Two-tier roads and the evasion of political responsibility

Recent media reports suggest that among the Coalition’s range of options for the future of road provision is a system of two-tier vehicle taxation, with those using motorways paying a higher rate.  The tone of some of the press coverage suggests that this might be an Aunt Sally idea – a nonsense that has been put into the public domain to be knocked down, while what Government really wants to do can then be taken forward as something more sensible; but this is a Government whose disdain for evidence grows by the week.  Moreover, I have no doubt that the Civil Servants working on the issue know the problems.  This looks horribly like another Bright Idea from SPAD City, the brainchild of Special Advisers; but it’s instructive in many ways of the thought processes behind the coalition.

The problems are obvious.  Motorways are designed to carry heavy traffic, at speed, and to do so with relative safety.  Other roads simply are not.  For decades, getting through traffic out of towns has been a central aim of transport policy; billions have been spent on bypasses, often justified on environmental and safety grounds as well as to reduce journey times. Even that most pernicious and underrated of the effects of heavy traffic, community severance, has been prayed in aid.  In other words, for this proposal to be credible, Government thinking on either the value of those benefits or on the level of diversion must have changed.  But there is no evidence that this is the case.

Moreover, there are huge practical issues.  Bureaucratically it would be a nightmare – would you have occasional user permits? What if you wanted to change your tax band during the year? This is the Government, remember, that is closing DVLA local offices and slashing hundreds of DVLA jobs.  Online? Well, perhaps, but there are plenty of motorists who don’t have online access.  Throught the Post Office? Expensive, and likely to generate queues.  How much is this all going to cost?  And of course what about all those hard cases that will end up in the Daily Mail?

Enforcement? The media reports suggest using the existing ANPR cameras to read number plates.  Well, possibly – except that the ANPR reader that can reliably read number plates off the back of cars doing 70mph (or even 80mph if the Mr Toad tendency gets its way) in driving rain, with spray billowing out behind the car and a stiff gale rattling the camera on the gantry, to a level that would provide the certainty required to sustain a criminal prosecution, simply does not exist.  And more accurate methods of enforcement like DSRC tags would be hugely expensive, would require an entire new roadside infrastructure, and would – potentially – bring the system within the ambit of European legislation on electronic road tolling.  In other words, it’s a complete non-starter.

So why is the DfT floating these ideas?  Is this another symptom of the exodus of experienced staff as a result of Osborne’s cuts? Or is it really an admission that faced with the issues surrounding provision of roads, Government really doesn’t have a clue and is running scared of addressing the main issues – which are that Britain’s roads are unsustainably overcrowded, and that a return to the discredited politics of predict and provide is basically an expensive nonsense.

What this kind of proposal shows is a basic failure to get to grips with the real issue around roads provision. Tories (and one must assume Liberal Democrats, although one wonders just how much say poor Norman Baker gets at the big boys’ table) are locked into a number of unsustainable narratives around motoring – like the nonsensical rhetoric around the war on the motorist and the belief that you can build your way out of congestion (while simultaneously claiming to be the “greenest Government ever”).  The question of where the costs of motoring should fall – and of ensuring that those costs fully reflect the impact that road use imposes -  is firmly off the agenda.  The social implications of planning for a society based on car use in which a third do not have access to a car are swept away. And ultimately there is, as with almost every aspect of public service provision, a well-funded commercial lobby that sees a future privatisation as the road to profit.

When ideas as daft as this one are getting serious airtime, you know that something is up.  Transport policy is an area where the conventional narratives of market economics are bumping up against the realities of life – and our political system, based as it is around a neoliberal consensus, simply lacks the moral and intellectual equipment to deal with that clash.  A moment’s thought shows why we need a fundamental debate about transport and sustainability. A moment’s reflection on the nature of Westminster and media politics shows why we have so little prospect of getting one.

