Natalie Bennett sets out the Green Party's strategy

Stimulating and provocative Green Party speaker at Willesden Green Library

Derek Wall

Economics lecturer, writer and Green party activist, Derek Wall will be at the Willesden Green Library Centre on Monday 20^th February at 7.30pm to talk about his book, the “No-Nonsense Guide to Green Politics” and a book he is currently completing on the history of the commons.

 

This event is the fourth in a series of “Environmental Writers” meetings at the Willesden Green Library Centre, where authors read from their books with environmental themes and discuss them with the audience. The series is organised by the Brent Campaign against Climate Change in liaison with the Brent Library Service.

 

Derek Wall is an economics lecturer and writer. He has been a member of the Green Party since 1980 and was Green Party Principal Speaker from 2006 to 2007. Derek is a founder of the Ecosocialist International and Green Left. He has written a number of books on green politics including the No Nonsense Guide to Green Politics and has a blog at http://another-green-world.blogspot.com/. He works closely with Hugo Blanco - the Peruvian green activist who publishes Luca Indigena (Indigenous fight). Derek is currently researching a book on the environmental history of the commons and is a parish councillor in North Ascot.  He lives in Berkshire and has three sons.

 

Ken Montague, Secretary of the Brent Campaign against Climate Change says, “Derek is a stimulating and provocative speaker who is bound to stir up a debate about politics and the future of our planet. I am especially looking forward to hearing more about his new book, which I’m sure will make us look at British history in a new light.”

 

The discussion will take place at 7.30pm on Monday 20^th February in the Willesden Green Library, 95 High Road, Willesden, NW10 2SF. This is a free event and all are welcome.

 

This meeting is in the tradition of stimulating public meetings at Willesden Green Library which will be demolished under regeneration plans. The rather sketchy proposals for the replacement Willesden Cultural Centre do not appear to include plans for public meeting rooms.

Caroline Lucas on Question Time tonight

Caroline Lucas, Green Party MP, will appear on BBC Question Time at 10.35pm this evening, alongside Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, co-chairman of the Conservative Party, Stephen Twigg MP, Labour's shadow education secretary, Germaine Greer, feminist writer and academic, and Charles Moore, columnist and former editor at the Telegraph and the Spectator.

The programme will be available to watch again here once it has been broadcast: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01b3cdw

Thinking of leaving Labour? Go Green

A timely article by Peter Cranie who has moved from the Greens to Labour and is now back with the Green Party  LINK to his blog:

So the disappointment has begun. Ed Balls and Ed Miliband, both in this together. We've been here before, or more specifically I have.

I was a member of the Greens from 1989 to 1991, but didn't renew my membership. Back then there was a lack of organisation or actual politics in what appeared to be a friendly, but slightly disorganised social club. It was my natural political home in terms of the global issues that faced us, but in the 1992 election, I reverted to the party I had been brought up to support, Labour.

In Scotland, supporting Celtic and Labour was seen as a constant. They were your team. Celtic represented your heritage, Irish Catholic. Labour represented you, as a member of the working class. Ignoring the fact that my mother was in fact, English and Protestant, I was pretty much expected to follow this tradition, and my membership of the Greens was a "youthful error".

Like most people, I went to bed on the 9th April 1992 expecting to wake up with a Labour government, the party I'd voted for. Like many others, I was stunned by the result. When John Smith became leader, I joined Labour. While my uncle disagreed profoundly with John Smith's politics, he essentially said he was a decent man. After the death of someone I believe would have made a good Labour leader, I didn't vote for Blair, but I stayed in the party.

As a young activist, working in a marginal constituency in London in the run up to the 1997 election, I met Blair and Brown. I listened as they explained how it would be different this time. While they pledged that they would match Tory spending plans in opposition, I convinced myself that when Labour did win the 1997 election they would look at the needs of everyday folk around the country and realise that we needed to transform our society. Once elected, with an overwhelming mandate, the timidity and the fear of change quickly left me disillusioned. I didn't renew my membership and I'm glad that I was not still in the Labour Party when a Labour leader decided to side with the most right wing American president in history to invade Iraq.

2010 was the closest election since 1992 and for me there are similarities. Many people who had left Labour in the previous 13 years, for a variety of reasons, were angry and frustrated by the return of a Conservative to 10 Downing Street. Some rejoined Labour, quickly forgeting the mistakes and the anguish of seeing what was once the party for working people. Just like in 1997, those good people are trying hard to ignore that the Labour Party increasingly takes for granted the very many good Labour activists, supporters and voters who still try to hold true to Labour's roots.

