On Friday February 24th 2023 there was a special event at the LSE to mark the 50th anniversary of the Green Party. It was born as PEOPLE then became the Ecology Party before changing to its current one following the successes of Die Grünen Germany. The occasion spotlighted a number of deep concerns about the evolution of PEOPLE-Ecology Party-Green Party.
Failure to sustain membership
Some 25 or so other long-standing members who had played a role at a national level were there. One striking thing is the number present that actually were ex-members, including former public faces of the party such as Sara Parkin (in the background of the picture, wearing glasses). The departure of so many experienced ‘cadres’ suggests that all has long not been well inside the Green Party.
The pattern persists, with, at the moment, a seemingly high turnover of members. It would appear that many seasoned activists retain their membership more because there seems to be no alternative than because of deep enthusiasm for the party in its present state.
It is not just the loss of vital knowledge and skills that is so unsustainable. It is also the damage done to the party’s collective memory. It means that an ever smaller percentage of the membership remembers what happened in the past. It increases the likelihood that lessons are not learned and the same mistakes are made all over again.
For example, not many members will know what a failure, some six years ago, was the strategy of a ‘Progressive Alliance’ and, in particular, the virtually uncritical alignment with the Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn. The subsequent ‘Green Drain’ was especially damaging, with truckloads of members deciding that, if there were no really big gulf between ‘Red’ and ‘Green’, they might as well join Labour. Thus, when, as likely, the strategy is proposed again (most likely under that well-worn banner of ‘kick out the Tories’), there is a very real danger that debate about it will not be informed by past mistakes (including the disaster of the Richmond Park by-election in 2016).
Terf Out
Worse is the current wave of suspensions and expulsions from the party. To be fair, it was not the right occasion. That does not change the fact that there is an on-going purge, one driven by adherent of the toxic ideology of identity politics and especially ‘transgenderism’. Most members are, of course, in the dark.
They knew little, for example, of the dreadful Aimee Challenor affair (http://www.beatrixcampbell.co.uk/tag/aimee-challenor/). They know little now of the on-going attempts to drive out Shahrar Ali, (https://www.crowdjustice.com/…/sex-based-rights-vs…/ ), of current events in Sheffield (the suspension of Alison Teal and the wrecking of a previously very successful local party), the expulsion of former Green Women co-chair Emma Bateman (https://twitter.com/EmmaBatema…/status/1616165766528647184 )
But, most of all, they know little of the part played in this toxic story by certain prominent party figures. Some were there at the LSE event. They have never been hold to proper account.
Speed Matters
The 50th anniversary event understandably focused on the success side of the story of the Green Party, not least the number of councillors, though of course the party only has one MP in the form of Caroline Luca. When set against what needs to be done, it is a record of too little, too slowly. In many ways, the odds were stacked against the party and not just by the electoral system. Nor can the blame be simplistically put upon a biased media. The real barrier is mass culture and popular lifestyle preferences.
There is also, however, a history of lost opportunities and serial own goals. Just look at the huge amount of hostile comment on the party’s actions in popular networks such as Mumsnet (https://www.mumsnet.com/search?query=Green+Party )It needs serious examination if genuine progress is to be made. Yet there is little serious political debate inside the party, with many key decisions being made by cliques around national office. Thus most members know of other inroads into genuine green politics, not least the thinning out in the last party manifesto of references to climate breakdown in order to expand coverage of ‘identity politics’ matters (http://londongreenleft.blogspot.com/…/can-green-party… )
Green Line
There is, of course, the big question of whether there actually is a continuum of PEOPLE-Ecology Party-Green Party. Its immediate origins lie in 1972, with the publication of the ‘Blueprint for Survival’ and the MIT’s ‘Limits to Growth’, plus an article on overpopulation by Paul Ehrlich. Yet, now, it might be surmised that large sections of the GP membership do not understand or even reject what might be called the ‘Limitology’ perspective. More certainly, many deny that there is any problem with human numbers.
This dearth of green thinking is not confined to new members. One former leader, Sian Berry, with seemingly no dissension from co-leader Jonathon Bartley, referred six times in a speech to the national conference in 2019 to the “abundance” a Green government would create (a message totally at variance to that of limits, degrowth, and steady-state economics).