Twilight of the idolaters

It seems curiously fitting that, on the same day that Nick Clegg vents his frustration at aspects of the coalition, the news should also carry the story of a man who incinerated his own underpants in a microwave.  Marx famously wrote that history repeated itself first as tragedy, then as farce; but the history of the Liberal Democrat contribution to the coalition appears to mingle the two in a cocktail of betrayal, incompetence and at times sheer stupidity.  Consider the history of the coalition announced with such high hopes in May 2010; within days of taking office, the architect of Orange Book Liberalism is forced to resign, the guardian of the public purse caught with his fingers in the till, his replacement apparently reduced to being no more than the Chancellor’s human shield; the U-turn on tuition fees; the betrayal of the NHS, in which the Liberal Democrat peers suffered the ultimate indignity of being outflanked on the left – on the left – by David Owen; the humiliation of the AV vote; and now the final indignity of the withdrawal of House of Lords reform.

Every single Liberal Democrat red line traduced, while a Conservative party that lost the 2010 Election has been maintained in office, and given free rein to destroy services, emasculate local government and pursue the largest redistribution of wealth from poor to rich in modern history, sustained in office by Liberal Democrat votes.  Tory bloggers in the Daily Telegraph may fulminate about how, thanks to the Liberal Democrat influence, this isn’t a real Tory government; but this is merely the Lib Dems taking the fall for things like the abolition of the Human Rights Act or withdrawal from the EU that the Tories in office could never have delivered any way; or for failing to allow the delivery of a right-wing moral agenda that Cameron and his Notting Hill chums have little interest in delivering.  At every point the Liberal Democrats have failed to make any difference.

Back in 2010, I heard people of Liberal Democrat leanings excitedly talking about opportunity, and my predictions that it would all end in tears being dismissed as a manifestation of my usual Eeyorism.  But how could it have been any different?  The British Conservative party has an instinct for the concentration and wielding of power that makes many dictatorships look like rank amateurs.  The Liberal Democrats were like lambs to the slaughter.

This is partly because, as a party, they represented an uneasy marriage of two quite different political traditions.  On the one hand there were social radicals, people at the grass roots who really believed in change, and who embraced causes – CND in the 1980s, environmentalism and identity politics more recently.  What they lacked was a coherent theory; their heart in the right place, their star in the ascendant in the Liberal Democrat party that emerged from the merger of the Liberals and SDP, but no real grasp of economics and a lack of any systematic approach to society.  On the other hand, the Orange Bookers – drawing on the nineteenth-century Liberal traditions of laissez-faire and more recent theories of public choice and intelligent markets, but with a belief that the market could serve a benign vision of social progress, most significantly when accompanied by the reform of political institutions.  These were the people who gained the ascendancy in the period leading up to 2010 – people like Laws and Clegg himself, and even Vince Cable who was able in opposition to deliver withering analyses of  bubble capitalism even while Orange Book zealots were embracing the ideology that made such bubbles possible.  In other words – an incoherent fissiparous ideological mess.

In Government of course the Orange Bookers have been in the ascendant.  Shrinking the state? Provision of healthcare in the private sector? Local government as a commissioner of services from the private sector rather than as an active agent of social change?  It’s all there in the Orange Book for anyone with a strong stomach and a taste for turgid prose.  In many respects, this has been an Orange Book government.  Where the Orange Book vision has matched the Tory passion for free markets, a minimalist state and private sector provision, this has seen a coalition of common cause, with Liberal Democrats as enthusiastic cheerleaders for privatisation and cuts.  But political reform is different.  The price of Liberal Democrat cooperation was a commitment to political reform – but it is becoming increasingly clear that this was a commitment that the Tories were never able or indeed willing to deliver.  Clegg and his colleagues simply lacked the will, nerve or common sense to enforce his part of the pact.  Clegg may whine that Labour skewered Lords reform, but that pass was already sold – the Bill that Clegg sought to defend was simply bad legislation, with almost every reforming instinct removed to appease the Tories.  By the same token, AV was a milk-and-water reform that would have made little difference. Cameron and his party never wanted political reform and were never going to allow it, except insofar as it suited their interests (i.e. a smaller House of Commons on reformed boundaries which would have wiped out any  gains in  proportionality from AV).

Shirley Williams – in the days before she became a cheerleader for privatising the NHS – said that a centre party would have no heart, no roots, no philosophy. It was a comment that was eerily prescient of what would bring the Liberal Democrats down – a party with no real theory, of conflicting political standpoints, whose leaders lacked the judgement and objectivity to get past the glamour of office in striking the coalition deal.  Never trust a Tory was the cry when, thirty years ago, I was active in the old Liberal Party.  Or, as Tawney wrote about Labour in 1931, to kick over an idol you must first get up off your knees.  There are aspects of the old Liberal tradition that are desperately needed today – its empiricism, its emphasis on democratic and representative processes, its assertion civil liberties. Liberal Democrats, through market idolatry and sheer bad judgement, have helped ensured they are sidelined.

