freeze at an interview. Big deal. At least she’s not a manipulative liar.
Excellent. This is the key: “We know that the solution to the environmental crisis is the same solution as that to social and economic crises: a fundamental change to our economic system that puts people first.”
We can all have a bad day at the office, but that is not the point. What really concerns me is that the Green Party’s “offer” does not seem essentially green at all.
What key policies does Peter McColl want to see emphasised?
“… bold and popular policies like Citizens’ Income and a massive programme of investment through house building”
” … the changes [that] we really need: an end to austerity through investing in much needed housing, a £10 minimum wage, and taking the railways and utilities into public control”
These are good policies, and I would and probably will vote for them when the time comes. But I can’t see how they are essentially (inherently, distinctively, whatever) green. I think they are best desribed as “New Old Labour”, a phrase that for me sums up the GP’s current electoral “offer” and strategy.
Why do we want green politics to be “transformative”? Is it because people often don’t seem to be nice to one another, and it would be nicer if they were? Or is it because we fear that within a space of time which is historically short and evolutionarily minute, circumstances on this planet may have changed so radically that there will no longer be many or even any opportunities to discuss social justice and struggle over it. The one planet we have may by then no longer be habitable for most of the life forms that have grown up on it.
Already we are well into creating the third great species extinction event to have occurred on earth, and the first to have been caused by the human species. Simultaneously we are in the early stages of provoking catastrophic climate change, a process which at any moment may be accelerated by positive feedback loops that at present we only dimly understand or even recognise.
Some time between now (yes I mean now, today) and let’s say 2050 – scarcely more than a single human generation – these two ongoing and accelerating disasters will certainly have picked up so much momentum as to be unstoppable, and by then will be feeding off and stimulating each other through more unpredictable positive feedback mechanisms. Truly, we are the world’s first endangering species.
If, as Peter says, the “fundamental heart of green politics” is that “you can’t divide environmental problems from social and economic problems”, why do these seemingly ulta-high-priority policy areas never seem to get a mention? Do we think (I really must stop saying “we”, but it is very hard) that we will get into power first and then bring it up on the afternoon of Christmas Eve or in August when people are away on holiday? Who does that remind you of?
No, Peter’s contempt for the “comfort zone” of allotments and recycling and cycle lanes and yes even wind turbines is actually an attack on a “straw man”. It is actually the social policies that are much easier to talk about, in comparison with the real “environmental issues” – the degradation and imminent breakdown of the planetary ecosystem, caused by human behaviour.
But with only a few years left, if indeed there are any, where does the GP’s responsibility lie?
Dave
I think you make a very fair comment. The issue to me is that we can either be a ‘voice crying in the wilderness’ full of the best of intentions but completely ignored as people deal with the fundamentals of just living, or we can offer an alternative that is not too far out there but is working towards ( forgive me ) the common good. That includes the environment. I’m just working through Tony Juniper’s book “what nature does for Britain” and am happy to fully sign up to the manifesto he identifies as I suspect most candidates will! The drive towards a citizen basic income will help towards refocusing society on wellbeing rather than growth..can we do enough in the timeframe you describe, I don’t know BUT I rather be trying than ignoring what we are doing to the planet, after all it will live happily ever after without us…the same cannot be said the other way around.
Regarding re-nationalizing certain activities as as ‘Green’ policies. That is true.
All businesses that are not aspirational or luxury must compete to the lowest denominator.
To get a CEO job in the, those in charge must intend to act without morality.
They may dress the sheep up as lamb a little, but the winner will have the best price. That means that if you can evade tax and pollute pollute to win. The result of that is tighter budgets to allow people to live slower and do more productive work like being a nurse or GP.
If they can hike up the price as long as they can get 30 ministers to pass a loosely related bill…they must.
IF they can fire lots of staff and then get the private sector to offer locum staff..they will.
This all adds to the lack of security. lack of security leads to panic working. Panic working leads to greater GDP. But it’s no way to live and there is no underlying confidence which to conserve and help.
I actually believe that their is a capital based solution. I also think that Citizen salary is a sure fire way of of producing a massive disenfranchised entitles 25 year old 6 child families causing trouble
We should expect a society of mutual responsibility.
