brighton alex sallons’ loose talk speaks volume

“What are the big campaigns of Caroline Lucas’ tenure as an MP ? “asks former Green Party councillor Alexander Sallons and suggests that “the lasting one seems to be Natural History GCSE, not exactly capturing the  zeitgeist…”.

Whilst  Labour seems to have shamelessly taken this option off the list of GCSE’s, such unwarranted comment towards one of the most respected, hard-working and lone Green MP for the past 13 years is both slanderous and hugely unfair.

Under normal circumstances, such post from any member would swiftly be brought to the attention of the Green Party Regional Council (GPRC) for consideration as a breach of the Code of Conduct and the blogger be suspended.

But this is not going to happen. Sallon’s piece “ The crisis of leadership in the Greens” is the voice of the dominant identinarian and trans faction in the party which runs the Green Party Regional Council and the Disciplinary Committee. It is the same faction which still refuses to respond to the Cass Review report and is opposed to any amendment to the Equality Act and control GPRC.

Its activists have captured and been running the party’s governance for almost a decade now, aided and abated by key members of the Leadership Team such as deputy leader Zac Polanski, Brighton MP Sian Berry, Bristol MP Carla Denyer and co-leader of the party, Baroness of Manor Castle Natalie Bennett and others.

Sallons therefore feels safe enough to say whatever he wants; he has ‘cover’.  

His blog is part of a choreographed campaign now fronted by ‘Greens Organise’  whose aims is to “change the direction of the party” whilst they seek to consolidate their grip on the Party Executive Committee and the Party generally.

Picking up on the views of journalist Owen Jones – now believed to have joined the Green Party- former internal communications candidate Sallons claims that the Party is in a crisis because of  “the lack of Comms out of the Green Party” and “the fact that the Green Party are terrible at communicating at a national  scale”.

Sallons concedes that in spite of being “dry, equivocating, boring analyses”, Green MPs are “ultimately sensible and correct”, but he then goes on deploring that this “doesn’t get people excited, it does not get people clicking, and that means it isn’t in demand”.

Sallons seems to have failed noticing the expectional results of the 2024 General Election and cannot have paid much attention to the significant increase in the main media’s coverage and interest in the Party ever since.

Expressing his frustration as to how long it will take to deliver any “change of direction” and the elections of a new leadership team, he also declares that what the team needs is nothing less than a “political ideology”.  

Given that the Green Party has always been and remains uniquely grounded in Ecology as a metatheory as developed in the Philosophical Basis and Core Values, there is only one explanation as to why any green party member would accuse the leadership team of not having “a political ideology”: members of this faction come from another ideology. They do not  subscribe to the Green Party’ ecological philosophy, its humanism and democratic values.

As if the purpose of this blog post was not obvious enough, Sallons can’t also resist to take a swipe at Executive Committee members who are genuinely concerned about the financial viability of the Party due to Court cases against the Party as he accuses them of being “more interested in commissioning moot legal advice than investing in the capacity of a beleaguered and underfunded Comms team “.

Focussing on the party’s governance structures, Sallons rightly notes that trying to reform the instruments of governance has taken almost 20 years and is indeed “getting ridiculous”.

But who is to blame for the party constitution being frozen in time and our inability to reform our instruments of governance ?. ‘Social justice warriors’ such as Sallons have had control over a Kafkaesque policy making process and all internal elections for almost a decade now.

In spite of a huge increase in membership in the last 3 years, the sad fact is that the number of unaccountable, self-appointed attendees – as opposed to representatives or delegates – has stubbornly remained at less than 1%. The reality is that it is in the interest of members of this faction to ensure that Conference decisions continue to be made by a very small number of participants.

As frustrated regular conference attendees have witnessed over the past few years, identinarians operate under the radar with their private social media platforms and What’s Apps and have become experts in manipulating the whole process of selecting conference motions and Plenary sessions. They also revel in their role as ‘hate speech’ vigilantes at local, regional and Conference level resulting in complaints submissions.

They are responsible for the party’s  huge democratic deficit, its discriminatory disciplinary process and dysfunctional instruments of governance.

What can be done about this anti-green faction’s hold on the 6000 strong London Federation in particular, Regional Councils and Wales remains unclear at this precise moment in time.

Sadly, it is clear that as long as local party activists and members continue to keep their heads below the parapet or bury their heads in the sand, the threat of bankruptcy could turn out to be the final waking call.

Hopefully, this is still some way off and we must remain confident that free speech, reason and democracy will somehow prevail.

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