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 Spirit of ’45: a flawed but powerful message for contemporary politics

You would need a heart of stone – or to be Liam Byrne – not to shed a tear during The Spirit of ’45.  My moment came when the retired doctor – one of a number of individuals whose reflections and reminiscences punctuated the narrative, and whose demeanour might have been made for a white coat and stethoscope – recalled how on the first day of the NHS, he was making a house call to a family and heard a child coughing upstairs, and offered to help.  The mother demurred, obviously worried by the cost, until the doctor gently reminded her that his visits were now free. It’s a story that has all sorts of resonances, not least of tales from my own family history of when the arrival of the NHS  eased life so significantly for my grandmother and my semi-invalid, weak-chested grandfather.

Ken Loach’s film tells the story of how a nation mobilised for total war determined never to allow the squalor and poverty of the 1930s to be repeated and elected a Labour government on an avowedly socialist platform, and how that Government took the pillars of the economy into public ownership, built good quality social housing, and set up the National Health Service.  He then jumps forward thirty years to Thatcher and discusses how the structures that had been established after 1945 were dismantled and returned to management for profit, focussing in particular on the brutality visited on striking miners in the 1985 Strike,  and culminating in the destruction of the NHS under the Coalition.  But the film also shows the disappointment that the structures of the new nationalised industries did not mean workers’ control – although nationalisation brought huge gains (for example the ending of the priority of output over safety in the mining industry) the structures of management remained fundamentally unchanged, with the newly nationalised industries being managed from the top down (although paradoxically the union officials interviewed in the post-1970 sections of the film all argued that privatisation meant that the efficiencies of central strategic planning were no longer to be had). The narrative is carried on by archive footage and narration intermingled with comment from a number of people – a man who grew up in the pre-war Liverpool slums, a Welsh miner, a group of retired nurses and our doctor.  The post-Thatcher narrative was carried on by a succession of Union officials, who emphasised the key role of class in the politics of the era and argued that Labour had abandoned its working class roots.  It ends with a powerful and emotional message about the witness of those who lived through the post-war years, and the imperative of passing their hope and belief on to a young generation that had few reasons for either.

It is a powerful, emotional film – it is shamelessly polemical, often in revealing ways.  Footage of the 1945 election campaign shows Churchill not as the powerful war leader, but strangely glassy-eyed in front of the camera in what seemed like a precursor of a party political broadcast, or hesitant in front of a hostile, heckling crowd. Or the crucial fact – often overlooked in the trope of Churchill as triumphant war leader – that on the home front, and in the organisation of wartime production, Britain effectively already had a Labour government, in which Labour Ministers directed the command economy on which victory had depended.  Elsewhere the manipulation was more obvious – Margaret Thatcher’s conference speeches interspersed with the shots of the more grotesquely eccentric party faithful, or where at the end – after the film’s witnesses had expressed their optimism – the opening shots of VE Day celebrations were repeated, this time in colour in contrast to the monochrome of the rest of the film.

There were serious omissions, too.  Not just sociological oddities like the largely-forgotten fact that Britain was consumed by a crime-wave in the years immediately following the war, but most significantly the fact that the British economy was completely shattered by the war – a fact mentioned but whose implications (profoundly important, I’d argue, in making a contemporary link) were not considered.   Economics was barely mentioned – no more than a passing reference to Keynes.

There were a number of thoughts that I took away from the film:

First, following on from the point about how Labour had directed the domestic war effort, I wondered whether 1945 was a unique moment in history that made the achievements of the Attlee Government possible.  The war had demonstrated that a planned, centralised economy could work, in a way that was unparalleled before or since.  Perhaps – just perhaps – part of Labour’s triumph in 1945 was down to an acceptance of the use of such methods to avoid the chaos that followed the First World War; perhaps the return to the Tories in 1951 was a sign that the moment had passed, and that politics as usual – based around appeals to the individual rather than the collective – had returned.

