Brighton’s Green administration – lessons from the rise and fall of mango politics?

To understand the enormity of what has been going on in Brighton Green politics, try explaining it to an intelligent, Leftish, non-Brighton colleague who can stand back from the issues.  An administration elected on a mandate of minimising the effect of Coalition cuts, proudly working towards a living wage in a city with some of the highest living costs in Britain – which then, apparently in the name of equality and fairness, delegates decisions on equalising allowances that  could lead to substantial cuts in the living standards of some of the city’s lowest paid workers to officers, with apparently no political control over the final decisions. At the same time, local Green MP Caroline Lucas remains – along with Plaid Cymru and a few dissident Labour MPs – just about the only Parliamentarian making a sustained and cogent attack on austerity economics, and has said that she will join the picket if there is industrial action over the pay cuts. Not for the first time, the only Green MP in Britain finds herself shovelling up the ordure left by apparently inexplicable decisions by the only Green-led council in Britain and has shown that she can judge the public mood in Brighton rather better than the Green administration.  And the local Green Party, at a well-attended Emergency General Meeting, has voted decisively for a motion committing itself to campaign against pay cuts - a motion in whose support Caroline Lucas spoke forcefully and passionately.

Moreover, it runs the risk of revitalisng the Labour Party.  For two years, Labour, still smarting from its displacement as the natural home of progressive Brighton, has failed to land a single substantial punch on the Green Party.  Indeed, its 2012 Budget vote to back a council tax freeze at the expense of services remains one of Brighton politics’ more spectacular own goals; and its national policy to retain coalition cuts and possibly make more of its own has damaged its credibility further.  Faced with its inability to provide a credible policy alternative it has tried to portray the Green administration as a gang of amiable incompetents not cut out for big boys’ politics – a dubious proposition, not just in the face of memories of Labour in office (the botched attempt to create an executive mayor; or the farcical attempt to rebrand North Street as Ocean Boulevard, and Labour’s petulant response when people laughed) but in the face of some impressive Green achievements like the living wage and the ability of the council to lure new money to the city for big transport and public realm improvements (or perhaps in the face of the suspicion that “big boys’ politics” means the sort of municipal Stalinism for which Brighton Labour was once notorious).  But in the last year the Green administration’s record has begun to render Labour’s threadbare narrative credible – with the current split in the Green Party, the public admission that quite a lot of the Green council group has been out of the loop on key decisions, and the epic farce of the Seven Dials Elm Tree (a Green-led council threatening to fell an ancient and rare elm, the Green MP standing underneath it denouncing the decision and two Green activists camped in the branches of the tree).

Now of course it isn’t quite as simple as that – there is of course a lot of history and nuance behind the pay modernisation story, not least the political negligence by previous administrations (especially the previous Tory one, which appears to have failed to take forward the work that Labour in office started before 2007).  But there’s that extraordinary decision to surrender political control over the process; as my colleague pointed out, put it like that and you have what looks like the only political leadership left anywhere that has Nick Clegg as its role model.  It’s an intriguing thought: lefty Greens like to portray themselves as watermelons, green on the outside and red on the inside.  Could this be mango politics, green on the outside but orange in the middle?

It’s very simple.  Talking about fairness on the one hand while abdicating responsibility for threatening some of Brighton’s lowest-paid workers with a pay cut of £97 per week makes you look like a Liberal Democrat.  Greens shouldn’t be in that game.

You could argue that this is an unfair caricature – although it’s one that is fairly current in Brighton and Hove right now – but the point is that there have to be important lessons to be learned from the Brighton pay debacle.

The first is quite simple – never, ever, abandon political responsibility for important decisions.  Arguments that issues like this should have the politics taken out of them are simply wrong. Issues of pay and rewards are political to their core – and it is astonishing that a Council group apparently of the left could make this error.  Yes, the background is that  the current allowance structures are discriminatory, in that they distinguish between “male” and “female” gradings.  Of course that’s unacceptable.  But the moment you try to argue that these are not political decisions, and should be left to technocrats, you are playing the neoliberal game – whether you intend to or not.  It’s what’s happening in Greece or Italy – and Greens should have no part in it. Whether you like it or not, officers’ decisions are not ideologically-neutral – especially when you are dealing with HR specialists who are trained to deal with issues of pay and conditions in a way that reflects the values of the corporate sector.  Moreover, there is a clear conflict in this case with the Party’s Brighton election manifesto – which undertook to defend the City as far as it could from Coalition cuts.  Now obviously this dispute was – is – not about reducing the City’s overall pay bill – but it is about some of the lowest paid people in the city, people who have been hit hardest by austerity economics.  If the point of handing over control to officers was to avoid political opprobrium, it’s a strategy that has conspicuously failed. A sophist could argue that the letter of the Green manifesto had not been breached; a political realist would argue that the implications of a cut in take-home pay is all of a piece with the austerity agenda, especially when a failure by Government to provide local authorities with the resources for equal pay is a de facto cut.

Second, get your relationship with your officers sorted out. For me, as an ex-Civil Servant who has worked for both Labour and Tory Ministers of a wide range of abilities, the signs have been unmistakeable – key members of the Green Group have been going far too native.  Their public pronouncements all too often sound like officers, not politicians speaking (like Jason Kitcat’s ill-judged tweet about the loss of allowances not really being a pay cut). I don’t imagine local government officers are so very different from Civil Servants and, like the Civil Service, I have every reason to think they are most effective when they have strong, decisive political leadership from elected politicians.  I am not close to Green councillors’ interactions with officers but I have seen all too many of the symptoms – in particular the language in which some prominent Greens conduct their politics. I do not underestimate the difficulties of what they are doing – there were times in my Civil Service career when I wondered whether being a new Minister must be the worst bloody job on the planet – but quite a few of them manage to get the hang of it.  Lawyers represent a particular problem; one of the most difficult things certainly that Ministers have to learn is that lawyers are there to facilitate the delivery of your policies within the law, not to tell you what you can’t do. In my Whitehall experience, it’s amazing how many ministers (and officials) don’t get that.  Again, I have little reason to believe that local government is any different.

