Calling the Green party socialist is an insult to socialists

The Green party has been likened to a watermelon: green on the outside and red on the inside. But that is to do a huge injustice to generations of socialists and communists. Misguided though they were in many of their ideas, nobody could accuse them of actively seeking to make society poorer.

That, however, is the unashamed aspiration of Natalie Bennett and what has become the fastest-growing political party in Britain. It is quite possible that a good proportion of the 9 per cent of the electorate who say they are planning to vote Green in May are unaware of this, but it is there in black and white (‘policy EC201’) on the party’s website. It states that the party wants to pay every-one a ‘Citizen’s Income’ — which has since been put at £72 a week — in order to allow ‘current dependence on economic growth to cease, and allow zero or negative growth to be feasible without individual hardship should this be necessary on the grounds of sustainability’.

The three main parties have been happy to cast accusations of extremism at Ukip, yet they have missed the real extremist party in their midst. There is nothing to be welcomed in a shrinking economy, not even with £72 a week to compensate you for your lost job. If a depression were a reasonable price to pay for an improved environment, Tyneside in the 1930s would be remembered as a paradise. No doubt the air became cleaner as shipyards closed, yet those who lived through the Great Depression tended to remember it for other reasons: hunger and desperation.

Of course, everyone should be concerned about the environment, but to think that it is best-served by self-imposed poverty is folly. Pollution from industrial activity has fallen hugely since the 1930s, not because we have held back from wealth creation but for the opposite reason: we have learned how to do things better.