Second, the film had almost nothing to say about economics, but the economic background of the Attlee Government is of central importance; and the comparison with the modern economic climate is instructive.  After six years of total war the British economy was shattered and its infrastructure was worn out.  At a time when we are being told that we must endure the economics of austerity because we lived beyond our means, and in response to the economic crisis of 2007-8, it is worth remembering that the creation of the NHS and the building of social housing to give working people decent, secure homes as of right took place against an immeasurably worse economic situation – albeit one that reflected the necessities of national survival rather than the casino economics of bankers’ Ponzi schemes.  The austerity of the late 1940s and the persistence of rationing were barely mentioned; but surely played a part in the return of politics as normal in 1951. It is additionally almost forgotten that the Attlee government presided over the most fundamental economic redistribution of modern times – in which wages for working people rose decisively in contrast to the wealth of the rentier class.  At a time when we are seeing the reverse taking place it seems important to make the link between social progress and redistribution. Moreover, there is an interesting parallel between the nationalisation of the coal, steel and transport industries and the original motivation behind Thatcher’s privatisations – the need to invest in infrastructure that was clapped out.

Third, the film does not consider the fact that the Labour Party of 1945 emerged from the split of 1931, in which the Labour leadership went into coalition to form a National Government.  It was a party that had explicitly rejected the fiscal orthodoxy and the reductions in the living standards of working people that Ramsay Macdonald had embraced as part of a flawed Westminster consensus.  It’s important because Labour’s leadership today looks much more like Ramsay Macdonald than George Lansbury; fiscally orthodox and apparently quite willing to live with cuts in living standards – including benefits – in the name of economic necessity.  The economics-free evasions of One Nation Labour (which I have blogged about here) look very much like the sort of thing that the Labour leaders of 1945 had consciously rebelled against in 1931; Labour in 1945 was confident in its theory.

Finally, there was a powerful sense that the witness of the participants in the film was undmediated.  Apart from a few comments about the way the media attacked Aneurin Bevan, there was almost no mention of the media.  We were firmly in the world of authentic experience – of consciousnesses formed by daily realities, not by the mediation of mass media.  This was a world of reality-based politics.

So, where  does this leave us in 2013, when the apparatus of decency that Attlee built has largely been dismantled, and we are living through the last days of the NHS as Bevan conceived it?  In a week in which a Labour front-bench, faced with a situation in which unemployed people were illegally stripped of their benefits, chose not to oppose a Bill that would nullify the redress that these people were entitled to under the law, the conclusion must be that Labour, in its present form, is not remotely capable of acting as the vehicle for any optimism that the tide against austerity economics can be turned.  Interviewees like Tony Mulhearn talked of the way in which Labour was no longer a working-class party, and no longer spoke for working people; the fact that the industries have changed and the people for whom Labour is failing to speak are now supermarket workers, contract cleaners, call-centre workers and indeed the unemployed forced on to workfare schemes rather than workers in giant, unionised industries does not negate the challenge (I could add from my own experience of my short and unhappy membership of the Labour Party in the late 1990s, what really motivated local party activists in my part of the world was not speaking for the vulnerable but expelling socialists – I remember one incident in which a local party panjandrum told us that the selection of a certain individual as a council candidate would be viewed with disfavour by No 10 –  leaving aside political considerations, an organisation that relied on such arrant nonsense to rationalise a witch-hunt had some pretty basic issues to deal with). Labour’s assimilation into the neoliberal mainstream means that it remains part of the problem, not the solution.

So where does the solution lie? Ken Loach has launched an appeal for unity on the Left to oppose austerity and to put into practice the calls for a new politics based around the values of 1945.  Leftish Labour figures like Owen Jones and Green MP Caroline Lucas are involved in launching the People’s Assembly to re-energise the Left and to recapture the values of 1945; it’s a huge but necessary task, and one that I cannot see the current Labour leadership tolerating; the challenge for the Labour left of recapturing a party that filleted its internal democracy in the 1990s to make way for new Labour looks pretty insurmountable, and Labour has long been a party intolerant of pluralism and dissent.  For me, part of the key lies in an issue that did not register in Loach’s film at all – the fact that any modern socialism must be Green, and conversely that Greens must be socialist, because the planet is under dire threat and the root of that threat is that power and wealth are in the hands of a minority determined to exploit the planet for their own benefit, rather than sustaining and nurturing it for the benefit of all; it is already obvious that in the global sense, environmental catastrophe is a matter of equality, or in Loach’s terms a class issue.  And the threat to our planet is as dangerous as the total war of 1939-45 – more so in fact – and it is difficult to see how it can be avoided without the sort of mass mobilisation that won that war, involving strong – but democratically accountable – state institutions.