Third, this is not just a local Brighton and Hove issue.  For the Green Party, anything that could jeopardise Caroline Lucas’ prospects of re-election is a national issue.  It is with no disrespect to Natalie Bennett, doing a terrific job as Green Party leader, that I’d argue that Caroline Lucas remains the most prominent and most eloquent Green advocate we have – and the fact that she is doing that in Parliament, when our media are fixated on Westminster, only increases that importance.  Greens outside Brighton are puzzled and angry about what has been happening in Brighton – not least because the Green Party is steadily building up its presence in local government, winning its first seats on a number of local authorities, with that unequivocal opposition to austerity at its heart.  Recent policy decisions – and indeed the most recent election broadcast – are unequivocally confirming the Green Party as a party of the Left. Mango politics in the only Green local administration are damaging for the Party as a whole.

Fourth, never forget your party roots. I am not a very active member of the Green Party ( for various reasons it’s difficult for me to get to meetings) – but I keep abreast of debates and it’s clear that there is a chasm between the Party and the administration’s leadership.  (There is also serious doubt – following some comments by Councillors on Twitter – that all of the Green Group were consulted or even aware of the ramifications of the decision to devolve to officers, or that the decision would not be remitted to Councillors for approval).  Greens are supposed to be different; Greens are supposed to value consultation and democracy (and have taken quite a bit of flak from some Labour people for consulting too much).  Green values are about how you conduct politics as well as outcomes, and one of the reasons for the rise of Brighton’s Greens is Brighton Labour’s history of vicious infighting.  I have occasionally – on this blog and on Twitter – had occasion to ask Liberal Democrats whether the Coalition is what they really went into politics for; some Brighton Greens must have been asking themselves the same question.  I have heard on so many occasions the argument that Greens in Brighton offered something new and different and now appear to be just another bunch of politicians.  We cannot afford this perception to take root.  If Brighton progressive people wanted just another bunch of politicians they’d have voted Labour.  Green leaders need to reconnect with the activists who are struggling to defend the administration outside the Town Hall bubble.

All of this means that the Green Party in Brighton is at a crossroads.  It can stand back now, take stock and try and get back to the idealism that led to its election – above all to take back the political initiative.  There are good signs – a unanimous vote at the Housing Committee in favour of a Green amendment to the officers’ report that enshrines the Green policy of no bedroom-tax evictions; a vote remarkable for the fact that even Brighton and Hove’s Tories supported it.  That’s a big Green win, and shows that the Green Party in Brighton has not lost its ability to be a game-changer on the Left.

What is needed now is hard strategic thinking.  It is almost two years to the day before the Green councillors, and more importantly Caroline Lucas, will face elections.  There have been some brilliant successes; by 2015 the city will look and feel different, with the 20mph limit and big transport schemes that have firmly shifted the balance towards cyclists and pedestrians.  In a time of austerity, to deliver these and to bring new money into the city is a huge achiemement.  But the Party’s electoral success will be largely down to whether it can learn some serious lessons from the pay modernisation debacle, an if it can recapture the idealism that made 2011 seem like a fresh start for the City.

The most inane comment ever by a Brighton and Hove Councillor?

In this household our local freesheet, the Brighton and Hove Leader, normally makes a rapid and uninterrupted progress from doormat to recycling bin, featuring as it does a small collection of the previous week’s news stories wrapped around pages of adverts for car dealers. But this week a front-page story in the 14 March edition caught my eye, containing as it did a comment from a Brighton and Hove Tory Councillor that made my jaw drop.  It’s reproduced below:

It was Tory Cllr Dawn Barnett’s comment that astonished me.  To repeat, with my emphasis:  ” … with all the 20mph and cycle lane spending they should find some money for the safety of the children.”

So just exactly does Cllr Barnett think the 20mph speed limit being rolled out across the city is for?  A way of keeping council officers harmlessly occupied? A cunning plan to really annoy motorists?  Cllr Barnett has a history of making comments that with hindsight might have been better considered – witness her advice that those living near a traveller encampment should refrain from paying their council tax in clear breach of the law.  But surely even if it is not intuitively obvious that reducing traffic speeds improves conditions for vulnerable road users like children, there is peer-reviewed evidence showing the hugely beneficial effects of 20mph zones.  It’s just possible that Cllr Barnett has read the tabloid misreporting that accidents are increasing in 20mph zones – which is caused by the increased number of zones, not by increasing accident rates.  But even so, it’s a pretty breathtaking statement and some would say a fairly typical example of how Brighton Tories’ pronouncements on traffic and transport appear to be motivated by passion rather than intellect.

I have no quarrel with the people of Hangleton who are calling for a better crossing of the notoriously busy Hangleton Link Road for their children – their campaign is a powerful example of how traffic speeds are a safety issue as well as one of community severance – that unquantifiable but hugely important effect of busy roads.  But it’s worth remembering that Brighton and Hove’s Green administration has, in times of unprecedented cuts, made huge steps in shifting the balance away from cars towards vulnerable road users like pedestrians and cyclists; and that Brighton and Hove’s Tories campaigned at the last council elections on a hugely expensive policy of removing Hove’s extensive and well-used cycle lanes.  If the children of Hangleton get their footbridge, it will be all of a piece with the wide range of traffic policies being enacted throughout our city.

Seven Dials Elm reprieved – for now

I blogged yesterday about the extraordinary row concerning the removal of a healthy elm tree to facilitate the Seven Dials Roundabout improvement works in central Brighton.  The good news came this afternoon that the Vernon Terrace elm had received a temporary reprieve while further discussions take place about its future. Other parts of the improvement works will be taken forward.

I was up at the tree at lunchtime today and there appeared to be an slightly edgy stand-off in the drizzle between the protesters and a digger that had been brought in to pull the railings out of the roots – which would have caused considerable damage.  It was a calm, good-natured protest and the intervention of Caroline Lucas was obviously hugely appreciated.  And my admiration for the two protesters in the tree was boundless – you really needed to be there to see just how high up they were.

Some pictures:

It’s obvious what local people and Green Party members across the city want. Let’s hope that officers are being given clear directions to find a way to save the tree.

One elm tree and a big Green dilemma

As I write, an extraordinary and symbolic protest is taking place under – and apparently in – the branches of an elm tree in central Brighton.  Brighton and Hove’s Green administration has embarked upon a major and hugely welcome redesign of one of the city’s least loved junctions – the Seven Dials roundabout, a traffic hub in which traffic crosses from sundry directions.  It’s unsightly and dangerous – especially for pedestrians and cyclists – and the fact that the Green administration has got to grips with a problem that previous administrations have chosen to ignore can only be welcomed.  Whatever the fate of Brighton and Hove’s Green administration, there is little doubt that one of its big legacies will be a range of transport schemes that have firmly shifted the balance in favour of pedestrians and cyclists, and rightly so.