Recessional

Rudyard Kipling wrote his poem Recessional for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Not his original choice – that was The White Man’s Burden – but Recessional was something altogether less celebratory; a warning against hubris, a reminder of the transitoriness of pomp and ceremonial whose repeated refrain of “lest we forget” has become more readily associated with the mass slaughter of two world wars than with the emptiness of Jubilee celebrations.

It’s a thought that has never been far from my mind, as the three days of national rejoicing comes to an end. At the centrepiece, a Thames flotilla, a pop concert and a Service of Thanksgiving in St Paul’s; around the country, street parties (perhaps fewer than the mainstream media led us to believe), bunting, flag-waving, beacons, drinking; in the media, celebratory fawning; elsewhere, the slightly different pomp and circumstance of this Summer’s other main event, the Olympics, suspended for a day or two while the Queen’s sixty years on the throne are celebrated in the appropriate fashion.

Looking at the events, I have found it a strange and detached affair – a strange sense that this was not the Britain I know and live in from day to day (a feeling I had during the Falklands War, or after the death of Princess Diana). What does it tell us about Britain today? What are we celebrating – is it the longevity of an old lady, head of state through accident of birth and abdication, who has served inscrutably for so many years? Or is it an institution, or a society? As a nation (or at least some of it) waves bunting and Union flags, eats cup-cakes, Keeps Calm and Carries On, and unites around the television set to watch Elton John sing forty-year-old pop standards, how does this connect to the daily reality of people in Britain today?

Glimpses of reality

A number of vignettes show how the Jubilee celebrations connect with the darker side of modern Britain.

First, the growing scandal of the Thames Pageant stewards – a painful and poignant reminder of what life is like for millions in Coalition Britain. Long term unemployed people made to work for their benefits – despite, of course, the fact that they will have paid their National Insurance – bussed in from Bristol in the night, forced to sleep rough under London Bridge and change into their uniforms in public, denied use of toilets and shipped out to a sodden campsite in Essex. People who replaced paid workers who had been sacked shortly beforehand; apparently some were told they would be paid. A potent reminder that the grandeur celebrated on the Thames largely derives from an empire based on forced labour; a reminder that, for all the rhetoric of national inclusiveness, there are people who our political and media class either forget or actively demonise.

A second vignette; a campaigner for disability rights being told on Twitter that he had no right to campaign, and that he should be grateful for even the much-diminshed largesse that the taxpayer showers on him.  It’s all too common a trope of modern Britain; the coalition’s attack on the most vulnerable in society, a Government of bankers and landowners gleefully stigmatising them as scroungers, is perhaps the most repellent of the many mandate-less behaviours of the current Government

And finally a third vignette – the unknown but I suspect large number of employees who have no contractual right to a paid holiday on 5 June, and who are being forced to lose a day’s pay as their employer closes. I have spent some time trying to find numbers, which I guess must run into many thousands of people in our increasingly casualised economy – people who I’d guess would be on low hourly rates, living marginally in a society where pay is falling in real terms. I know of cases where this is happening but I cannot find any general numbers, or even any suggestion that some of the lowest-paid in Britain subsidising the Royal celebrations with a day’s pay is a problem. It reminds me of those sad, poignant memorials one sometimes sees in historic houses, salvers or other gifts presented to the landlord by loyal tenants on the occasion of their marriage or other such rite of passage, the contributions no doubt extracted with the menace of ostracism.

They are reminders – poignant and powerful – that the pageantry and pomp are the gilded carapace of a society that is becoming more divided, poorer and crueller than for decades. And since the Coalition took power two years ago, the constant implementation of measures for which it has no electoral mandate has turned that slide into a rout. We wave flags and eat cupcakes, but an institution that has done more to improve the daily lives of Britons than any other – the NHS – is quietly dismantled by coalition parties awash with donations from businesses determined to milk its remains for profit.