Perhaps the real Spirit of ’45 is this; that people came together, worked collectively in war and for a brief few years managed to work collectively to change their society immeasurably for the better.  But over time our political culture shifted back towards individualism and lost that sense of the collective.  Faced with environmental degradation and what looks like a fundamental crisis of capitalism, we need to rediscover that collective spirit.  But we have a huge way to go.

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.

Queers Against Cuts and a failure of Pride

Brighton’s annual Pride procession is one of the City’s great events – a day when the City can collectively let its hair down in celebration of its diversity. Sadly, at today’s Pride, a line appears to have been crossed that suggests that the event has lost its soul.

The issue concerns the treatment of a group called Queers Against Cuts, who, having been accepted by Pride organisers as a participant in the parade, were subjected to what looks like disgraceful and spiteful treatment by organisers and police.  The organiser of the group tells the full story here but in summary, it appears that having been accepted by the Pride organisers as part of the procession, the Group was, at the insistence of the police, moved to the back of the procession directly in front of police and made subject to some sort of police containment – the group say they were kettled, the police reject the use of the word, but this looks more like a case of semantics than substance.  Whatever the case, they were subjected to treatment that was rather different to that afforded to other participants.

The Pride organisers have started to talk about politicisation.  It’s a feeble argument that does them no credit.  The four main political parties in Brighton had floats – even the Liberal Democrats, of whom nothing has been heard since last year’s local election rout, managed to field a presence.  Of those four parties, three are explicit supporters of a cuts agenda; the fourth, the Green Party, runs a minority administration in Brighton that is reluctantly making cuts.  Trade Unionists were out in force; the Queers Against Cuts float was due to be immediately behind the NUT.

It is to Green MP Caroline Lucas’ immense credit that she intervened on Queers Against Cuts’ behalf, but the damage was done.  And on Twitter and elsewhere, the Tory trolls have been out; QAC demonised as a small group hell-bent on disruption, spoiling Pride for the majority.  Except they weren’t – there’s no evidence to support that contention.  As far as I can see QAC were out to make a point and make a bit of noise – no different from other participants.

Moreover, the “politicisation” angle misses an essential point.  Pride is political.  A public event that celebrates equality and diversity must be political in the society in which we live, when inequality and prejudice remain that society’s default mode.  Pride started as a demonstration for equal treatment by the police, in the days when targeting gay men was still an officially-sanctioned tactic, and when the then Tory Government was entrenching homophobia through the notorious Section 28; as debates about equal marriage and issues like the way in which society treats disabled people or the homeless rage in modern Britain, it remains that any event that celebrates equality and diversity must be political.  The organisers, now perhaps mesmerised by that offensive phrase “the pink pound” seem to have lost sight of this.

As I said, a line has been crossed.  Pride, long a part of Brighton life, has become mainstream – more than one watcher commented on the commercialism of this year’s procession.  Add to that  a system of police intelligence-gathering that sustains and justifies itself by the collection of information on “activists” – the majority of whom have not been arrested and have no criminal record – and you have the recipe for events like today’s, in which permission to participate stops at the boundaries of political consensus.

It is ironic that organisers and police working together as they appear to have done today would have excluded, by the same rationale, the founders of Pride.  Perhaps today has seen the end of Pride as we have known it; a once-radical event made safe for neoliberalism which allows participants to congratulate themselves on being “edgy” while challenging nobody. When one sees reactionaries tweeting in defence of the spirit of Pride, one senses that the game is up.  And, as a Brightonian for more than a quarter of a century, I’d find that ineffably sad.

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.

Why I’m backing Brighton and Hove’s Green administration

Last Thursday evening, Labour and Tories in Brighton collaborated to pass amendments to the Green administration’s proposed Budget that froze Council Tax – in contrast to the Green proposal for a 3.5% increase – and to make corresponding cuts.  Following the vote in favour of the amendments, the Green group on the council – with one exception – voted to accept the amended budget.

It has been a matter of real controversy within the Green Party, both in Brighton and nationally – fortuitously the vote took place the day before the Green Party conference opened in Liverpool, and a motion critical of the Brighton and Hove Group was not debated in a move that has apparently deepened the controversy and led to resignations from the Party.