Unfortunately, in Seven Dials, there is collateral damage.  The scheme as agreed involved the cutting of a magnificent healthy elm tree at the top of Vernon Terrace.  It is that tree that has become the focus of protests.  Local people collecting signatures have been joined by Green MP Caroline Lucas and some of Brighton’s seasoned Green activists have been actively involved in defending the tree.  Some have climbed it – including veterans of the recent Coombe Valley protests against the A27 Bexhill by-pass.

The concept of Green activists protesting against a Green council’s proposal to cut down a tree to facilitate a traffic scheme – even one as welcome and fundamentally green as that in Seven Dials – would be in any event farcical.  But there are other issues in play that compound the problem.  First, this is an elm tree – and elms are of particular importance in Brighton and Hove.  When Dutch Elm Disease set in across England in the 1960s, it was visionary and decisive action by the town’s arboriculturalists that ensured that Brighton was shielded from the disease; doing so involved a drastic programme of cutting trees pre-emptively but the result was that Brighton has one of the largest collections of mature elms in the country.  For many of us, a mature elm tree is one of the most powerful symbols of Brighton, and part of our collective heritage.  The simple fact is that these trees matter to people in the city.  Diseased elms are cut down occasionally, and although people are saddened by the necessity everyone understands why it has to be done.  But this is a healthy elm.

Morevoer, the tree is – just – inside Regency ward, represented by the Council leader, and close to the boundaries of two other  key Green-held wards (Goldsmid and St Peter’s).  A decision that has managed to alienate key supporters across three wards looks like bad politics at a purely party level as well.  The point is that implementing the Seven Dials scheme would have been a huge win for the Green administration; a sign that it can deliver against a horrific fiscal background.  It looks awfully as if it has blown it.

The arguments for cutting the tree are that it will obscure sight-lines on the approach to a pedestrian crossing; that the roots are breaking up the road and pavement surface, the latter causing problems for passing pedestrians and in particular buggies and mobility scooters.  The Council argues that the issue was covered in the consultation, but campaigners claim to have been unaware of the loss of the tree.  None of these points is of itself invalid – but these look like the arguments of officers, not politicians. And moreover, consultations – valuable and important though they are – are no substitute for political judgement and sensitivity.  It does seem astonishing that the implications of taking this tree have slipped under politicians’ radar, to the point where the most prominent Green politician in Britain, Caroline Lucas, finds herself being interviewed in front of a tree that she’s defending from her own Green-led local council.

It’s already a situation in which the Green administration has been damaged.  The spectacle of a Green-led council forcibly removing its own activists from a tree before cutting it would destroy the administration, and probably Caroline Lucas’ prospects of re-election.  Finding an alternative is a condition for the administration’s political survival. It’s also horribly damaging for the Green Party as a whole.  But there are more fundamental questions about what happens when Greens – or any other group trying to challenge the hegemonic values of our political culture – obtain office (especially in where that administration is in a minority).  It shows the desperate importance of  (excuse the pun) remaining in touch with your roots, and not allowing your natural political instincts to be thrown off by the demands of office.  There are fundamental strategic issues here that Greens in Brighton and more widely must consider very carefully.

If the Green administration in Brighton and Hove can reconnect with its roots, it could emerge stronger from this.  But in many ways this is the most important test it has faced, and the fate of one much-loved elm tree could seal the fate of Brighton’s Green administration and hugely damage the Party as a whole.

Twenty’s already plenty in Brighton and Hove

Earlier this week Brighton’s local rag, the Argus, was working itself into one of its usual small lathers of indignation over the fact that many of the road signs related to the forthcoming introduction of the 20mph speed limit across much of the city were already in place – despite the fact that the new limit does not come into effect until April.

Leaving aside the fact that doing things in good time for deadlines is what efficient councils do – imagine the furore from the same imagination-challenged journalists if the signs were not in place come the big day – the reaction is interesting and typical.  In fact, I was out in Hove yesterday afternoon and saw the effect at first hand.

Yes, motorists were seeing the signs and actually slowing down.  Pedestrians and cyclists were getting the benefit of the changes weeks before they were due to become mandatory.  And there was no mass panic, no chaos, no distress.  People were getting on with their lives, traffic continued to move, and the benefit was already noticeable.  In a small way, the balance was already shifting from motorist to vulnerable road users, and the quality of life for all in our city just improved that little bit.  Is there any real evidence that those motorists who are now driving at 20mph rather than 30mph on our city’s streets are suffering any real disadvantage in doing so? Given the levels of congestion and the number of junctions in our city, are their journeys really getting disastrously longer? And after all there is no resident driving in Brighton and Hove who is not also a pedestrian too.  And even the motoring lobby – consumed as ever with paranoia in the face of what are often desultory efforts to get them to obey the law – have to admit that nobody’s going to be the subject of premature enforcement action.

The Argus has a long tradition of backing the car lobby – some cynics have pointed to the vast quantity of advertising it carries for local car dealers – and, to their shame, some local politicians who ought to know better have jumped on the bandwagon.  Moreover, the Argus’ hyperbole, its ability to find crisis, shock and fury in mundane events, is legendary. But for this pedestrian and cyclist, the arrival of those signs mean that all of us – including motorists – are getting the benefits of the new 20mph limit early.  And how can that be a bad thing?

Equality, citizenship and the privileging of faith

A Green Party internal panel in Brighton has recommended the expulsion of Cllr Christina Summers from the Green Group on Brighton and Hove Council after she spoke out against – and voted against – a Council motion supporting equal marriage.  Equality has long been a Green Party commitment; Cllr Summers argued that her faith meant she had to speak out and vote as she did.  Without going into the detail – the internal panel has yet to publish its reasoning and the Green Group has yet to vote on the recommendation – it is claimed that Cllr Summers breached an agreement signed by all Council candidates that she would not oppose Party policy on this issue, and also that she took part in protests outside an abortion clinic in Brighton.

