language games at the 2025 green party conference in bournemouth

This is a follow-up to our popular post on the Autumn 2025 Conference published on of 13^th October here .

Because Critical Social Justice (CSJ) activists believe that reality and truth are mere social constructs, politics for them boils down to “language games” where words only point to other words and not to the material world.

Winning those games therefore is not about engaging in debate with the purpose of getting as close to the truth as best as possible. Winning is about succeeding in silencing all opposition to their view of the world – or ‘Theory’. This includes playing mind games, shaming, bullying and harrassing their opponents verbally as well as resorting to emotional blackmail, being “economical with the truth” or just lying. In extreme cases, de-platforming tactics and physical violence are deployed in order to suppress Free Speech altogether.

Plowing through the transcript of the 5 Plenary sessions at the Bournemouth Conference, the Green Light team found too many examples of such verbal tactics being deployed overtly and covertly by CSJ activists, both from the floor and the chair to be listed here. We may come back to some of those examples in the continued pursuit of our mission to illuminate how identinarians operate within the Green Party.

We have therefore chosen instead to conduct a forensic analysis of the language used by a number of long serving social justice activists from ” the new guard ” in support of the Green Party Regional Council’s (GPRC) pivotal D05 motion : “Change the Governance Structures of the Party”.

Chair of GPRC, Joe Hudson – Small’s main argument for D05 – which does away with the Executive and the Regional Council to be replaced by a new 36 strong Council – rested on the proposition that a new governance structure was needed “in order to enable our ongoing and further electoral success and take on Reform to replace Labour”.  

How exactly, in practical terms, such dramatic change in the Party’s internal structures will help getting more greens elected was not made clear. But simultaneously echoeing newly elected eco-populist Zack Polanski’s slogans such as “taking on Reform” AND “replacing Labour” created such a positive vibe as to momentarily stop paying attention to what was actually being proposed.

He also declared that his motion ensured that people from the Global Majority would be represented on the new Council going forward and reassured conference participants that  “now, this motion is also substantially the same as in previous years”. 

This was a liar. Only the Young Greens out of the 7 Special Interest Groups have ever had reserved seats on the Executive Committee.

Joe Hudson-Small then went on to stress that “the party had undertaken some consultation” and that “the result of that is this motion”. No details of such consultation was provided.

As the word “ consultation”  triggered a reminder that the workshop report had not yet been heard, Dylan Lewis in the Chair called for that report. Member of Wakefield Green Party Ollie Watkins confirmed that there were indeed questions about consultation. He said: “ to which the answer was that it had not been consulted outside of GPEX and GPRC since it was last brought to conference “. He also reported  that there were concerns about the new proportional regional representation system.

The proposed 36 strong national Council with a cap of ¼ of members per region could indeed deprive all smaller regions from having any representation at all.

Watkins  finally reported on the workshop outcome: there were 17 people in the room. The straw poll showed six in favour and three against.  

8 members in the room therefore either abstained or had left before the vote was taken.

Unsurprisingly, the same member from Wakefield came back minutes later to speak against D05. From Yorkshire, Watkins’ concern was indeed that the ceiling for elected members from one region was too high. He expressed his deep worry  that “ this could end up with a Council that entirely consists of members from the South and the middle “.

As opposition to GPRC’s radical proposal  was gathering momentum, seasoned conference chair and long serving Critical Social Justice activist Emma Carter from Stafford and Stone Green Party jumped in. Declaring that she had “no skin in the game”, thus inferring that she couldn’t be accused of bias, she chose to address conference from the floor with an authoritative, reassuring tone of voice and said:

“ I think it is important conference that we talk a lot about compromise and how we shouldn’t allow perfect to be the enemy of something good . Good. So, no change to our governance will ever be perfect (sic).  OK, this has been decade in the making and there might be things that I might pick out of this motion that I do not find perfect “. “However” she added “it is absolutely essential that we now move forward in the spirit of consensus and compromise”.

How could any sensible green with less than 2 months membership or any long serving member possibly disagree with such morally loaded and deeply felt ‘green’ line of argument?

But if that was not quite enough to convince conference, she repeated:  “we will never be able to satisfy everyone with our structures “ and quietly stressed that “because we always strive for something better and that’s positive and that’s good “.

A close associate and partner to the former GPRC’s chair of the Party Governance Review who had volunteered in 2013 to steer structural reforms in an identinarian direction but repeatedly failed to do so, Carter closed her speech with an emotional appeal to members to vote for D05 because it was ” positive and good “ and that it was “for us”.

In other words, legitimate concerns about GPRC’s proposed changes in the governance structures of the Party expressed by any member not only meant they didn’t not belong ( not part of the ” we” ), but that they were also being negative and bad.

The world in which identinarian live is a simple one. There are “good” people and there are “bad “people; and the only ‘good’ policies are those inspired by The Theory.

As evidenced in the Green Light since 2023, Critical Social Justice otherwise known as “The Theory “, is a cult and you do not argue with its scripture and preachers.