My immediate gut instinct was to side with those who argued that the Green group in Brighton could not continue in office having lost the Budget vote.  It’s worth considering the background – the administration had embarked on one of the most comprehensive consultation exercises ever seen on a local authority budget, against the background of swingeing, ideologically-motivated cuts in central Government funding for local authorities.  Moreover, the Green decision to support a modest Council Tax increase was taken against the background of what was effectively a bribe from central Government – get extra cash this year if you freeze council tax, but commit to funding cuts in the longer term.

Labour and Tories proposed near-identical amendments to the Budget (while denying collaboration, although if they didn’t the draft speaks eloquent volumes about the closeness of thinking between Labour and Tories in Brighton) and the Labour amendments were passed.  Most of the Green group then voted for the amended Budget.

As I said, my gut feeling was that the Green administration could not carry on.  But I now realise, on reflection, that their actions were right for the Party and right for the people of Brighton and Hove.

Had the Green group tried to vote against the amended Budget, their moral authority as an administration would have been finished.  Every measure they proposed, every aspiration, would have been torn apart by Labour and the Tories and their friends in Brighton’s local media on the grounds that the administration had voted against giving itself the means to do so.  It would have become a lame duck administration, its authority shot to pieces.

So why continue in administraion?  If the Green administration resigned, the Tories would come to office.  Brighton and Hove Tories:

• want every school in Brighton to become an academy;
• would overturn the city’s commitment to a living wage;
• support the privatisation of all Brighton’s care homes;
• would eviscerate the innovative Green proposals to improve Brighton’s public realm and make the city a liveable place;

and during the course of the debate

• supported  nursery closures while attacking the decision of the Green administration to sell the Mayor’s personalised number plate;
• repeated the racist lie that the city is “awash with travellers” – an inflammatory fiction that Tory MPs and Councillors continue to push, in contrast to the adminstration’s aim to produce a long-term solution to the traveller issue;
• complained that the Green group contained too many incomers to the city (see previous bullet point);
• backed an illegal proposal to remove facility time from the Council’s unions (a measure which of course provides a consultative route that makes the council more efficient and saves money)

I am wondering quite why some critics in the wider Green Party – including those proposing motions at the Green Party conference – see the installation of an administration believing these things as the best way in which Green councillors could discharge their obligations to their electors.  Of course, one can understand that none of them have had the experience of administration and the wider responsibilities that that brings; but they need to get beyond the belief that this is a theoretical debate. Like it or not, Brighton Greens took on the administration of the city in the full knowledge that they would be a minority administration facing years of cuts.  The idea that you could walk away now on a point of principle and that the electorate would continue to have faith in you seems to me to be utterly misguided.

Could a minority Tory administration do all those things?  Possibly not, but the chaos of trying to do so is not something that should be lightly dismissed.  Moreover, how could we be sure that Labour would not back them?  As I’ve written elsewhere (scroll down to comments) the really interesting thing about Labour in Brighton is the way that its rhetoric and politics  has developed in a way that aligns them so closely with the Tory position on how local government is financed – indeed on what local government is for.

Those on low incomes are hit hard by cuts in services – while a coucil tax freeze favours the better-off.  It’s a simple economic fact.  In other words, Labour still claims to speak for the poor and vulnerable but in general is advocating policies that have precisely the opposite effect. And it appears to have bought into precisely the sort of low-tax rhetoric that Pickles uses to justify his assault on local authority power. One would like to think that Labour would know better – but recent history suggests otherwise (students of urban development will realise that Labour’s urban legacy in Government will be the erosion of local democracy, the privatisation of public space, the gated estate, the private mall and the CCTV camera – in the essentials of urban policy, as in so much else, Labour and Tory are increasingly indistinguishable).

So why the inconsistencies? It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Labour in Brighton is still fighting the 2010 General Election, and still smarting at the fact that, having taken for granted that it would get the progressive vote in this city, it lost to a candidate who outflanked it on the left and continues to provide real opposition to the coalition in a way that the national Labour leadership just doesn’t appear to have the stomach for. It’s now indulding in toddler politics – still smarting over its defeat and throwing a toddler hissy fit that must be giving Brighton’s Tories quite a lot of quiet satisfaction. It looks very much like a group that has lost the will to argue for change and is content with throwing its toys around instead; and one that will do almost anything in its power to discredit the Greens.  Labour may once have been a party that knew the difference between statesmanship and an emotional spasm but pronouncements from its leaders suggest that it’s really quite comfortable with a neoliberal tax and spending agenda and that attacking the Greens counts for far more than defending the vulnerable.