Cllr Summers clearly sees this decision as discrimination against Christians, and as an assault on her freedom of speech.  In the BBC report linked above she is quoted as saying:

“It’s discriminatory against Christians. It’s a typical symptom of prejudice, blatant prejudice.

“It raises a big question – can Christians serve in the public realm? They are saying don’t bring your faith into politics.”

It’s an argument we hear time and time again from fundamentalist Christians – and adherents of other religions – in the face of secularism. Without going into the details of the Panel’s recommendations there are  important general issues that this case illustrates about the clash between private and public values, the nature of citizeship and the pursuit of privilege.

There is obviously a clash here between public values and private faith, As a party Greens believe that discrimination on the grounds of race, gender, or sexuality, is wrong.  We also believe that the harrassment of vulnerable women outside abortion clinics is wrong.  Neither of these is incompatible with members holding strong views about, for example, abortion in private.

In Brighton and Hove Greens ask their candidates for public office to affirm their support for equality, and campaign accordingly – indeed, part of the reason why Greens have emerged as the leading party in Brighton and Hove is their unequivocal and vigorous support for equality on the grounds of race, gender and sexualtiy.  But as soon as we make an exception on the grounds of faith, we are no longer respecting faith; we’re privileging it.  We’re in effect saying that we only expect our elected representatives to uphold those values – the values on which they were elected and to which they signed up when they became candidates – insofar as their private convictions allow.  And that seems to me to be an untenable position.  Where does it end?  Because faith is of necessity a private, personal matter it could be used to justify almost anything.  And I’d argue that the moment we privilege faith we have ceased to respect it, because you have created an environment in which the public idea of respect  – based on a common and mutual acceptance of public values and evidence, and the compromises that are necessary to make a civil society work – cannot function.

What this means for Greens and for anyone else involved in promoting equality is that, to be serious about equality, you simply cannot accept a position where faith is privileged in this way. It blurs the private and public in a way that is, in my view, unacceptable and dangerous.  It means that political debate moves from an understanding of common responsibility and respect  to a shouting match based on personal and private conviction.  It is dangerously close to that most fascistic of political errors, the cult of sincerity.

To argue that Christianity is being driven out of life in Britain is arrant, self-evident nonsense.  We remain one of only a handful of countries in the world in which the state religion is guaranteed representation in Parliament.  Although religious observance has declined, there is no sense in which worship is restricted.  Christians are not harassed in going about their daily lives, or their observances.  This is not a debate about religious freedom but about power and privilege, in which Christians appear to be arguing that they have an exemption from the disciplines and compromises of public, democratic life and a right to assert their values in a privileged way.

It is in the assault on the division between public and private, rather than in the requirement that Christians become, in the broadest sense, citizens that the real route to authoritarianism lies.  I’d argue that one of the prime duties of a civic society is to protect the right of all citizens to hold and practise their beliefs, to the extent that it does not affect the rights and freedoms of others; once you cross that line between public and private it seems to me that you are on the way to authoritarianism.  In refusing to privilege faith, we are in effect protecting it.

Community politics revisited: Greens and Liberal Democrat tactics

The results of the Green Party’s leadership election are due to be announced tomorrow.  In anticipation, the Independent has today run a piece which suggests that Greens should follow the Liberal Democrats’ tactics for capturing local election seats, leading to Parliamentary gains.  It argues that disillusioned Liberal Democrats are likely to turn to the Green Party in greater numbers than Labour voters.

It’s a plausible and attractive argument.  Its proponents could point to the fact that the Green Party’s biggest successes have been in Brighton, which returns the party’s sole MP and has a minority Green administration.  In many ways, Brighton looks like a Liberal Democrat town; affluent, educated, with its two universities, its temper of diversity and its modern economy – the sort of place where Liberal Democrats tend to do well, and where it is mainly the fissiparous nature of the local Lib Dems and their tendency to fight each other into oblivion at the merest sniff of electoral success that has prevented them from making electoral advance.  It’s a narrative that Brighton and Hove Labour iteslf often uses, claiming that the Greens have mainly prospered in middle-class wards (a narrative that conveniently ignores big Green gains in traditional Labour wards in last year’s local elections).

It’s also a reminder that for many years the Liberal Democrats – and most notably the Liberal Party before that – were proponents of community politics, which brought together vigorous local campaigning with a set of beliefs about community and political representation which, in theory at least, went far beyond simple electoralism.  The essential text of this movement was a pamphlet by Gordon Lishman and Bernard Greaves, The Theory and Practice of Community Politics, published by the then Association of Liberal Councillors in 1980, which brought together ideas that Liberal campaigners had developed over the preceding decade.

As the Green Party thinks about strategy, and in the context of a call to use Liberal Democrat tactics, it’s a fascinating and important read.  There is much in it that goes to the heart of Green beliefs – about empowering individuals in communities, about democratic accountability, and about participation.  And there are ominous omissions and issues – revisiting the pamphlet thirty years after first reading it, its hostility to Government and advocacy of voluntarism sits surprisingly comfortably with the Con Dems’ Big Society agenda.  It is powerfully hostile to Trade Unions. Above all, like so much pre-Orange Book Liberal and Liberal Democrat thinking, it has almost nothing to say about economics – a crucial weakness in a text that claims to offer a systematic ideology.

The authors write emphatically that community politics was not a strategy for winning elections, but something far wider than that.  But this is what was lost, and this is what allowed the Liberal Democrats to be captured for neoliberalism.  It seems to me to be precisely the lack  of any theory, combined with the way in which Orange Bookers could appeal to the radical individualism of Greaves and Lishman and turn it into a consumerist economic narrative – that allowed the neoliberals in the door.  And it was the use of the term “community politics” to justify unthinking electoral opportunism that inhibited the development of a coherent and confident body of theory that would have given the old Liberal Democrat left a hope of resisting the neoliberal Orange Book tide.  It also of course compounded the problem that Liberal Democrats were often (with good reason) regarded as cynical opportunists for whom the end justified the often very dodgy electoral means.

All this is powerfully instructive for a contemporary Green Party that is facing many of the issues confronting Liberals at the time that Greaves and Lishman published their pamphlet.  In some respects the stakes are far higher than they were for Liberals in 1980; not just the urgency of climate change but, in the UK context, a Westminster political system dominated by three national parties (plus the SNP) who fundamentally believe in variations on the same ideology which is wreaking havoc on our society.

