Greens and power: the importance of theory

There has recently been a small media storm over a question in the Eton scholarship exam, in which 13-year-old boys were asked to imagine they were prime minister and to write a speech justifying the shooting of protesters.  The best response I’ve seen to this was by Chris Dillow on his Stumbling and Mumbling blog, in which he points out that it shows that Eton had a far better grip on the realities of power than those on the left criticising the question.  Power, he argued, is a problem for the Left.  And I think he’s absolutely right.

It reminds me of what my father always used to say about why Communists routinely got elected to office in his union, the NGA. Not because the nation’s printers were Marxist-Leninists, but because everybody knew that the Communists were the best negotiators. Confidence in their theory and a belief that capitalism was inevitably failing, added to disdain for the Public School arrogance and intellectual laziness of British management of the era, gave them a confidence that meant they negotiated without fear.

Management has of course changed.  It’s become more subtle and more pervasive and has a body of theory of its own. Dillow quotes The Jam – “what chance have you got against a tie and a crest?” – but it’s more subtle and sinister; a matter of firsts in PPE, sharp suits, MBAs, management theory and a whole host of ideologically-loaded guidance on human resource management (the term itself, Human Resources, being a perhaps unconscious throwback to the age when factory workers were dehumanised as “the hands”).  There is now a substantial, thriving body of theory  to be deployed by HR departments, couched in a language that conceals the essential purpose – how to get more out of people while paying them as little – and ignoring their rights as far – as they can get away with.  Much of that theory uses psychological narratives that seek to give the appearance of scientific respectability, but which are themselves deeply ideological. Describing HR departments as the advance guard of market capitalism sounds ludicrous and bathetic, until you consider what they actually say and do (when I was a civil servant, it was a standard joke that HR departments were largely staffed by people who couldn’t hack policy jobs – largely because a sharp nose for the sort of unevidenced bullshit that was the stock-in-trade of Government HR departments was one of the basic requirements for doing policy work – although with a qualification I discuss below).

And that’s just a microcosm of the whole range of assumptions deployed by those in power.  You see it in the way economists and foreign policy “experts” use technocratic language to dress up political consensus often based on the flimsiest of ideological assumptions; economics is a prime example, being ultimately based on a series of axioms about behaviour which in the real world are frequently contradicted.  But they are resonant, and have power; and establishments – financial, political, bureaucratic, media – unite around them.  We are told that Greece and Italy have “technocratic” governments; this is a euphemism for governments pushing extreme neoliberal programmes outside the jurisdiction of democratic control.

It is therefore obvious that if you are an elected politician seeking to effect real change, you have to challenge those assumptions.  If you are in office, the work of the officials who advise you and implement your policy will be shot through with those assumptions – they are the basis on which permanent bureaucracies select their senior membership.  Evidence-based policy-making in state bureaucracies can often be about moulding evidence in the service of ideology, rather than challenging it; a sort of collective intellectual heading-off-at-the-pass.  And you must not be seduced by the accoutrements of power – whether you are Ramsay Macdonald speculating that every Duchess in London will want to kiss him, or New Labour with its culture of self-abasement in the presence of corporate power and wealth, or One Nation Labour seeking to avoid asking any of the awkward economic questions.  Your whole philosophy of Government will be based on challenge – which quite obviously is not the same thing as bullying or ignoring officials, because (writing as someone who worked in both Whitehall for two decades, some of that time on European Commission projects) officials respond to challenge and strong political leadership (while reflecting that conventional notions of “leadership” are themselves deeply ideological).

All of this is a problem for a Party like the Green Party, which opposes existing power structures but finds itself engaged in electoral politics which, if successful to any degree, means that it will find itself managing those structures and seeking to implement its vision through them.  I’ve recently been re-reading Ralph Miliband’s Parliamentary Socialism, so the thought of how Labour was seduced by a Parliamentary system whose essential purpose was to maintain the power and authority of the ruling classes is fresh in my mind (not just on the Right – there’s a fabulous irony in the way in which Tony Benn – the nearest thing the left has to a national treasure – used to base so much of his politics on the grounds of Parliamentary sovereignty) .  One of the interesting points was that of a party focussed almost exclusively on parliamentary action – and condemnatory of extra-parliamentary action – was undone in part by the way in which the establishment managed to organise its own extra-parliamentary networks like the media in opposition to elected Governments.  It’s a sad but telling fact that the real spade-work of neoliberalism has often been done by parties of the Centre Left – New Labour in Britain, Roger Douglas’ Labour Party in New Zealand – who, partly influenced by what have been presented as crises, have found themselves backed into positions where they do not have the political resources to challenge existing structures and being forced into compromises with “realism”  - usually defined with reference to the ideological positions of the Right.  It’s part of the genius of neoliberalism, and bolsters its claim that issues of economics and distribution are in principle above democratic scrutiny. With Labour having relinquished any pretension to socialism or radical change, its successors on the Left need to draw on those lessons and to understand the need to take on the value-systems of neoliberalism on the broadest possible front.