It seems to me that not the least of Labour’s offences – especially through its denial of collusion with the Tories – is to treat the electors of Brighton as if they were stupid.  It contrasts very powerfully with the Green administration’s commitment to real consultation.

In this situation, it seems to me that however painful the decision to vote for the amended Budget – and it would not have been easy – and to carry on in administration, it was the right one and the one that does most to protect the interests and aspirations of the people who put their faith in the Party at last year’s Elections.  To have walked away would have condemned the Party as a home of people who have nice fluffy ideas but run a mile when the going gets tough – and would seriously have undermined Caroline Lucas’ position as the only MP and Party Leader who is standing out against the three-party neoliberal consensus.  I have every respect for the people within the Green Party who argue that the Group should have resigned, but I am very proud indeed of our Green Councillors in Brighton and Hove for continuing the fight for the values that I and thousands of others across our city voted for last May.

From Red Ed to Ramsay Ed

Today’s strikes by public sector workers against changes to their pensions (which amount to a 3% pay cut) are important.  It’s not just that strikers turned out in large numbers, and were well-supported; or that opinion polls show sustained and substantial support for the strikers; or that the Government’s intellectual case for pensions changes is in tatters, not least after a truly disastrous performance by Francis Maude on the Radio 4 Today programme this morning, in which he showed himself desperately out of his depth when challenged on the detail of the Hutton Report and on the entirely false proposition that the cost of public sector pensions is unaffordable (there’s a transcript here).  Add this to the half-million people who marched through London on 26 March, and the mounting wave of protests; there is a popular upsurge, a potentially vast grass-roots movement waiting to be led.

But it’s a movement that has no voice in mainstream politics.  On a day when the people that Labour was created to defend took strike action to defend their hard-won pension rights, Labour spokesmen queued up at the microphones to condemn the actions. To the fury of union leaders, Ed Miliband chose to follow the same line as David Cameron, Nick Clegg and the Daily Mail – that the strikes were wrong.  In a passage that hit heights of imbecility that should have the whole Labour party hanging their heads in shame, Miliband condemned the strikes with the sentence:

“The Labour Party I lead will always be the party of the mums and dads who know the value of a day’s education.”

Such sentiments were of course set aside for the Windsor family wedding in April.  It’s abject nonsense – and this from a man who was once regarded as the Unions’ choice for Labour leader, or Red Ed in the words of the tabloids.  But what we now have is Ramsay Ed, Cameron’s echo chamber, making speeches in which he does the Tory party’s dirty work by claiming that teachers and other public services are doing themselves a disservice by standing up for their rights, in language that directly mirrors that of Ramsay Macdonald at the time of the 1926 General Strike.

I think if I were a radical in the Labour Party right now, I’d want to find a quiet corner and weep.  As a Green Party member I can point to the fact that my party leader (and, as it happens, my MP), Caroline Lucas, stood foursquare behind public sector pensioners today.  But it’s not enough.  The Green Party has one MP, leads one local authority and has a substantial presence in a handful more; the problem is way bigger than that.  The people on strike today – and the vulnerable people they serve, and who have traditionally looked to the Labour Party to protect them – and, yes, we on the non-Labour left – need a Labour Party that is better.  A Labour Party that is passionate, committed, fearless, forthright in protecting the poorest in society.  How many of those did you manage today, Ramsay Ed?

The position we face in Britain is simply this.  We have a Government which is pursuing a feral neo-liberal agenda in which the poorest and most vulnerable are forced to pay the price for the stupidity and greed of the financial sector, at huge human cost.  And we have three political parties which continue to advocate that neo-liberal agenda and are utterly blind to the economic and human carnage it created, fighting over an ever-smaller scrap of political ground, while more and more people are left outside the parameters of mainstream political debate.  In other words, we have a profound crisis of political legitimacy in Britain today.  Ed Miliband today showed that Labour remains part of the problem, not the solution, and as long as it fails to stand up for the people it was founded to support that will remain the case.