But it is instructive at a time when Greens in Brighton are facing their first taste of minority office. It’s a daunting prospect being Green trailblazers; a minority administration of the only national party opposed to cuts and austerity, trying to deliver progress against a background of savage cuts in local government funding.  Despite the cuts, despite the minority status, there are real gains being made: particularly in transport and public realm issues, in preserving subsidised bus routes and in attracting funding for innovative traffic schemes aimed at making the city more liveable.  In fact in Brighton it’s Labour that is following traditional Liberal Democrat oppositionist tactics; backing Tory budget cuts and supporting Eric Pickles’ council tax freeze con, opposing for the sake of opposition to the point where they casually ignore the legal and financial constraints under which the council operates to score easy points.  If you ever wanted a demonstration of electoral opportunism devoid of integrity, responsibility or intellectual engagement, you need only look as far as Brighton and Hove Labour.  As a Green, I’m fairly sure that the party that I want to be part of looks nothing remotely like that.

For me, the key task for Greens is not to chase the Liberal Democrat lost votes, but to understand why political participation has fallen, and in particular why Labour lost five million votes between 1997 and 2010.  I think the answer is fairly  straightforward – that Labour has embraced neoliberalism, remains a pro-cuts and pro-austerity party, and those – often the poorest and most vulnerable in society, who look to a strong state for support and empowerment – for whom this agenda offers nothing have walked away from Labour, and from electoral politics generally. These are the people whose daily life experiences are wholly outside the mainstream of political debate in the UK.  And as I wrote in an earlier blog post on the Green Party leadership election, these are the people to whom Greens, as the only significant party with an alternative to neoliberalism, must look; it is their voice that we must become.  It’s why in the leadership election that has just finished (and whose result at the time of writing I do not know) I voted for Peter Cranie as the candidate best able to break out of our middle-class comfort zone and reach out to those who have been left behind by the British political system.

So grass-roots activism is essential.  I think there is an argument for something that matches the finer aspirations of Greaves and Lishman, although I think we need to recognise that the spirit of community politics is something that died out long ago in the Liberal Democrats.  But I think we need to be more ambitious than reaching out to ex-Liberal Democrats.  Greens should aspire to be the voice of all of those who have been disenfranchised by the neoliberal consensus

Olympic cycling: an opportunity missed

The heroics of British cyclists in the Olympic velodrome have been widely celebrated – and quite rightly so. Whatever one thinks of organised competitive sport – and I’m the first to admit I’m far from being a fan – what those competitors do (regardless of their nationality) is pretty astonishing.

But one feels that in the prevailing mood of celebrating all things British a rare opportunity has been missed to reflect the authentic British cycling experience.  There’s a whole range of events that could be included – for example the team swerve into traffic to avoid the white van parked in the cycle lane, the individual emergency stop to avoid the 4×4 turning left across your bows while the driver is on the phone, the pothole avoidance peleton, avoiding the driver who thinks it’s clever to pass as close to you as possible. The possibilities are vast.

And of course the whole competitive atmosphere could be made far more true to life.  Instead of cheering, flag-waving supporters you could fill the velodrome with BMW drivers yelling random abuse.  In the case of accidents, instead of medics a team of specially trained magistrates, police officers and journalists could be bussed in to reassure injured cyclists that it was their fault for being on “our” roads.   And of course the whole thing could be presided over by a witless exhibitionist Mayor who claims to back cycling, despite his indolent efforts at cosmetic measures to promote cycling having actually made it more dangerous (perhaps we managed that one).

The fact is that outside the two weeks of Olympic competition, cyclists are treated as second-class citizens in Britain’s cities.  Cyclists are routinely killed on Britain’s roads – not least by goods vehicles drivers – and the courts routinely deliver no more than a slap on the wrist.  And yet – as most continental cities realise – any city that aspires to be clean, liveable and sustainable inevitably places cycling at the heart of its policy mix.  Britain, currently facing EU infraction proceedings over its poor air quality record and with its cities choked with traffic, could learn something pretty important from, say, Den Haag or Copenhagen (both cities I know well).

It would be wonderful if the long-term legacy of these Olympics included the political class uniting around a strategy to place cycling, rather than the car, at the heart of urban transport policy.  But it requires vision, intelligence and an ability to see beyond the profit motive and beyond the curious psychopathology of our relationship with the private car.  No optimism there, then.

The triumph of the commons: why Elinor Ostrom matters

The death of Elinor Ostrom, economist, radical and first woman to win the Nobel Economics Prize, seems to have passed largely unnoticed in the Anglo-Saxon world; a look at the #ostrom hashtag on Twitter in the hours following the announcement of her passing showed tributes in many languages, for once English not in the majority.  Yet Ostrom’s work remains an inspiration to those on the Green left and, I’d argue, is supremely important in developing a counter-narrative as the failure of the Anglo-Saxon model of free market economics becomes clearer by the day.

Why does Ostrom matter?  To answer this, you need to go back to one of the most influential texts of free market economics – Garrett Hardin’s The Tragedy of the Commons, published in 1968.  The heart of Hardin’s argument can be found in these paragraphs:

The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.

As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, “What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?” This utility has one negative and one positive component.

1) The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal, the positive utility is nearly +1.

2) The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular decision-making herdsman is only a fraction of -1.

Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another…. But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit–in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

In other words, Hardin argues that collective control of a resource is impossible.  The answer to this tragedy – private ownership (Hardin goes on to compare the use of commons to bank robbery). It is a hugely influential text, one that has been used over and again to argue that common ownership is impossible.  Hardin argues that common ownership will lead to environmental degradation; ultimately he concludes that the answer lies in preventing the populace from breeding.  It’s important to note that, not only is this argument fundamentally anti-democratic, but it is firmly rooted in the social Darwinism that informs so much American socio-political discourse (the irony that this unsupportable bastard offspring of Darwinism holds sway in a society in which millions reject the central, scientifically-supported tenets of evolution is of course vast and obvious).

