This rift is particularly damaging for the Green Party because it has partly resulted in dramatic cuts in its environmental campaigning activities since 2015 in favour of building its network of coordinators and field teams devoted to winning elections.
The identity politics ethos of seeking benefits for ‘people like me’ has been extended into a career path for young identinarians as local and city councillors, elected positions or jobs in an expanding Green Party, which now has a staff of almost 90.
Meanwhile there is the growing Green presence in the House of Lords to aim for…. It is thought that former co-leader Sian Berry, an extreme transgender rights advocate is favourite to claim the third Green Party seat when it becomes available, if she were to be unsuccessful in defending Caroline Lucas’s current Commons seat in Brighton Pavilion.
While there’s nothing wrong with seeking electoral success, in the Green Party, it means that it is now largely absent from high-profile developments around climate emergency and loss of biodiversity.
Where is the Green Party in calling out the cause of the current major floods and severe heat waves, or discussions around strategies for decarbonising our economy or ensuring a just transition for poor, global boiling-afflicted countries?
The party leadership’s desire for electoral success has substituted tactics (in the form of the Target to Win formula ) for principles. It‘s meant that big politics such as climate emergency and loss of biodiversity are seen as vote-losers and sacrificed for local issues which are seen as being electorally popular.
In the 2022 local council elections, local parties were instructed to focus on housing, crime, public transport (at least green-tinged) and, for instance, making London ‘the most trans-inclusive city in the world’. In one constitutency, for instance, there was the embarrassing situation of the Labour Party talking and campaigning more about climate emergency than the Greens.
The Green Light 