A perfect Green storm in Brighton Pavilion?

I was fascinated to read an article by Nancy Platts, Labour candidate in Brighton Pavilion at the General Election, on a Labour party website, discussing why Labour lost Pavilion to Caroline Lucas.

As someone who voted Green in 2010 and joined the Party immediately after the election I agree with much of her analysis.  Nancy Platts was a very good candidate; she clearly articulated a powerful, attractive and radical political vision which was more calculated to appeal to Brighton voters than her party’s official line.  She is certainly right that the Green party was able to motivate students and others  who might in other circumstances have voted Labour – or, more likely, not voted at all.  She is right that Iraq, tuition fees, PFI and environmental issues were important (the student vote was vital to Green gains in Hollingbury and Stanmer ward at the local elections).  And she is also right that electing a free radical who would not be whipped into line as soon as she set foot in Westminster held a lot of attractions.

But there are other issues at work too.

First, demography.  In many respects, Brighton, with its two universities, its high proportion of graduates and its focus on information technology and media jobs, is a classic Liberal Democrat town.  But the Liberal Democrats have long been an irrelevance; a tradition of infighting has never allowed them to gain any purchase.  These are people who are motivated by issues, but, as Nancy Platts said, Labour let them down.  But the effect may have been mitigated by Labour tribalism – I recall so many conversations before the election with people who expressed their disgust at New Labour over Iraq, Afghanistan, tuition fees, PFI, appeasing the Murdoch press and so on, but who also said they’d be Labour till the day they died.  Whether these middle-class tribalists revolted in the privacy of the polling station I don’t know; the vehemence of the protest did suggest a certain lack of conviction.

Second, it’s important not to underestimate the arrogant, complacent tribalism of Brighton Labour.  I was, around the time of the 1997 election, briefly a member of the Brighton Pavilion Labour Party.  Even at that stage it was inward-looking and arrogant, reluctant to reach out to new members.  Actually finding someone who would talk to a new member about meetings and events was hard enough, but the moment when I decided that this shower were no longer worth the candle came with a local election candidate selection meeting from which I was excluded for the crime of arriving five minutes late – as a commuting wage-slave dependent on trains home from London. Evidently the reality of life for many of their core supporters mattered rather less than the letter of the rule-book.

It was an attitude to those outside the inner elite that extended to Labour’s management of the council – given the behaviour of the recently-departed Tory administration it’s easy to forget how awful Labour were. Having – as a governor of a primary school in a Tory suburb – been told that the extra resources we needed were unlikely to be forthcoming as the kids concerned were not “our people”, or having watched the stitch-up that led to the building of Falmer Stadium, in which Labour at local and national level showed a contempt for process that would have had Eric Pickles whistling in admiration, I have no difficulty in understanding that, when presented with an alternative, many people who might otherwise have been natural Labour supporters turned to a radical alternative elsewhere.  Brighton Labour’s obsession with demonising Caroline Lucas demonstrates yet further that Brighton Labour still looks like a group intellectual self-abuse session conducted behind closed doors.  I don’t think Labour has any prospect of winning Pavilion back while Caroline Lucas remains a candidate, but continually fighting the last election is not an intelligent or confident approach to the next one.

And of course there is the conflict between the apparent continued belief that Labour “owns” the left while, in almost all the essentials, it has ceased to be a party of even the social democratic centre left.  Yes, Labour achieved some important things in office – like the minimum wage – but only when it was being true to its roots.  Today, the national party’s acquiescence in the cuts agenda and its continued support for neo-con adventurism abroad, along with its refusal to speak up for those suffering as a result of cuts in DLA and other benefits, is an illustration of one of the reasons why there is a crisis of democratic legitimacy in Britain – three parties fighting over an ever-smaller piece of political ground, none of them prepared to challenge a neo-liberal economic and foreign-policy agenda, with increasing numbers of voters simpy opting out or lured by the extremes.  One of the reasons why Caroline Lucas is likely to remain MP for Pavilion for as long as she wants to is that she is not compromised by the intellectual and moral evasions of the Labour Party when faced with the shock doctrine.  My own experience of the last local election – in a Tory suburb, no less – is that there is huge respect for Lucas’ unequivocal and eloquent opposition to the Con Dems’ ideological agenda.  Her rejection of the economic illiteracy of Osborneomics is a more convincing and powerful argument than Labour’s agenda of slower, fluffier cuts that don’t upset the middle classes.