The failures in the metaphor are obvious.  Most obviously, Hardin offers no evidence at all that the commons are doomed to fail; the actual historical evidence shows that in many societies at many periods, land has been managed as a commons, sustainably and to the benefit of all, according to common rules.   Hardin argues that private ownership will do better; he offers no evidence to support this claim.  Also, the image of the rational being painted by Hardin is clearly one-dimensional; the rational actor is the one who seeks immediate gratification without thought to the collective consequence.  But it’s a straw man; while those attributes look very much like the actor in models of market economics, the simple fact is that not only do people do not necessarily think like that, but in almost all the interactions of life we actually do completely the opposite.  These are ideologically-based assumptions that pay no heed to the empirical world.  I refute Hardin’s psychological assumptions every time I put my scraps on my compost heap. The use of pseudo-mathematics in Hardin’s example is really just a form of obfuscation.

Most importantly, in spite of all these flaws, this unsupported concept of humanity provides a ready rationale for the appropriation and privatisation of common assets – or, more generally, of natural resources.  It’s actually a deep expression of pessimism about the human race – a set of assumptions that Hobbes would have recognised.

The importance of Elinor Ostrom’s work is that it provides a refutation of this world view.  And significantly – at a time when academic economics has retreated increasingly into the refining of mathematical models, leaving the relationship of economic theory to the real world increasingly unexamined, Ostrom was a thinker who worked in the field; her work was informed by a range of projects looking at issues as diverse as water associations in Los Angeles, police departments in Indiana and irrigation in Nepal.  It’s an economics that is grounded in experience. She drew on history and empirical research to show that in reality people are not just selfish actors, but do consider the wider consequences of their actions for those around them and the environment in which those actions are carried out.

At the heart of Ostrom’s contribution is a set of rules for the commons:

1. Clearly defined boundaries (effective exclusion of external un-entitled parties);
2. Rules regarding the appropriation and provision of common resources that are adapted to local conditions;
3. Collective-choice arrangements that allow most resource appropriators to participate in the decision-making process;
4. Effective monitoring by monitors who are part of or accountable to the appropriators;
5. A scale of graduated sanctions for resource appropriators who violate community rules;
6. Mechanisms of conflict resolution that are cheap and of easy access;
7. Self-determination of the community recognized by higher-level authorities;
8. In the case of larger common-pool resources,organization in the form of multiple layers of nested enterprises, with small local units at the base level.

These are of course high-level principles – there is no magic wand being waved here; governing the commons, like any democratic exercise, may well in practice be messy and difficult – and involve a lot of activity that those who only measure achievement in terms of cash output will regard as wasteful and bureaucratic – but the fact is that it can be done, and done democratically and sustainably.  In that it contrasts powerfully with  the central conceit of market economics that there is, in Margaret Thatcher’s phrase, no alternative.  Market economics posits a set of pseudo-psychological statements about how individuals behave – of which Hardin’s comment is one; Ostrom’s work on the commons shows that human activity is far richer and more diverse than the market theorists would allow, and is above all democratic – it’s a basis for how equal human beings can resolve key issues about the management of resources without the coercion of ownership, or, crucially, the appropriation of resources

What does Ostrom tell us about the current world financial crisis?

Ostrom’s theory of the commons can be seen as providing a powerful alternative to the conceits and fallacies at the heart of the current world economic crisis.  The current crisis looks in many ways very much like Marx’s crisis of capital accumulation – corporate interests hoarding vast cash piles, while demand slumps, in the face of the capital’s need to accumulate to survive.  It’s a scenario that moved Keynes – whose mission was always to save capitalism from the idiocies of its practitioners – to formulate the need to stimulate demand, to kick-start the normal process that kept capitalism working (and, one might add with the hindsight of today,  to escape the cycle of crises that increasingly appears to characterise raw unregulated capitalism).

Commons thinking addresses two key elements of the way in which capital has continued to accumulate.  The first is through accumulation and price inflation of assets like land – the latest crisis, like every financial crisis since 1973, was precipitated by the collapse of a property bubble.  The second is through the monetisation and effective privatisation of assets held in common but which have sat outside the traditional purview of exchange.  This includes such things as the appropriation and exploitation of land belonging to indigenous people (or colonialism, as we used to call it) and the turning of subsistence economies into cash-based suppliers for the wealthier parts of the world; it also includes the monetisation of natural resources like air and water or even  life itself (for example in the case of the appraisal mechanisms for new roads, where the safety benefits of new roads are calculated on the basis of a “value of life” number generated through stated preference techniques);  exchanges that have traditionally been free acquire a cash value that can be factored into GDP numbers that feed capital’s voracious need for compound growth.  It means that economic activity – and increasingly what we would traditionally think of as non-economic activity – is carried on according to structures of value dictated by capital’s need for voracious expansion.  And many would argue that it is that expansion, based on paper values of intangible assets rather than the needs and aspirations of the majority, that is at the root of the current crisis.  Moreover, the inexorable pressure of capital accumulation – especially in times of crisis – is towards short-term gain; an economy which is based on the short-term realisation of paper gain in relation to monetised assets is the very opposite of sustainable.

Commons thinking offers us a way to counteract this. It challenges the belief that the only measure of wealth is the generation of asset numbers on paper; it reminds us that real wealth often has little or nothing to do with economic activity, and it places democratic decision-making at the heart of the generation of real value (it actually means that we decide democratically what has value, rather than leaving that decision to owners of capital and their tame accountants, or to politicians in a representative democracy in which those who do not share the prevailing ideology have little or no voice).  It’s a challenge to the fatalism of market economics – notably to the belief that millions of people are not permitted to have a view on what matters.  It emphatically does not offer easy solutions – in that sense it is way more honest than the neoliberal view that suggests we just have to make markets work more efficiently to ensure prosperity for all.  It recognises the messiness of life, the fact that the world is full of conflicting interests that have to be resolved, far more effectively than a system based on the single imperative of maximising paper asset value in the long-term.

In summary: the commons, and Ostrom’s work, offer a starting-point for an economic and political discourse that is more humane, nuanced, grounded and sustainable than the dominant neoliberal ideology.  At a time when neoliberalism is failing and the reaction to that appears increasingly to be an abandonment of democratic principles, the work of Elinor Ostrom is desperately important.

Agenda for a new Green leader

Caroline Lucas has announced that she will not seek re-election as Green Party leader later this year, in a move aimed at increasing the exposure of other leading Greens.  It’s a wise move; Caroline’s achievement has been enormous, raising the profile of the Party by gaining our first Westminster seat and providing what has at times looked like a lone Westminster voice against the politics of neoliberalism and austerity.  We have our first Green council, working to confront the huge issues of making a Green case in against parameters dictated by central Government.