It implies that a rising political party of the left has to develop a strategy for dealing with power – a task that’s more urgent now when the ideology of reaction is more explicit and more pervasive than it has been in the past.  It needs a narrative that can challenge “realism” with evidence and build democratic consensus around that narrative, which means understanding the nature of the beast it is opposing and exposing the values of the beast, rather than accommodating them.  It also needs a special kind of discipline – not the discipline of the party whip and the witch-hunt but a rigorous understanding of how any lack of unity will be exploited by your opponents, and to develop truly democratic structures that represent that.

And that is very different from taking on the establishment at its own game.  This is a dangerous delusion above all for Greens, who want to argue for a new form of politics.  It’s not about behaving like the establishment, but about understanding it and developing the intellectual and organisational confidence to take it on.  The challenge, once you achieve elected office, is to keep a firm grip on whatever power you have, and to be able to challenge the bureaucracy and its ready made assumptions.  You never, ever relinquish that power to officers or officials.  Margaret Thatcher was dead right when she said that advisers advise and Ministers decide; but then Thatcher was someone who used power with deftness and skill. You do not need to share her values or approve of her methods to understand how much of her political ascendancy lay in her grasp of this fact.

Technocrats do not change the world.  Greens believe that changing the world – and building sustainable systems – is not just desirable, but an absolute imperative if our planet is to survive.  If we are going to do that, we need to have a strategy and a language for speaking to power with authority and confidence, which means understanding that.  And none of this is easy – which is why it’s desperately important for radicals to do the theoretical spadework. The rest, as they say, is managerialism.

Brighton politics latest: a failed Green coup and a big Labour headache

It’s been a day of extraordinary developments in the ongoing saga of Brighton’s minority Green administration and the fallout from the city’s pay modernisation debate.  Today saw the Council’s Annual Meeting at which the Leader and Mayor are elected – an occasion more notable for its formality than controversy.  Not today.

The big event has been Labour breaking the news that a substantial number of Green councillors had apparently been involved (or at least complicit) in soliciting Labour votes to topple the current Council Leader and convenor of the Green Group, Jason Kitcat.  Labour’s press notice includes a screenshot of an exchange Twitter direct messages between Green Cllr Alex Phillips and the newly-elected Labour Group leader, Cllr Warren Morgan, in which Cllr Phillips appears to be asking whether Labour would support the candidacy of Cllr Phelim McCafferty – and indeed be prepared to nominate him for the leadership.  Predictably Labour refused to muddy their hands with such things and are now arguing that this shows that the Green Group are hopelessly divided and incapable of leading the city.

At one level, you have to see their point.  I do not know any of the background to what has happened, but if you take it at face value (and that Twitter exchange suggests that one must), then, leaving aside questions of loyalty and honesty, it was above all an extraordinarily stupid thing to do. It is no secret that the Green Party is deeply divided over the administration’s decision (not Cllr Kitcat’s alone, incidentally) to hand over responsibility for the pay modernisation to officers.  I’ve argued before that it was a dreadful error of judgement and I know that many others far more active in the Green Party than I am share that view.

But seriously to expect that leaders of other parties would be willing to help the Green Group out of the hole it has dug for itself just beggars belief.  Labour’s interest obviously lies in keeping the Brighton Green Party in office, in a minority, and divided – especially with the higher task of reclaiming Brighton Pavilion for the Westminster consensus in mind.  Moreover, what sort of legitimacy would a Green council leader dependent on other parties’ votes for office have, especially when Jason Kitcat has just been re-elected unopposed as Green Group convenor?  Did they really think that this would lead to a situation in which the party – let alone the Green Group – would be more united and able to campaign more effectively? That the divisions would just go away with a new leader in place?

Moreover, did they really think that they could trust Labour?  Those of us with long Brighton memories know that Brighton Labour has traditionally had the political decorum and moral fastidiousness of a gang of rats fighting over a discarded piece of burger in a Preston Street sewer.  Making the approach on Twitter compounds the error – even by DM in confidence.  When I was a Civil Servant, a very wise senior colleague promoted the rule of thumb that you should never write anything in an internal email you would not prepare to have read out in court – a principle that could equally apply to politicians and Twitter.  The Brighton Green Party is full of ex-Labour members; there’s no excuse for not knowing your opponent, and it is difficult to see the Twitter exchange as anything other than astonishingly naive.