The real problem for Labour in Brighton is that the Green Party is standing up against Cameron, Osborne and Clegg’s agenda; Labour, intellectually and morally compromised, can’t and won’t.  How a Green minority administration manages our city will be a hugely important test, but Labour’s problems in Brighton are deep-seated, structural, ideological and will not be solved by organisational change.

Where does progressive politics stand after 5 May?

Elections last Thursday saw conflicting fortunes for political parties across Britain – an SNP landslide in Scotland, annihilation for the Liberal Democrats in many parts of the country, Labour gains but the Tories taking enough seats from the Liberal Democrats for them to claim (with help from the supine media) they’re holding their ground, and a resounding defeat for AV in the referendum.

So, for progressives, where does this leave us?

On the face of it, the really big winners from this have been the Tories. They’ve got the election system they wanted, the one which gives the political establishment the smoothest ride and ensures the narrowest representation. This, combined with the reduction in the number of seats in the House of Commons, the mass appointment of Peers and the what appear to be strong hints that they will block House of Lords reform, means that they have consolidated their grip on power. Moreover, the balance of power within the ruling coalition has been made clear. The Liberal Democrats have been skewered – Vince Cable’s complaints about the Tories being ruthless and tribal (he’s only just noticed?) are no more than distant warblings from the bottom of the dustbin of history.

The position of the Liberal Democrats bears some examination. The question that they must answer is whether they have driven the Coalition in a progressive direction; essentially, whether life would have been substantially different under a majority Conservative government. In most of the essentials, the answer is no. Massive public expenditure cuts and NHS privatisation have not been prevented; the Liberal Democrat agenda on constitutional reform and civil liberties has been brushed aside; university tuition fees will be £9000 per year. All they have done is provided the means for the Tories to enact the shock doctrine, and been wasted in the process; a text-book model of useful idiocy.

The important thing to grasp about the Liberal Democrats, though, is that none of this is a sell-out. This is an Orange Book government – cuts and NHS privatisation were Lib Dem themes long before they got into government. The real betrayal is that Clegg managed to convince electors that his party was progressive. The lies were told during, not after, last year’s election campaign.

Labour did well – better than you would think from reading the mainstream media – but this was not a breakthrough performance. And, as I’ve argued before, Labour’s progressive credentials are weak. If you believe that the Tories’ cuts agenda is economically illiterate, then Labour’s policy of slower, fluffier cuts equally fails to deal with the causes and effects of economic crisis. And Labour remains the party of Iraq, Afghanistan, the party that introduced tuition fees, demonised those claiming benefits and rammed through legislation increasing police powers which criminalised dissent (the pre-emptive arrests of “known subversives” before the Royal Wedding – so reminiscent of how Eastern European states handled dissidents before the fall of Communism – took place under Labour powers). There are progressive people in the Labour Party but collectively it is a party that defends, rather than challenges the status quo, one eye always focussed on the Daily Mail. To adopt Tawney’s language, it has not yet got up of its knees.

But it wasn’t all bad news for progressives. The SNP landslide in Scotland is at one level a rejection of the shock doctrine, as Scots had the option of voting for a party that could claim to have defended Scotland from its worst excesses. More interesting was the steady advance of the Green Party – it still (outside Brighton and Norwich) has no more than a handful of councillors, but becoming the largest party in Brighton on an agenda that explicitly refuses to accept the arguments for cuts and privatisation. In Brighton there is no doubt that Caroline Lucas’ almost lone advocacy of economic and political alternatives at Westminster struck a chord, but here the Greens have built up their position over a number of elections, indulging in what looks like old-fashioned Liberal community politics (before it degenerated into the mindless activism that fuelled the Liberal Democrats’ reputation as the dirtiest fighters in British politics).

It’s an illustration, though, that the best hope for progressives now appears to lie outside the main party system, building a radical analysis within which to tackle individual issues. The student protests, the campaigns against corporate tax evasion and local opposition to cuts have had some success in driving the political agenda. It looks as if we’re in for a long haul – and there are some signs that the future of progressive politics will depend on building structures that will challenge the values of mainstream politicians, and break open the market consensus.