The Green Party election launch was a brisk affair, lasting all of 15 minutes. Carla Denyer concluded the session by declaring that the major Green Party priorities were “the NHS, housing, climate change and nature, public services and the quality of our water”. Other items mentioned included “practical solutions to the cost of living crisis” and a pledge to “make the tax system fairer”.
Does this really add up to a strategy to achieve the purposes of the Green Party?
Clearly, many of these declared priorities are not fundamental to our Party’s raison d’être. Its constitutionally–stated purpose is to “develop and implement ecological policies”.
Most conspicuous by its absence was the blatant failure to mention and challenge the pursuit of indiscriminate economic growth and to provide a “well-being without growth” perspective. This makes this Green Party appear a very strange one: it is the pursuit of economic growth, a fundamental goal of all other major political parties. That is the force behind so many of our current ecological and environmental crises.
How can any Green Party fail to challenge this, and not offer an alternative economic model?
And how can any Green Party fail to highlight the priority of the climate crisis, the urgency of bringing an end to the use of fossil fuels and the existential necessity to meet the 1.5⁰centigrade target limit under the Paris agreement?
But to return to the priorities stated at this launch, one is left wondering how the Party plans to achieve these things. Co-leader Adrian Ramsay has declared that “Green MPs will push the next government for bold action to achieve the real changes that are needed to confront the big challenges our country faces”.
So, were the Party to have its four target candidates elected, it is imagined that they will “backseat drive a huge Labour majority government” into agreeing with them most of the time. A beautiful idea, but wishful thinking. Labour’s present 206 MPs couldn’t enact their agenda against 345 Tories. So, what hope is there for the influence of four would-be Green MPs in a government with a potential huge majority?
A General Election presents a unique campaigning opportunity to publicise priority problems and put forward strategies for tackling them. But rather than do either of these things, rather than draw the public’s attention to key underlying issues and present real practical solutions in line with the Party’s own fundamental purpose, the Green Party has launched its entry into this election with a list of priorities cobbled together from every other major party and presented no plan for enacting any of it, other than to “backseat drive” a government it acknowledges will be ruling with a commanding majority.
What’s happened to the Green Party? How did it lose its way, especially when it is needed now more than ever ?
Your comments are welcome : TheGreenLightBLog@protonmail.com
The Green Light 