I rejoined the Greens in 1999 after returning from a year of travelling and seeing Greens elected in Scotland and to the European Parliament. It is the best decision I ever made. I became an activist after George Bush became US President. Since then I've put whatever I could into the party, in terms of my personal efforts in Liverpool, the North West and our national party, and I am proud of the progress we've made across the country.

While I recognise my party is far from perfect (nor am I), there is not a week that passes by that I don't look at the work done by our local Green councillors in Liverpool, the North West Green Party, our leader and first MP Caroline Lucas and by the very many Greens doing great things around the country.

The Greens are a party that is making progress. We stand for something different. We are the last party standing against the cuts and the last party that advocates radical redistribution of wealth in a country that grew increasingly unequal during 13 years of Labour government.

A few ex-Labour people are joining us. For now it is just a trickle, but there will be many more to come in the next decade. Leaving Labour is not an easy thing to do for people. There are feelings that you betraying your side or your corner, but for many people in Labour, it the party leadership that has left them as a residue from a previous era, taken for granted but no longer respected.

Leaving Labour is also hard because people who you have worked alongside and socialised with stop being your friends. If your whole life and your whole social network is tied to a political party, that makes it very hard. But it can be done and in fact, life after Labour can be even better. The Greens are the redistributionist social democratic party Labour used to be. We still have a way to go in finance and campaigning capability, but each additional activist makes our work easier.

Thinking of Leaving Labour? Then think about Going Green.

Greens tell Unite, 'We are the alternative to Labour'

The Guardian article by Len McCluskey, General Secretary of the trade union Unite, has reaffirmed Labour's failure to stand up for ordinary people. Labour's biggest financial supporter has publicly acknowledged their party's abject failure to oppose neoliberal austerity.

All three main parties now seek to protect the vested interests of deregulated financial capitalism - and in doing so they endorse an economic model that squeezes the poorest in society to sustain their broken system.
The public sector pay freeze will strip £2,600 off the wages of a teaching assistant. Pension reforms will see the average pension for a female public sector worker slashed to just £4,000. And cuts to education force students to pay £9000 a year, placing an entire generation in systemic debt.

Opposition to unfair and economically illiterate austerity must now unite around a Green New Deal for Britain. Green Quantitative Easing is needed to act as a direct stimulus to fund the jobs that create long term assets in the real economy. The UK needs a plan to reverse the unemployment that is driving up the welfare bill, and which instead gets people back into work and paying taxes.  

The Green Party calls on Trade Unions to back the Green alternative that is now the only voice standing up against an economic system designed to place the tab for 2008 on the UK's public services.

Caroline Lucas: Balls calls into question the very purpose of the Labour Party

Caroline Lucas, Green MP, made this response to Ed Balls' retreat on cuts in the Guardian:

In his interview with your paper on Saturday, Ed Balls effectively holds up a white flag and admits that Labour has given up any attempt to set out an alternative economic agenda (Beyond the hair shirt: Labour party can give Britain the tough love it needs, insists Balls, 14 January).

His capitulation before the Tory-led coalition's definition of economic credibility as meaning ever more fiscal austerity, and his jaw-dropping statement that "we are going to have to keep all these cuts" calls into question the very purpose of the Labour party.

Moreover, the choice he poses between higher public sector pay or growing unemployment conveniently ignores the fact that many public sector workers are on very low incomes, and falsely suggests that we can't afford to fund both. It is investment in decently paid jobs that generates income, and thus the tax revenues to pay for credit or borrowed money, not the other way round. Instead of trying to outcompete the government in some kind of masochistic virility test to see who can threaten the greatest austerity, an opposition party worthy of the name would be making a far stronger case that austerity isn't working, and offering a genuine alternative.

A combination of more progressive taxation, a crack down on tax evasion and avoidance and, crucially, Green quantitative easing to deliver investment directly in the new jobs and infrastructure the UK urgently needs to make the transition to a more sustainable economy, would do far more to challenge the government than the Tory-lite policies set out by the shadow chancellor.

Green Party supports tomorrow's strike of 2 million

The Green Party strongly supports the unions' strike over changes to their Public Sector pension schemes which will see their members having to work longer and contribute more. The 24 hour walk out is set to be the UK's biggest strike for over 30 years with over 2 million Public Sector employees taking part.