We need the innovative, yes greedy wanters, to take risks and create exciting opportunities.
But these people have no place running railways, hospitals, building houses, energy and water. The ownership of these things is not an area of innovation. Inventing the products is. Buying the products and using them is not.
If there is a step to be taken, and a new logic to be accepted…the only one you will get into the mainstream is the privatization of basic necessities. We can repair that two ways. We can tax wealth ties up in basic necessities..and use that tax, incrementally over several years to buy the shares back. Or we can buy them back, with prited money.
We need some rules on printing money. But printing it, lending it to a bank and then borrowing it back from the bank with interest is not one of the ways.
I would actually create a state bank that offers flat 4% tracker mortgages.
Gosh, someone needs to re-explain why Basic Income Scheme (i’ll stick with the old name) has always been a central plank of Green policies. Briefly, yes it is most definitely Green. It is fundamental to a post-growth society as it liberates people from ‘growthist’ enforced labour. Removing one of the drivers of forced growth will help to remove pressure on the planet. And by freeing people from enforced labour, we can all have more time to do something better with our lives. To go back to the 70s, ‘the Time of Growth is at an end. It is the Time to Bloom’.
Oh, and Labour folk absolutely HATE it! An exchange from earlier today:
Labour’s view of Green Party’s Basic Income scheme https://storify.com/orchid_b/labour-s-view-of-citizens-income
I’m afraid you are completely wrong Dave, and you’re falling into the exact trap Peter mentions of dividing social and environmental policy. These are not competing policy areas.
Capitalism has destroyed our ecology by putting profit before people and planet. It has also utterly failed to resolve that problem through carbon trading schemes, because the master’s tools won’t dismantle the master’s house. It is absolutely clear that if we are going to stop the further destruction of our environment we need to change capitalism as we know it, at least. Things like nationalisation of transport and industry, the collective ownership of the means of production (but more importantly the means of distribution and exchange) are structures which we can use to end ecological destruction. In fact dismantling capitalism as we know it, so that we can incorporate ecology into our planning, rather than the profit motive being the only factor.
We all know this – ask any Green Party member if the economic system has to change fundamentally to save the planet, and 90% will say yes. And yet, bizarrely, we are the only party that tries to separate our policy into ‘environmental’ and ‘social’ (and for some reason ‘social’ policy includes economic policy).
So when you say that nationalising the railways, building houses and the Citizen’s Income aren’t ‘green’ policies, I’m afraid you are completely wrong, not only because ‘green’ does not simply mean ‘ecological’ but also because these policies are essential to preventing further destruction.
Mike, I’m afraid that what you have written is nonsense, and pernicious nonsense at that, because as far as I can see you have mounted an argument against what you would LIKE me to have said, since that is so much easier than arguing against what I actually did say.
Some points:
* Capitalism has not, yet, “destroyed our ecology”, if it had we would not be sitting at our respective computers typing, we would probably be crouching in our respective holes wondering where next week’s food was going to come from.
* If I say, as I did and do, that the need to address “the degradation and imminent breakdown of the planetary ecosystem, caused by human behaviour” is at the essential core of green politics and is missing or largely missing from the messages currently sent out in GPEW-controlled electoral work, how exactly am I splitting the “environmental” (not a word I like in this context) from the “social”? Why isn’t “caused by human behaviour” sufficiently social for you?
I ACCEPTED (sorry for the caps but I am trying to get your attention) Peter’s argument that the “fundamental heart of green politics” is that “you can’t divide environmental problems from social and economic problems”, BUT went on to ask “why do these seemingly ultra-high-priority policy areas [ecosystem breakdown, catastrophic species loss] never seem to get a mention?”
After all, the GP’s Philosophical Basis begins like this: “We believe that: A system based on inequality and exploitation is threatening the future of the planet on which we depend, and encouraging reckless and environmentally damaging consumerism.”
In my post above I went on to CHALLENGE Peter’s straw-man theory that it is easier and more comfortable to advocate green “environmental” policies than to put the focus on green social policies.
I CONTEND that exactly the opposite is true: because the voters’ mindset and the media’s prejudices condition them to expect the presentation of social policies then social policies are relatively easy to put forward in a way that commands a hearing, whereas ecological policies (as opposed to the environmental trivia that Peter lists) are unexpected and thus tend to be unwanted, and so rejected or passed over. The GP is making a weak, misleading case because it finds that easier to do.