However, Labour does not emerge well from this, and may in the long run be the bigger loser.  That Twitter screenshot is something that may come to haunt Warren Morgan.  After all, Alex Phillips made it clear that the exchange was meant to be confidential.  Now I think that the Green Group has made some  errors of judgement, but nobody has ever suggested that Jason Kitcat is anything other than a man of complete personal integrity. Personal conduct matters and Cllr Morgan’s publication of that confidential Twitter exchange will inevitably raise questions about trust and betrayal of confidence. It’s one thing to campaign vigorously – as leader of Brighton and Hove’s third party that’s his job – but there is a sense here of lines being crossed.  I think the public interest defence some Labour people have deployed looks very much like a post-hoc rationalisation of some distinctly shabby behaviour. My guess is that people won’t forget that  and that he’s done himself personally no favours.

More interesting is the way in which this plays against the background of the pay modernisation.  There have been some fairly caustic tweets from the @gmbcityclean account this evening, representing the view of Cityclean workers threatened by the loss of allowances, arguing that Cllr Morgan has botched an attempt to get rid of Cllr Kitcat, who is apparently seen as the enemy (these are the same workers who gave Caroline Lucas such a rousing reception when she visited their depot).  I don’t think that’s necessarily true, as I don’t think the politics would ever have happened, but there is clearly tension there.

And there is history.  The Cityclean workers are members of the GMB – the union that at one stage was seeking the banning of the Blairite Progress Group from the Labour Party.  Cllr Morgan is a prominent supporter of Progress and at one stage ran for executive office.  It is a commonplace in some circles to describe the local GMB as the industrial wing of Brighton Labour, but given Cllr Morgan’s alignment with what one might call Labour’s Dodgy Dossier tendency one wonders whether this exchange was the result of  deeper tensions between Party and Union.  Who do council staff threatened with loss of income really trust to defend their interests – their unequivocally anti-austerity MP or Labour’s Blairite group leader?  While Caroline Lucas has provided almost a lone voice in Parliament against austerity, Cllr Morgan remains aligned with a group that is undermining even Ed Miliband’s lukewarm will to challenge austerity economics.

Despite everything I’ve written above, I haven’t written off the Green administration.  If the Green Group, led by Jason Kitcat as the duly elected Convenor, can regain the political initiative over the pay modernisation and take political responsibility for finding a detriment-free solution, the situation in Brighton will change. But today’s events leave Labour exposed.  Most of all – while Caroline Lucas continues to blaze a trail against austerity in Parliament, it is Labour and its explicitly Blairite local leadership that will be answering the awkward questions come 2015.

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.

Brighton and Hove Budget day thoughts – What have the Greens ever done for us?

So, what has the Green Administration ever done for us?

Well, the Green minority administration was elected on a manifesto pledge to minimise the impact of coalition cuts on the vulnerable people of Brighton and Hove.  It’s not been easy – our city has been hit harder by coalition cuts than almost any other local authority in the South of England.  But it has worked tirelessly to make the best of a tough situation – by protecting, for example, subsidised bus services and libraries; and, against that background, has actually managed to make big strides forward – like the living wage for council staff or big projects like Lewes Road and Seven Dials which make our city safer (especially for vulnerable road users like pedestrians and cyclists – and in the case of Lewes Road, councillors and officers have done a brilliant job of bringing new funding to the city).  And, as local authorities are forced to pick up the pieces from Coalition “reforms” to the benefits and council tax system, Brighton and Hove’s Green administration has really gone the extra mile to shield the vulnerable people hit by those changes as far as they can.

But the Green Administration is making cuts!

True. Brighton and Hove has been slaughtered by central government cuts – a 17% cut in income.  But the Budget – on which there has been widespread consultation – proposes finding extra money to help those hit by benefit changes; ensures that all libraries remain open; finds extra cash for bodies like the Citizens’ Advice Bureau that support vulnerable people; creates incentives to bring empty properties back into use and protects staff  from compulsory redundancy.  Look at what most other local authorities are doing in response to the fall in funding and I think you’ll find that’s pretty impressive.

And what about the pay modernisation? Cutting council workers’ pay by thousands of pounds per year and threatening them with the sack if they don’t agree? So much for the living wage!