We call for a clamp down on tax evasion by the rich and a tax on financial transactions rather than the proposed public sector cuts and for the Government to urgently review the state pension which remains below poverty levels. We would like to see the rapid introduction of a citizen's pension, paid at a level that allows people to meet basic needs

Stuart Jeffrey, Policy Coordinator, Green Party National Executive

The Conservative-led Government's assault on public sector pensions is a serious concern for my constituents and for workers across the public sector. While recent moves by Ministers to improve the pensions package offered some hope, it's clear that we are still far from a genuinely fair deal.


I regret the disruption caused by industrial action, but feel confident that union leaders have resorted to a full strike only as a last resort - because public sector employees up and down the country continue to feel that the Government is simply not listening.

We must not forget that these are our nurses, teachers, civil servants - the people who provide the crucial services which we rely on every day. The Greens will not hesitate to lend our support and solidarity to them on November 30.

 Caroline Lucas, leader of the Green Party of England and Wales and MP for Brighton Pavilion

Greens at Westminster and City Hall will not cross the picket lines to work tomorrow.

Profiteers take no prisoners

After a weekend when the inhumanity of profit hungry private companies has been exposed in all its ugliness it is amazing that the Government has published its plans to introduce that ethos into the public sector.

We have seen News International exploiting murdered children and the families of bomb victims and war casualties. British Gas has announced massive price increases despite their massive profits which will impact disproportionately on the poorest and Southern Cross has gone broke leaving thousands of the elderly in care homes feeling bewildered and insecure.

And Cameron and co want to extend privatisation  to the public services  that are depended on by the most vulnerable in our society!

When I was reporting the London Stock Exchange 40 years ago I remember how my editors were gob-smacked when I got news that Rolls Royce had gone broke. They were so disbelieving that this top British company, epitomising British industry and engineering had become bankrupt, that there was a delay before they put the news out on the wires. Of course Rolls Royce was nationalised, rescued by the state, until the profit making sections were hived off.  In more recent times the state has had to rescue the banks and step in to help casualties of exploitative insurance companies. The state of course is funded by our taxes.

Public anger at the continuing excessive bank bonuses and energy company profits is becoming more evident in my conversations with local people. What is seldom focused on is that state intervention hands over money to bolster these profits further. When Government ministers insist that winter fuel payments and other subsidies help out the vulnerable they don't add that these payments then go straight to the energy companies - public funds add to company profits.

I listened to a government minister arguing on the Today programme this morning that free schools and academies would not be allowed to make a profit. This may in theory be true (for the moment) but what those academies then do is buy in services, previously supplied by the local authority, from private companies. Academies and free schools are financed by public funds and these are handed over to the private suppliers - who are profit making. In the process the local authority, already decimated by government cuts, is further undermined.

C.Offe (Contradictions of the Welfare State 1984) argued that commodification (privatisation) of society, the post-war project of the Right,  nonetheless requires a welfare state to provide the conditions for that commodification - a safety blanket for the casualties of competition and a training programme for future worker-consumers. The contradiction that he focused on was that the welfare state is dependent on the commodity form for its financing but in order to provide the conditions for commodification the welfare state has itself to be outside it. Post war the welfare state developed an ethos and ideology outside the values of individualism and private profit that in times of crisis directly challenged those values.

The Cameron project, intensifying the process begun under Thatcher and Blair, takes this a stage further by attempting to commodify the public sector/welfare state itself and undermining its ethos of service and mutuality.  In the process it is in danger of destroying  the safety blanket. The sick, the elderly, the disabled will be 'supported' by companies employing low-skilled, low-paid, temporary labour in order to maximise profits from funding provided by state-funded 'personalised' budgets. In other words, our taxes which already fall disproportionately on the lower paid, are handed over as profits to the private sector.

In the case of Southern Cross there is a real danger that old people will die due to lack of care when myriad small companies take over the running of care homes and there are similar dangers in the employment of private companies in assessing benefit claimants.

As I talk to people about these I sense a strong frustration and feeling of powerlessness: "There is nobody defending our interest;" And they are right as far as the main political parties are concerned - they are steeped in neo-liberalism and take for granted, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the private sector is more efficient. At the same time the various bodies which are supposed to defend the interests of the people: Press Complaints Commission, energy regulators etc are shown to be powerless faced with massive multi-national companies and conglomerates.

This leaves the way clear for the Green Party to become a powerful advocate of the people. challenging the attack on public services and putting forward alternative ideas regarding fairness and mutuality.