The risks have always been that as a Party we could come to look like a one-woman band, and that Caroline could be stretched too thin. Her decision is as good a way as any to minimise those risks.

A leadership election provides an opportunity to reflect on what sort of a party we want to be.  Greens have always been rightly sceptical about cults of party leaders – it was a tough (but with hindsight surely right) decision for this party to adopt a single leader at all. But this election does give an opportunity to think and debate about what we want the party to be.

These, then, are the personal thoughts of just one not very active Green Party member about what he sees as the priorities of a new leadership.  I’m not talking about policy details here, and I’m certainly not criticising Caroline’s leadership which I believe has addressed these issues in a way that no other UK politician has come close to managing.  But these are themes that I believe an effective Green movement must address. Those thoughts fall naturally into three (inevitably linked) categories: dealing with the crisis in democracy, reshaping our economic agenda, and creating a sustainable, fair and cohesive society.  All of these lead naturally into a fourth – the need for a return to evidenced discourse and a challenge to the prevailing ideological narratives.

Dealing with a crisis of democratic legitimacy

If there is one theme that has run through everything I have written on this blog it is the depth of the democratic crisis we face, here in Britain and more generally in the developed world.  The situation in Britain is desperate: three main Westminster parties all pushing a neoliberal agenda and arguing over nuance and who is better qualified to implement it, with an electorate that is increasingly unwilling to vote at all, and a feral media united in an apparent determination to avoid intelligent debate that goes beyond the Westminster consensus.  Even in those parts of the UK where government is devolved, there is no real debate.  In the meantime, the failure of that Westminster neoliberal consensus is becoming clearer by the day.  And there is a quiet consensus to limit the scope of active democracy – for example a localism agenda that seeks to turn effective local government into commissioning bodies doling out contracts to companies providing services for profit.

It is a simple and overpowering fact that many of the measures that characterise this Government were things that neither Coalition party dared put explicitly to the electorate at the last election – the effective destruction of state-provided healthcare, savage public expenditure cuts, cuts in benefit for the disabled, £9000 tuition fees.  But all of them were there in the public domain if you looked below the surface – by reading the Orange Book for example – and every single one of them is effectively a continuation of what Labour did in office.  But nobody, explicitly, voted for these things.

It is almost as if the main parties are fomenting an active suspicion of democratic institutions and practices.  Britain must be the only country in the world in which politicians and the media actively campaign against existing human rights legislation, which does no more than enshrine basic convention rights.  Political dissent is being marginalised and in some cases criminalised; the pre-emptive arrest of a republican street theatre group before last year’s Royal Wedding is just one particularly telling example.  But the use of aggressive police tactics against dissent, like the collective punishment of kettling, and the growing privatisation of public space, are all examples of a society which increasingly seems afraid of those who challenge the consensus. All these are symptoms of a polity racked by fear, acknowledging tacitly its lack of legitimacy. Liberal Democrats used to claim to be upholders of civil liberties – on this issue, as in so many others, they have been shown up in Government as a party of time-serving liars.

The new Green Party leader must be an unequivocal defender of democracy – as, indeed, Caroline Lucas has been.  Most importantly the Green Party must reach out to those who have been left behind by Britain’s failing democracy, and must seek to re-engage them in a democratic process.  It’s a challenge about how we as a party conduct ourselves – not just through our own democratic processes, but by reaching out to people who are, frankly, not well-represented in our Party structures; the poorest and most vulnerable.  I believe we are a society that is ripe for a growth in fascism, and in which the democratic model that both the mainstream politicians and the media present is a sort of eviscerated consumerism, in which a concept of “choice” that has little to offer beyond decisions about whether to buy Jaffa Cakes or Hobnobs in the Co-Op has been elevated into a central mantra of Government. As Greens we have to reject X-Factor democracy and engage with people and ideas that are routinely dismissed or even demonised by the Westminster consensus; it means arguing that democracy is not about choices between market options but about mature collective decision-making, based on trust.

One of the most powerful facts about mainstream British politics is the way in which the Labour Party, which claims to speak for the poor and vulnerable, has long since ceased to do so in any meaningful way.  Labour luminaries from Ed Miliband to Liam Byrne are quite happy to speak the language of benefit scroungers, of feral underclasses and of forced workfare while still arrogantly assuming that they have a God-given right to the votes of the people from whom they have walked away and whom they casually demonise.  Understandably, those people have walked away from Labour in their millions since the high-water of 1997.  The new Green Party leader must understand – and act on the understanding – that Labour is a disgrace, and must understand that it is their duty, and the duty of the Party, to speak for and engage with those people – to give them a voice, and hope, and a stake in the democratic process.

Empowerment must be at the top of the Green Party’s agenda.  There is no other party that is seriously placed to act as an advocate of democratic renewal.

Reshaping the economic agenda

Austerity is a political choice, not an economic necessity. That simple fact must be at the heart of the Green Party agenda.  Neoliberalism, for all its language about freedom, is a deeply anti-democratic creed; where the enrichment of the few clashes with democratic choice, neoliberals will always choose the former, as a growing track-record shows.   And we as a party need to see that the real fault-line in economic policy is not between Westminster parties but between those who believe in the neoliberal doctrine of austerity – the Conservative Party, the Liberal Democrats, the Labour Party leadership, the SNP, big business (obviously),the media, the academic economic establishment – and those who argue for another way – the Green Party, Plaid Cymru, many Labour people, quite a lot of people who have been Liberal Democrats (I’m assuming those with a sense of decency will have torn up their membership cards a long time ago), a growing number of economic commentators, and people of no party who consistently reject neoliberalism at the ballot box and who are the victims of what looks increasingly like the biggest Establishment wealth grab since the Enclosure Acts.

A Green Party leader must explicitly and resonantly reject the politics and assumptions of austerity – once again, Caroline Lucas has led the way, often appearing (along with a handful of Labour and Plaid backbenchers) to be the only voice raised at Westminster against the neoliberal consensus.  And we as a party must be absolutely unequivocal – austerity is a political choice, not an economic necessity.  It is without empirical foundation and is manifestly failing.  And that leader must have the understanding and willingness to engage with the alternatives – whether those alternatives come from think-tanks like the New Economics Foundation, or from Elinor Ostrom’s pioneering work on the commons, or from Richard Murphy’s Courageous State.  There is a ferment in economic thinking and it is a populist movement – consider the way in which UK Uncut has ensured that corporate tax evasion is at the top of the political agenda.