Ah, I see you’ve been reading the Brighton Labour twitter feed.  Yes, negotiations are under way over allowances.  No decisions have been taken. Yes, the Unions are negotiating hard to protect their members – after all that’s their job. But the view of the Brighton and Hove Green Party is clear.

But what about people in the Green Party who are accusing Brighton of selling-out?

Well, anybody can hand out leaflets at Party Conferences and it’s very easy when you have never run anything in the real world to generate cheap moral outrage at the compromises of real life.  The fact is that the Brighton Green Party’s manifesto said clearly, and right at the front in case anybody could miss it, that the Party in office would minimise the impact of those cuts as far as it could.  Now if you were arguing that the Green administration – a minority administration, remember – had failed to to that, or was in a position where it could no longer do so, and was clinging on to power as a result, you might have a point.  But, as the positive budget going forward to full Council tonight demonstrates very clearly, that’s far from being the case.

And what about the parking charges? Draining the life-blood out of the city!

Evidence is a funny thing.  Against every photo in the local rag of an empty sea-front on a wet Wednesday in April, one can counter the fact that Brighton has one of the lowest rates of empty shops in the country.  And I know we didn’t get many last Summer, but have you ever seen the London Road leading into the town centre on a warm Saturday? Traffic queues going out two or three miles beyond the Patcham Roundabout!  Yes, businesses in Brighton are suffering. We’re in the middle of the most sustained recession for a century. Moreover, the Council has listened and made some changes, especially to short-term parking charges.

Ah! A U-Turn!

U-turns are so 1980s.  Let’s put away the shoulder-pads and the brick-sized mobile phones. Listening and making changes is what grown-ups do – on councils as well as in life. Funnily enough, one of the things that Labour gets worked up about is how much this council consults – remember they’re the party that tried (and failed) to create an executive mayor for the city.  And there is a fundamental question that neither opposition party in Brighton has ever really addressed – about whether a local economy based on car-borne visitors is really sustainable.  Do you really think Brighton and Hove need more traffic?

And all those Green pet projects we’re hearing about, while buses and mobile libraries are cut?

We’ve heard a lot about these from Labour.  It’s been a while since they’ve been in office, but even so the apparent difficulty in distinguishing between current and capital expenditure is dispiriting.  And many of these projects bring in external funding and create jobs.  It’s a funny thing – Labour talks a lot about infrastructure expenditure nationally but snipes when the Council does it here.  And yes, the administration has protected local subsidised bus services and has come up with a plan to replace the mobile library with a home delivery service that would give users access to a much larger stock of books than even a shiny new mobile library could ever expect to carry.

But Labour are campaigning against the cuts – like the mobile library – aren’t they?

Well, they’re making a lot of noise. But the facts are rather different.  Labour nationally are committed to keeping the coalition cuts and possibly making more of their own.  The idea of Labour as a party that will defend local authority budgets is deeply, desperately laughable.  Moreover, last year at budget-time, given the clear choice between voting for a council tax freeze and protecting services, they unhesitatingly chose the former.  Not only does this benefit middle-class council-tax payers at the expense of the poorest and most vulnerable who use services the most, but, because local authority funding is cumulative, it leaves less for future years.  The fact is that by their budget vote last year, Labour did long-term damage to the city’s finances.  They are, to put it at its mildest, the very last people to complain about cuts; austerity economics is hard-wired into One Nation Labour’s DNA.

And what’s all this about removing Mr and Mrs from council forms?

Oh please.

But – apart from the living wage, transport improvements, improving the public realm, protecting services and supporting the vulnerable, keeping libraries open, protecting subsidised bus services and promoting projects that bring new money into the city, what has the Green  Administration ever done for us?

Oh.

Equality, citizenship and the privileging of faith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Community politics revisited: Greens and Liberal Democrat tactics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Hard Labour

The Labour Party.  For those of us on the non-Labour left, it sits across radical discourse like Philip Larkin’s toad.  Large, morose and with a massive sense of entitlement that leads its members to believe that it, and it alone, has the answers to the various crises affecting Britain.

I’ve been reflecting on the role of Labour quite a lot, following an interesting exchange of views between Labour and Green bloggers on the relationship between the groupings; and in the light of various pronouncements by Ed Miliband over the past few days – on the economy, on Labour’s legacy from its last period in Government, on the prospect (wholly imaginary, it transpires) of disloyal trade unionists threatening to disrupt Britain’s day of national rejoicing at the Royal Wedding.  It’s depressing.

