Guest blog: Left Unity and the Green Party - time to talk?

 Sean Thompson is a former member of the Green Party and Green Left, who left the Green Party to join Left Unity. Ahead of LU's November Conference he has written an article about the organisation's relationship with the Green Party.

He has given me permission to publish this as a Guest Blog. I do this to encourage debate. I do not endorse everything he says but I do think he raises some important issues for both Left Unity and the Green Party.



Two resolutions to our national conference in November mention the Green Party; one calls for ‘structured collaboration… between serious forces on the left at the 2015 election, including the Green Party’, while the other states that
‘we will not call for a vote for… the middle class Greens’

Clearly, we need to get our act together and decide on the sort of relationship we want to develop with the Green Party. In my view, it is essential that we not only have a realistic understanding of the party’s politics and its support base, but that we develop a positive (but critical) working relationship with them wherever we can.

It’s only a bit more than eighteen months since our Ken, appearing on BBC’s Question Time, said that what Britain needed was a ‘UKIP of the Left’ and so kick-started the initiative that was to become Left Unity a few months later. However, since May it has started to look more and more as if it is the Green Party which is beginning to match that description. Membership of the Green Party of England and Wales (GPEW) is booming: it now stands at around 23,000 – a near 60% increase since the beginning of this year. Membership of the Young Greens (party members under 30 or full time students) has more than doubled over the same period and now stands at over 8,000. In the week since the TV companies announced that UKIP would be invited to take part in the election debates between the party leaders next May but that the Greens would not be, the party received an incredible 2,000 membership applications and in five days an online petition demanding its inclusion in the debates received over 185,000 signatures. Given our very modest size and limited visibility and the utter irrelevance of all the old far left sects and (except for a couple of areas) TUSC, the Green Party is increasingly being seen as the only alternative to the left of Labour.

Mark Steel has them rolling in the aisles at the People's Assembly

Trade Unionists confront the climate crisis on Saturday June 8th

 

The conference aims to put the climate crisis at the centre of the debate about how to deal with the economic crisis. We need to find alternatives to the government's austerity programme designed to deliver jobs and move us in the direction of a low carbon economy.

This is part of an interview with Graham Petersen, the UCU's national environment co-ordinator, on the current Red Pepper website. The full interview can be found at

http://www.redpepper.org.uk/confronting-the-climate-crisis-graham-petersen-interview/

Graham is one of the many trade unionists who will be contributing to the "Confronting the Climate Crisis" conference on June 8th. Others include officers and rank-and-file members the CWU, FBU, PCS, TSSA, Unison, Unite, and several other unions.

They will argue that in its impact of the price of food, the prospect of harsher winters and larger fuel bills, and the potential for creating climate jobs, climate change is already, in Graham's phrase, a "core organising issue" for the  unions. But there is a larger issue.

In the past the trade union movement was in the forefront of campaigns on the great moral causes of their age, from the anti-slavery movement in the nineteenth century to the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980's. The First International was launched by trade unionists to support the cause of Polish independence.

The challenge of not leaving to our children and grandchildren a planet devastated by climate chaos is the great moral cause of our age. In the words of Suzanne Jeffery, Chair of the Campaign against Climate Change Trade Union Group, the June 8th conference is an opportunity for today's trade unionists to "step up to the mark" as our predecessors did.

Register for the conference now at  WWW.CLIMATETRADEUNION.EVENTBRITE.COM. Alternatively send your details (including return address) with a cheque made payable to Campaign against Climate Change, to Martin Empson, Canon Green Court, West King Street, Salford, M3 7HB.

You can also join our facebook event at https://www.facebook.com/events/156810361152225/ and help to generate interest in the conference by tweeting your comments using the hash-tag #ctcc2013.

Trades Unions vital in the long march to equality- Green Party

The Green Party today put itself firmly on the side of the trade union and working class movement when they passed a motion moved by Pete Murry of Brent Green Party and the Green Party Trade Union Group, on the party's relationship with the unions.

The motion said in part:

The Green Part believes that the Trade Union movement plays a vital role in defending the interests of working people and continues to play a leading role in the long march towards equality and social justice in Britain and around the world. Therefore the Green Party encounters all its members to be active Trade Unionists wherever this is possible.

Will Duckworth: Green Party needs to build links with unions to fight injustice

From the Green Left blog (Virtual Water Melon) LINK

The Green Party’s deputy leader Will Duckworth has called for stronger links between politicians, the general public and unions to fight workplace injustice.

Mr Duckworth spoke out after attending a demonstration against a series of forced redundancies at Halesowen College, which is close to his home and the area he represents as a Dudley Metropolitan Councillor.

He said:

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Governments in the last 30 years have been working hard to try to destroy unions, and the result is that it’s now too easy for management to bully individual employees, who don’t have the protection they need and deserve. Standing up for workers’ rights is vital, especially during times of economic downturn when increasingly desperate employers look for ways – some of them unfair – to reduce outgoings including wages and sick pay.

The current government is working hard to destroy the collective bargaining power held by unions – one of the only ways employees can safeguard pay and conditions, including basic rights to safety in the workplace. Only by standing together can we protect these basic, necessary rights.

Mr Duckworth joined union members and members of the public to protest against the dismissal of four Mathematics lecturers from the College. He was one of more than 12,000 people who signed a petition calling for the reinstatement of the lecturers.

College management argues that the lecturers have been ‘underperforming’ but many, including union leaders, college students and the lecturers themselves, fear that financial pressures and the lecturers’ union membership may have played a part in the decision.

They also expressed concern about the way the redundancy process has been handled by the College.

Mr Duckworth said: 

We’re very concerned that the proper disciplinary processes haven’t been followed: if the College was unhappy with the lecturers’ performance, it should have issued them with notices to improve before taking this very strong action.

He added that he hoped to build stronger links between the Green Party and trades unions.

He said: 

My attendance at the demonstration was to show support for workers who I believe may have been treated very shoddily. It was also to help to build links between the Green Party and trades unions, so we can work together in future to combat and prevent such injustices.