Carter’s intervention was followed by Martin Hemingway, former candidate to a co-leadership role and long serving chair of the Standing Orders Committee, speaking against GPRC’s proposed new governance structure.

In addition to his deep concerns about the 1/4 cap on regional representation, he stressed that what was proposed  “shifted power away from other bodies”. He pointed out that GPRC with its remit to look after the well-being of the party and the independent Standing Orders Committee as the guardian of the Constitution would simply disappear.

In the two minutes slot he was permitted to speak, Hemingway urged  conference to vote against the motion as he strongly believed that it aimed to bring about ” a very major change to the Constitution”.

Acknowledging that the mood in the Hall was turning away from support and being mindful that a 2/3^rd majority was required for the motion to be approved, Dylan Lewis took the  decision to have one more round of speakers.

Rushing to the rescue of Joe Hudson- Small, non-binary Ashley Routh from Sheffield Green Party and long standing member of the Standing Orders committee  as well as chair of the LGBTIQA+ Greens took to the  stage. 

 As a Yorkshire and Humberside elected representative serving on GPRC, they declared that “having done a pretty reasonable amount of casework for people around the country” and having “ just totted it up in my head “ they added: ” I think I did more casework for people in the Eastern region and the South East region as GPRC representative than I did for my own Northern region”.

A master of ‘language as power’, as per The Theory, Routh chose to add a new twist to the debate by bringing in a his own real life experience as a source of ‘Knowledge‘ and ‘Truth’.

Why Routh representing the Yorkshire and Humberside region would have been conducting casework for the Eastern and South East regions is open to question, unless they were perhaps referring to another of their role as a member of GPRC’s  Disciplinary Appeals Panel where they will have dealt with most cases of alleged transphobia resulting in members being expelled or suspended. However, as a former Parish councillor in Lincolnshire, Routh  may indeed have been dealing with  genuine “casework”.

Routh ended their argument in support of shutting down GPRC by mocking the old  EU Party’s regions as “ somehow the cultural touchstones of how we operate as a party “ and determined that such regional map was “a little ridiculous”.

For good measure, they finally invoked newly elected Deputy Leader and popular pro-Palestinian activist Mothin Ali from Birmingham as evidence of someone outside of London and the South East who was  “a very effective voice” for the Party as a whole.

Wrapping yourself in the Palestinian flag on that 5^th October 2025 to secure approval from first timers fresh out of street protests about Gaza’s genocide to abolish GPRC and the Executive and form one big national Council with a system of representation that could  exclude  6 of the former EU regions was a CSJ’s master stroke.

Calling on one final speaker in support of the motion, Islington member and another authoritative, identinarian female voice from the London Assembly, Cllr Caroline Russell  stepped in with an original angle: the new CEO, Harriet Lamb needed  “for us  to be  really nimble”. She thus implied that a 36 strong Council would somehow be easier for the CEO and The Office staff than to deal with the existing 13 strong Executive.

 A close ally to Emma Carter for over a decade, Russel repeated  Carter’s mantra that “no change will ever be perfect”  and explained that “ the proposal gave us  something that has the potential for us to focus, to be flexible”.  

Adding insult to injury, given the concerns expressed by Watkins and Hemingway regarding regional representation and the lack of consultation, she then mindlessly added that the proposal “would be representative of the members of our party “.

Calling for unity, and appealing to the majority of new members with less than 2 months membership, she simply declared: “we will all vote for it today”.

Finally offered to use his right of reply, GPRC’s  chair Joe Hudson Small closed his remarks by thanking Emma Carter who “did not have a skin in the game” for reminding Conference how much of a long time had been spent on the governance review.

He then carried on with an increasingly muddled speech about “ defection procedure” (sic) , firmly denied that  “a cap would prevent dominance from London and the South East”  and welcomed the fact that his proposal would be good for… “intersectionality”.

Before calling for the vote,  Young Greens member and chair of the LGBTIQA+  Dylan Lewis reminded members that the Green Party supports one member one vote as “ we support this for government “ and affirmed that the Global Majority Greens representation on the Council would ensure that the party “ did not elected people with privilege”.

The Green Party has indeed long been in favour of a fair voting system where every vote counts, but this has nothing to do with the ‘one member, one vote’ decision making process within the Green Party whereby less than 1% of self-appointed members actually make policies.

With 441 members in the room and 142 members online – who had been deprived of the opportunity to speak For or Against any motion from the start of Conference due to a technical oversight – GPRC’s radical D05 motion ” Change the Governance Stuctures of the Party ” was approved with 303 votes For and 138 Against.

At that precise moment, on 5^th October 2025 as Conference was coming to a close, the membership had risen to 115,000. As we publish this post today, the Party has over 150,000 members.

Such a huge and sudden increase in membership generated by the energetic and charismatic “eco-populist” new identinarian Leader Zack Polanski has to be welcome.

But with so many new members joining online and then assigned by The Office to the legally ‘autonomous’ Local Parties, will our Association with its new governance structure and where all main decisions are still made by less than 1% of members be resilient enough to adress the question: how democratic is the Green Party?

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