Labour and entitlement

One of the biggest problems I have with Labour is that its record in office shows beyondany argument that it is a right-of-centre, authoritarian party at home and followed a slavishly neo-Conservative agenda abroad.  Much of what the coalition is doing now was foreshadowed by Labour in office – tuition fees, NHS cuts, erosion of civil liberties -  and it should not be allowed to forget that.

But there is a sort of collective sense of entitlement – a sort of mix of arrogance and amnesia – in Labour quarters that it has a God-given right to be the voice of progressives.  I am an elector in the Brighton Pavilion constituency, which, at the last General Election, returned a genuinely progressive MP to Westminster in the person of Caroline Lucas.  Before the election, I had a number of depressing conversations with Leftish people who agreed that Labour’s record was in many respects dismal, and whose own political position was much closer to Lucas; but when I pointed out that they should consider voting Green, the excuses came thick and fast – always been Labour, will die in the Labour Party, only hope for progress, need for unity and solidarity etc.  Expressions of solidarity that really betray a sort of ovine blind loyalty – the sort of political abdication that allowed the neo-cons to get control in the first place.

And they’re still doing it.  I referred earlier to the exchanges between Labour and Green bloggers – what struck me was the language.  Blogger Raincoat Optimism talks about refusal to work in the Labour Party as the scourge of the left – my italics – in a formulation that drips with arrogance and chauvinism.  We’re not talking about sectarian differences in micro-policy; speaking personally, I’m in the Green Party because, inter alia, I believe that the Iraq War was immoral and illegal, that Labour handed the state far too much power, and that Labour in government followed an economic agenda that was neo-Liberal and illusory.  These are not trivial matters and, like a lot of people on the non-Labour left, I’m not prepared to be read lectures on left solidarity by members of the Party responsible for this.  As R H Tawney – who once upon a time had a certain cachet in the Labour Party – put it: to kick over an idol you must first get off your knees.  (Indeed, Tawney’s great 1931 essay on the choices before the Labour Party, from which that quote was taken, remains a highly relevant read today)

Ed games

So, on to Ed Miliband’s recent pronouncements.  I found these really depressing, because to me they indicated the lack of ambition in Ed Miliband’s leadership, in which Labour’s agenda is reactive and apparently dictated by the media.  Take, for example, his comments about strikes on the Royal Wedding day – a confection of the Tory press which Miliband should have denied – and should have been briefed to deny.  Instead he gave exactly the answer that the Tories wanted him to give, to create mischief between Labour leadership and the unions.

Missing the open goal

The most obvious problem is Labour’s economics.  At a time when the Coalition is blowtorching public services in the name of economic reform, necessitated by the deficit.  I’ve argued before that it isn’t a case that stands up, and I believe that it should be relatively straightforward to present the alternatives with credibility and passion. Instead, Miliband seems mired in what looks like an internal dialogue about whether Labour in office was sufficiently explicit about the “need” for cuts.  The ongoing feud between the Blairites and the Brownites may be of great interest to a few wonks, but means nothing to those about to lose their Disability Living Allowance, or their EMA, or about to face huge debts for the crime of acquiring a university education.  But it’s the good old Labour Party, head stuck firmly in fundament, more interesting in conducting a dialogue about who was responsible for what than actually dealing with the issues.  The Tories are weak on the economy.  Their case is poor, the effects likely to be devastating.  But Labour offers the arrogance of navel-gazing, and again dances to the Tory agenda that wants to claim that the economic crisis is all Gordon Brown’s fault.

Again, look at Tawney in 1931; it might awaken some Labour loyalists to the sheer frivolity of their collective reaction to the crisis.

And all the evidence is that people want something more.  People are incensed by the lie that we’re all in this together.  They are furious that bankers continue to pay themselves vast bonuses while jobs and front-line services are cut.  There is a dynamic out there that Labour wonks just don’t get when they read the papers. Where is Labour’s passion?  Where is the anger?  Where is the engagement?

Stifling the future

The saddest thing of all is that the student protests, and the growing momentum against the Coalition cuts, has seen opposition to the free market and its works becoming more inclusive, more creative, more open.  Famously, Laurie Penny wrote a piece in the Guardian saying that the movement was so big to have made old structures and parties redundant.  I don’t think that’s true, as I believe party structures can be both progressive and enabling, but I agree with the sentiment – this is new and different.  But the reaction of some of those old structures, notably the SWP, showed how raw was the nerve that she had exposed.

This is new, it’s inclusive, and it’s much too important to be snuffed out by old-style Labour chauvinism. If Labour is to be able to reflect the opposition to the Coalition, it has to change more fundamentally than it seems to be willing to countenance.