Adulation and democracy

This has not been a good few days for those who believe that a democracy is a society that can look at itself critically and objectively. The myth of royalty has been poured forth from the media; most notably through the constant distortion of history, through the narrative that seeks both to emphasise the ancient ritual of monarchy and to claim that it is an institution that has refreshed and modernise itself. The latter is probably closer to the truth, but as an expression of its survival instinct rather than a desire to be forward-looking. And if there is one emotion that has dominated this Jubilee it is nostalgia. The cup-cakes, the invocation of wartime unities in the face of the common enemy (now beyond the memories of all but our most senior citizens); all looking to the past. It constrasts powerfully with the 1897 affair, a celebration of imperial power by the establishment, confident and expansive – but with, it appears, rather less interest among the general public than we might expect today (and anti-Jubilee protests in the Empire). In 1897, the British establishment could be confident in its power, even though events were stirring that would utterly change the way in which Britain was owned and run.

Between then and now lies the twentieth century, one in which so many of the certainties of 1897 were brutally swept away. In less than twenty years Britain would be embroiled in the First World War; the surprising thing is not the scale of the carnage but, how in Britain, young men fresh out of public schools, the defining 1897 narratives of Empire, leadership and patriotism and service ringing in their ears, were sent away to a slaughter that, proportionately-speaking, far outweighed that of the conscripted cannon-fodder of a war that was in many ways a family dispute among the crowned heads of Europe. The colonies found their voices and their eventual political liberation. The coming of democracy, the welfare state, the social ferments of which led to Labour’s 1945 victory and the popular culture of the sixties; all of these should have made the events of the past three days impossible. But, here we are, celebrating a Diamond Jubilee again, if anything more passively than ever before. Where did it all go wrong?

The vast Ruritanian ritual we have seen over the past few days, it seems to me, is not the act of a confident, empowered democracy. It looks to me like a desperate act of refuge, a flight from unpalatable truths of political and social life. And to me it is impossible to understand the Jubilee, and the reaction of social and political elites to it, without acknowledging that we are mired in a deep political crisis; a fundamental crisis of political legitimacy. It is a crisis in which the narratives of the politcal elites – regardless of party – are becoming increasingly disconnected from the reality of life of Her Majesty’s subjects; one in which faith in democracy is increasingly being undermined.

I have written before about the neoliberal consensus across Westminster, in which three main political parties (not to mention the governing party in Scotland) embrace fundamentally the same economic ideology – one which is both flawed and deeply unpopular, resulting in both failure and an inherent culture of dishonesty.  Parliamentary expenses scandals, the deep corruption at the heart of the political elite’s connection with Rupert Murdoch – above all the enactment of measures like the effective privatisation of the NHS or higher education without any political mandate; all of these are symptoms of a crisis of democracy, exemplified above all by the fact that mainstream politics has become about the expression of a series of narratives unsupported by reality.  The narratives of Westminster politics become more dysfunctional by the day, simply unable to represent the realities of life for millions.

And this is perhaps where Kipling’s vision is so telling.  Kipling wrote that the appearence of pomp and pageantry was chimerical, and would fade away, but at the core was an inner set of values that would endure – in his case the values of Christianity.  More than a century later, our contemporary Diamond Jubilee has shown that it is the central core of values that has failed, while the puffery of monarchy and power remains.  There is of course a central core; it is the feral politics and economics of an elite that has brutally and knowingly turned back the progress – economic, social and political – of a century; which, in an age of mass media and ungrounded celebrity politics, needs the monarchy to preserve the illusion of a single, happy, united nation.  Coalition policies are needlessly, viciously destroying lives;  but for a day or two a population weary of dealing with the day-to-day consequences of an ideologically-mandated cut in their living standards, in a society that pays lip-service to popular democracy while denying the reality, can get time off from the realities of life.  They can wave flags, cheer fly-pasts, party in the streets and look back to a time when things appeared more secure – when we still looked to an enabling state to orchestrate the collective provision of things like healthcare or decent social housing or university education, and when it was still possible to buy a suburban semi on the national average wage.