Those early Greens might have been a bit surprised to see influential groups inside the Green Party that deny the science of biology by asserting that people can change sex and should be helped to do so if they so desire. Perhaps it is a good thing that the Green Party changed its name from Ecology or else it might have been taken to task under the Trades Description Act. Denial of biology must logically lead to denial of, say, the objective realities of ecology, geology, entropy and so forth.
The ‘ideological’ makeover of the Green Party was epitomised by the rewrite of its philosophical basis in 2013. That original ecological foundation was further eroded. In came far greater emphasis on the maximisation of individual entitlements. The notion of ‘limits’ receded further into the background, replaced by fantasies of some Big Rock Candy Mountain where all dreams would come true.
Four Pillars?
At the LSE event, Caroline Lucas singled out the Die Grünen leader Petra Kelly for praise. The latter was indeed a remarkable person in many ways. But Die Grünen itself was more a coming together of assorted grassroots protest movements than the expression of a coherent ecological platform. It might be remembered that, of the original four pillars of Die Grünen, ‘ecological wisdom’ was but only one element. Another, social justice, potentially contradicts it.
Many Greens in Germany and elsewhere have been oblivious to the fact that delivery of more social justice — if measured in terms of construction of more and more new houses, schools, hospitals, public transport networks, factories, and so forth — could only come at the expense of environmental systems.
All of them would require, for example, huge amounts of steel and concrete (and, of course, much more, including sheer physical space). Yet all generate huge costs and finite in supply. Concrete, for example, is itself arguably the most dangerous material on Earth. If the concrete industry were a country, it would be the third largest CO2 emitter in the world. More space taken for humans must mean less for ‘non-humans’, ie other forms of life.
The dominant social justice discourse wrongly assumes that production for social use (eg public ambulances) does not incur similar ecological costs as production for profit (eg private cars). It would, of course, be social justice to try and give absolutely everyone the same material standard of living as, say, middle class Californians. But it would be the equality of the grave since any such attempt would well and truly bankrupt the Earth resulting in the equality of the grave.
We are back to that little ‘limits’, one are the centre of Ecology Party politics but now virtually absent from Green Party public discourse. It is, however, not the basic fact of life on Earth but all the more pertinent at the moment given that all the other main parties are hooked on the goal of what Sir Keir Starmer calls “growth, growth, growth”.
Changing politics, changing organisation.
It is certainly not the same party organisationally. It now has a national executive and formal leaders, a major transformation since the first days of PEOPLE. Here we come to the biggest irony of the LSE event. In the room were most of those who laid the foundations for the Green Party’s current structure. Yet, arguably, the reforms created by what was called Green 2000 group were doomed to failure such was the on-going opposition of a recalcitrant faction.
A more centralised structure included an expanding apparatus of full- and part-time staff on the national party payroll. There are now nearly 90 staff on GP contracts, 38 of them full-time. The bulk are in posts in the central party structure, not least national office.
At one level, such an expansion enables the party to do more. Yet it has also created a vehicle that could be captured by forces hostile to the politics of the sustainable common good. This is indeed what happened, partly facilitated by a special membership deal for students in the early 2010s
It led to an influx of young people versed in student union style politics and a belief in a kind of social justice that some, rightly or wrongly call ‘woke’. The Young Greens thus expanded and, in turn, received more largesse from the national party that further fuelled their activities.
They were aided and abetted by some of those present at the LSE event since the YGs represented a potentially big reservoir of votes when standing for national positions. It became more and more commonplace to play to this gallery. This can be witnessed at national conference whose sessions are more like some infantile student union debate than the deliberations of a mature party.
Critical was capture of two committees, Standing Orders and Discipline. For most of those 50 years, they had had no great significance. Increasingly, however, they became a means to shut out unwelcome Ideas (ie political ecology) and remove oppositional individuals (some noted above).
Whilst mulling over this history, the image that comes to mind was that of the way Stalin used what naïve opponents thought were just administrative posts to gain a stranglehold over the Bolshevik Party and thereby eliminate obstacles to his political will. Perhaps this is a rather extreme comparison yet it remains the case that there is a drive by a small faction, to ‘makeover’ the party.
Back to basics
It would be a serious error that all was well in the garden back in the days of PEOPLE and the Ecology Party. It certainly wasn’t. But the problems inside the Green Part are now going from scratches towards gangrene. We need a real green fight back if the party is to be relevant and effective in the coming period.
The Green Light 