I mustn’t rabbit on, but bearing in mind that we now have somewhere between no time at all and a single human generation to completely TRANSFORM people’s values (yes, of course I eccept the word) so that they will consent to and approve of swinging the supertanker that is the global economy around to face 180-degrees away from where it is now heading, how do we evaluate the short-term impacts and efficacy of the following social policies?:
* Nationalising the railways: It’s the same railway system, rebadged, now run by UK PLC. And we have foregone the opportunity cost of whatever we had to pay for it (unless we create the money with QE!) Gradually we could strengthen the sytem and increase its capacity, over perhaps ten years reducing overall emissions per passenger- and tonne-mile a bit. This would enable us to slightly mitigate and so slightly delay the emissions crisis.
* Building houses. Lots of emissions here. Try researching the manufacture and use of cement. Repairing houses, and targeting job-creation initiatives on the parts of the UK where there is already a housing surplus, might be more beneficial.
* Basic Income (a policy that I actually supported even before I joined the GP!): given that the citizens’ values (deep values, not surface opinions) haven’t changed yet, what would they spend the money on?
On the need to build new houses, see this, which I assume is just an example of a larger problem
http://www.channel4.com/news/horden-county-durham-bedroom-tax-one-pound-housing
I liked this. Greens need to be bold now, attack, and stop trying to park the bus in front of their policies. The easy answer to ‘Why don’t you stick to the environment?’ is this: The main argument pro-growth is always ‘What about the poor? No-growth is OK for you middle class radicals, but you are condemning them to permanent poverty.’ So if you believe, as Greens do, that we are nearing the limits to growth, the ONLY way out of poverty for them is to take resources away from the rich: Socialism.
The corollary is the trad left question: ‘Why can’t you just be socialist and forget about all this middle class environment stuff?’ Here the answer is what you’ve pretty much said in the article, that environment problems usually hit the poor hardest, so that environmental & social problems are inextricably linked.
So yes, I too would like to see more broad-brush campaigning from the Greens. More basic principles and less detail on the bean counting, which is impossible to predict anyway.
I’m in my late 50’s and have not been politically active till now but have become so frustrated by the current politics I joined the greens and have been selected as a candidate for North Dorset.
the state should be about providing a safety net to protect the weak and vulnerable, promoting justice, equity and equality and ensuring we are safeguarded from external and internal threats, including environmental.
Ideas such as the universal basic income is one that needs serious consideration. By making sure everyone has the basics will benefit carers, farmers, crafters, community workers as well as the ‘benefit scroungers’ so beloved by the mainstream political classes. using community investment trusts so local communities control their own destiny with regard to renewables, housing etc rather than being imposed upon from afar and the removal of the market from public services to ensure quality and accountability go hand in hand are things worth fighting for.
Natalie had a bad day. She should have done what any politician would have telling the interviewer “you’ll have to wait for the Manifesto” then gone on to blame everyone else for all the problems we currently face. She tried. To err is human to forgive Devine, And to seek forgiveness priceless.
1,700,000 people on Zero hours contracts is the crime not tripping up!
Apologies for the poor punctuation and lack of capitalisation, I’m blaming my touch screen keyboard playing up!
Yes – this is the voice that is needed – the call for transformation – Labour are dancing in the Tories shadow afraid to step out of the narrative they have established as ‘mainstream’. There is a hunger and need for a radical narrative for real change which will attract support. I’d like to hear this voice more clearly in Green Party materials and interviews.
This article seems to be totally avoiding the elephant in the room, which is the fact that Natalie Bennett is single-handedly destroying all of the Green Party’s hopes for the up-coming general election.
I fear that Citizen salary is an trick driven by clever few wolves in sheeps clothing who plan to derail the progressive movement in it’s infancy, splitting the progressive vote.
Half will vote green because they feel part of something. The other half will go Lib/Dem or Labour or one of the other fringe parties.
All you had to do was keep it simple and offer honesty and accountability for MPs, Bankers. But the party elite have boycotted #VoterConsumerRights.
Tragic waste.