The recent Autumn Conference held in Brighton approved a GPEX-initiated motion, backed by the co-leaders, to ‘indefinitely suspend the Spring Conference until the party’s finances have improved’. The vast majority of members who do not generally concern themselves much with internal matters may well begin to ask questions when this news filters down to their local party.
And so they should. This is because whilst 555 votes were recorded, including a larger than expected number of proxy votes collected by the Young Greens and members of the LGBTIQA+ Greens, the motion ended up being approved by a grand majority of just one.
Whilst participation of fewer than 1% of members at such bi-annual events is not by any means rare, it is worth noting that the record number of registered members was 1247 at the Autumn 2016 conference in Birmingham; the lowest number of registered members ever was 642 at the 2013 conference in Brighton.
Equally unusual at this Autumn conference was the greatly reduced number of motions which made it into the Plenary Sessions. The Pre-Conference workshops time-table listed six A reports and 55 motions. These took place online between Monday 2nd and Thursday 5th October from 18.30 to 19.45 pm. They were relatively well attended with up to 50 members debating some of the more important or exciting topics.
However out of the number of motions which had made it through the prioritisation process onto the Final Agenda, a mere 19 motions came up for debate. In addition to these, one Late Motion to update the Standing Orders for the conduct of the AGM and one Emergency Motion calling for a public inquiry and a fraud investigation into HS2 were also tabled.
As an experiment, the AGM had been held online prior to Conference with a view to creating more Plenary Sessions time. But, disappointingly, it turned out to be inquorate. Back to the drawing board on that one !
You would think that a Green Party annual conference would deal with big-picture green issues and the important political concerns of the day. But this was perhaps too much of an unusual pre-general election gathering and it did not really do this either. Whilst the A5 report from the Policy Working group on the Climate Emergency was approved, the E023 motion entitled ‘Extraordinary Powers to meet the Climate Crisis’, aimed to amend the Climate Emergency chapter of Policies for a Sustainable Society and proposed by 16 members – including professor Rupert Read – was given the thumbs down.
Of the 19 D motions addressing the deep divisions within the party (on sex and gender in particular) only motion D06 seeking to promote Gypsy, Roma and Travellers representation in the GPEW was, in fact, debated. The top priority motion to disaffiliate from Stonewall conveniently – and for the 4th time – just fell off the agenda..
On the other hand, it could be argued that two issues that got pushed up the agenda had the effect of damaging party democracy whilst concentrating greater power in the hands of the leadership:
- firstly, our next internal leadership election was postponed on the grounds to avoid distracting our attention if a general election were called
- secondly, conference not only decided to cancel the Spring conferences until further notice but also voted to increase membership fees whilst the national party would retain capitations to local parties.
Oddly enough, no Treasurer’s report seems to be have been made available at this conference, nor was there any mention of the potentially eye-watering amounts of money needed to meet our legal costs, should the party lose the on-going discrimination court case and any further cases.
Very odd indeed.
The Green Light 