Above all, Greens must be in the vanguard of arguing that market economics is based on illusion and unsustainable. There is a debate about the axioms and purpose of economics that the academy is largely ignoring, focussing instead on the refinement of mathematical models that embody assumptions that are really no more than unsupported ideological statements.  Economics must be at the heart of our agenda – we need to understand the narratives and fears that lead to the paradox that, at the very times that market economics is palpably failing, voters embrace the architects of that failure – the National Government in the 1930s, Thatcher in the 1980s.  Ed Balls has thrown in the towel; alternatives, promoting equity and hope, must come from outside the Westminster consensus – it is for us to create and lead the political opposition to austerity economics.  The evidence is ample and growing; and there is plenty of creative thinking about alternatives.  And we must reiterate – as Keynes did in the wilderness in the 1930s – that economics is a matter for democratic control, and is a matter that should not be the preserve of experts but should be opened up to the full glare of political debate.

And we need to be champions of the public sector.  We need to state clearly and firmly – as the three Westminster parties cannot – that privatisation is, in principle, wasteful and is about consolidation of wealth and power  in the hands of the few; we must learn to argue for a strong, enabling, democratically-accountable and, in Richard Murphy’s admirable phrase, courageous state.  Once again, Greens must stake their claim in the territory from which Labour has walked away.  Murphy’s cappucino cup analogy – the state as the strong black coffee on which the frothy milk of private accumulation sits – is simple, powerful and one that I argue must be at the forefront of Green thinking.

One of the most insidious political propagandas of our time is the belief – underpinning almost every piece of economic reportage – is that the advocates of the market, and of austerity, are economic “realists” – while those who challenge it are well-meaning, ungrounded idealists.  I’d suggest that a key task for the new Green leader is to attack that explicitly.  The Left has to learn to get to grips with economics again, and to press the case that economic policy is about political choices, and connect with the people the political classes have left behind to lead them out of economic fatalism.  It’s a huge task – but a necessary one.

Social cohesion

Not long ago, six children were brutally murdered in Derby by an arsonist. Because the parents were recipients of benefits, a good number of media commentators apparently believe they were asking for it.  The callousness and cruelty of those commentators is something that has come to characterise Con Dem Britain (as Owen Jones argues powerfully here); it is a political position, sanctioned by Ministers for whom off-the-record briefing against the vulnerable has become a legitimate political tool.   As a society we have to ask ourselves how such hatred and loathing has become absorbed into the political mainstream – and I want to see a Green Party leader who will take an unequivocal stand against such hatreds, whether they manifest themselves through racism, through the blaming of women who are victims of rape, to the demonising of those receiving benefits and unable to work.  I want a Green Party leader who is angry – angry, for example, at the spectacle of a private sector company certifying for profit the terminally ill as fit for work, or at politicians who seek to encourage the belief that those on receiving benefits to provide them with mobility are somehow scroungers, and who tacitly encourage abuse and violence against the most vulnerable in society.  If I wanted crocodile tears I’d join the Labour Party; I want real, visceral anger from someone who is willing to speak truth to power.  I want a leader who will stand up to the casual bullying that, more than anything, characterises the temper of Coalition Britain. I want to be part of a party whose leader will call out the most privileged Government in recent years when they make ideological statements about people of whose lives, struggles and problems they are wholly ignorant, making decisions from which they have been shielded by wealth and privilege.

A Green society is an empathetic society. The British political and (especially) media establishments seem to regard empathy as something that is weak and soft.  Greens need to show that it is the only possible basis of a good society; we need to demonstrate that it is the casual cruelty of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat leaderships that is every bit as damaging as their economic dogma.  And we have to have the moral courage – as Labour clearly does not – to resist the easy temptation of easy populism.  Leadership is about reminding people that the world is a more complex place than many people are comfortable believing.

A return to evidenced discourse

I have focussed on three main areas of debate – but underlying all of these is a bigger issue about political discourse, and what seems to me to be an abandonment of evidence in favour of ideological narrative.  We see it in almost every aspect of political life – the use of prejudice and unsupported assertion to rationalise the wealth and power grab of the 1%.  Political debate becomes not an attempt to understand and interpret reality, but a competition between unsupported narratives; the winner is the party that can make the most outrageous lie stick.

The most obvious example – and one which is close to the heart of all Greens – is climate change; an overwhelming scientific consensus challenged by a toxic combination of big oil and tin tabernacle religion.  In this, as in so much else, Greens are on the side of empirical knowledge against the narratives of the powerful.  We’re dismissed by the mainstream politicians as woolly and idealistic – the same politicians who accept all the axioms of market economics in the face of their disastrous consequences, who await the intervention of the confidence fairy, who haven’t got a clue about peak oil.  Sustainability is about the long-term – planning for the next seven generations rather than the next seven months – and that requires rigour and an engagement with the realities of the world around us.  In one sense we’re talking about the revival of the best of the liberal tradition – the adducing of evidence to mould society in the service of ideas, themselves grounded in reason and evidence.  In the face of neoliberalism, there is no more subversive doctrine than to bear witness and to speak truth to power.

It means self-discipline. It means that we need as a party to shed our New Age image – a willingness (figuratively speaking, of course) to ban homeopaths from our Republic.  In challenging market economics and responding to climate change, or in arguing that equality leads to better physical and mental health,  Greens must be the party of good hard evidence.  We have to resist the siren call of woo, whether economic, social or scientific (one of the best things that has happened to the Green Party in recent years has been the adoption of a science policy that points us back towards rigour).  And we need to demonstrate that in a political culture of parliamentary parties fighting illusory battles, while engaged in an ideological enterprise aimed at disguising a power and wealth grab in favour of the rich and powerful, we are the party whose ideals of sustainablility, equality and justice are grounded and realistic.  It’s a huge task – one that in my view Caroline Lucas has risen to magnificently – but we need more of it, and I believe that the new leader has to use his, her or their position to focus Party strategy on that task.

In a political system based on unsupported ideology, the Green moment may be when reality bites back – as inevitably it must.  In a sense that it what sustainability means.