And constitutionally, of course, the monarchy stands as a powerful symbol of democratic failure.  It is through the royal perogrative – and the mystery and deference that continues to surround the institution – that the political elite can conduct its business away from public scrutiny, whether that business be fighting illegal wars without Parliamentary approval, letting big corporations off their tax obligations or even using Government press officers covertly to spread malicious lies about the poorest and most vulnerable in society.  There is no more powerful or obdurate enemy of democracy in Britain than the institution of monarchy, because it is the very institution that allows political elites to subvert democracy.

The three days of Jubilee celebration, then, seem to me to have been  a festival of national failure.  In 1897 the Jubilee celebrated imperial power; it preceded ferments that, for a while at least, appeared likely to shift the balance of wealth and power in the direction of the majority; but since 1979 that balance seems to me to have shifted decisively back.  We live in a society in which, over the medium to long term, people have become poorer and have less control over their lives, despite all the appearance of glossy prosperity.  Their environment is being degraded and there is less security in the real sense of the word.  People have saved for their old age only to find themselves in near-destitution.  Public space is shrinking and we live increasingly in a state of exception.  We have more toys and live less.  Even many of those whose material well-being has improved find themselves racked by insecurity and fear, and as a society we continue to self-medicate through drugs and alcohol to an extent that isn’t the case in our more equal European neighbours.

Against all that, monarchy is about generating the illusion of unity.  ”All in it together” is the mantra of Britain’s neoliberal coalition and monarchy is one way of convincing people to believe that.  Monarchy in Britain is both an anti-democratic outrage and a particularly manipulative and somatic branch of the global entertainment industry.  It’s a toxic combination and one that we as a society need to grow out of.

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.

Pariahdom in the public sector

Having worked for my entire career in the public sector until taking voluntary redundancy at the end of last year (essentially a matter of taking the settlement before getting pushed), I have long been aware of the increasing scapegoating of people in the public sector.  It has reached some of its worst excesses in the hands of the Coalition’s bully-in-chief, Eric Pickles – a man who before the election “joked” he would keep a gun in his desk to shoot civil servants who told him things he didn’t want to hear – claiming that overpaid public sector workers, not bankers, were responsible for the financial crash in 2008.

But it’s a continuous drip of mendacious propaganda.  A fine example was a story in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph concerning Phil Dolan, outgoing Chief Executive of North Somerset District Council and described as “The highest-paid employee in either central or local government.” and allegedly earning £570,000 last year

Except he wasn’t.

Get into the detail of the story and you realise that this huge sum is nothing to do with his annual salary of £157,000.  It includes a redundancy payment of £167,000 and £269,000 of notional payment into his pension pot to allow him to receive an immediate pension.  Mr Dolan will benefit from this over a considerable period of time.

In other words, it’s utterly mendacious.   A pack of lies, woven around numbers that sound large but are minuscule compared with the level of bonuses at the top of the financial sector.  And this of course is a man whose duty was to deliver real services to real people, not to gamble with other people’s pension funds.  Mr Dolan’s actual salary was considerably less, than, for example, London’s part-time mayor Boris Johnson receives for moonlighting on, er, the Daily Telegraph.

The truth for most public sector workers is of course completely different.  As CEO of a private sector organisation of the size and breadth of responsibility he exercised at North Somerset, Mr Dolan would have been paid vastly more.  It’s all very easy to pick out high salaries at the top in the public sector, but for comprarable levels of responsibility with their private sector counterparts, public sector workers are paid less.  And the average allegedly gold-plated civil service pension is £4000 per year – the myths about public sector pay and pensions are admirably punctured by PCS General Secretary Mark Serwotka here.

The temper of the Coalition can be perhaps best measured in the fact that when Manchester City Council announced 2000 job losses, there were no expressions of regret; instead Pickles’ mini-me Grant Shapps sought to make political capital and crowed about the destruction on non-jobs.

But truth, not least the truth that those working in the public sector are decent people working hard to deliver the decencies of life, is the last thing the Coalition – and their supporters in the yellow press – want when discussing public sector pay and pensions.  They are ideological crusaders whose case collapses in the face of the truth about the public sector.  Given the choice between backing a nurse and backing a banker, Cameron, Clegg and Osborne would back the banker every time.  And to get acceptance for this, they, and their newspapers, lie about the public sector and the decencies it provides.

And it’s time to recognise for what it is – dishonest, wilful bullying, directed against decent people who can’t answer back.