Green party

It is easy to criticise the Budget. The process was a chaotic mess. For many on the right, Rachel Reeves’s £26 billion tax raid to placate Labour MPs was a form of madness as well as badness. But good politics means understanding your opponents. One former No. 10 Tory thinks there was method in the madness: ‘It totally makes sense for Labour to move to the left.’ Nearly half of those who voted Labour last year would not vote for the party today. The number of voters fleeing Labour to the right – to Reform or the Tories – has remained steady since January at between 13 and 16 per

So far, Keir Starmer has been unmoved by complaints from left-wingers that his policies differ little from those of Boris Johnson’s at the last election. After all, if left-wing voters don’t like his low-key approach, where else would they go? The problem in British politics – as David Cameron found out – is that disgruntled voters do find somewhere else to go. In Cameron’s case, it was to Nigel Farage; in Starmer’s case, it may be to the Greens. Once dismissed as idealistic hippies, the Greens now serve in seven governments across Europe, including Germany, Belgium and Scotland. Even under the UK’s majoritarian system, they’re doing well with 800 council

How pleasant it is to watch an idea fall apart. Especially when it is an idea held by people you don’t particularly care for. In recent years all of the democracies have been plagued by green parties. The kindest interpretation of them is that they provide a wake-up call of some sort: a reminder that we should be kind to our planet, that sort of thing. But in every country they got too free a ride. They ended up preaching catastrophism to a supplicant media. And they ended up demanding that we all get off fossil fuels yesterday without any satisfactory explanation of how we were meant to keep the

We’re closing 2021 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 10: Julie Bindel’s piece from March on the Green party’s muddle over trans rights: At the Green party spring conference this weekend, a motion which sought to introduce a party policy on women’s sex-based rights was defeated. A whopping 289 delegates (out of 521) voted to not include biological females in the party’s list of oppressed groups. All the motion aimed to do was simply add a paragraph to the Green party’s ‘Our Rights and Responsibilities Policy’. The motion reads: This is to include the protected characteristic of sex as currently our Record of Policy statements supports

Is there a better left-wing political brand to own at the moment than that held by the Green party? It is hard to think of one. After all, we are in the midst of a three-part BBC television profile of Greta Thunberg that even the Independent has described as ‘effectively an act of worship’; environmental awareness has become the new religion in the run-up to the UN COP26 conference in Glasgow; and the Labour Party is in the middle of an obvious crisis – communicating neither a sense of idealism nor the feeling that it might win an election anytime soon. One could also add that the less said about

Hindsight is the easiest weapon to employ in politics — as Keir Starmer of all people should know. When you have witnessed events unfold already, it is simple to point out what politicians should have done. Yet when it comes to post-Corbyn Labour, some mistakes have been made that may just have been avoided — and hindsight is not required to reach that conclusion. The clues were there this time last year. Starmer has moved too slowly and has made the error that many unsuccessful Labour leaders tend to make: assuming that the party requires less mending than is actually the case. Sir Keir has employed the same logic that

What’s going on over at Reddit? The popular chatroom, which bills itself as ‘the front page of the internet’, has been accused of blocking Spectator articles. Earlier this week, the most popular UK politics page was suspended from public view and users who posted a link to a Spectator article were blocked. The article in question mentions one Aimee Challenor, a former ‘rising star’ of the Green party and transgender activist, who left the party in disgrace after she appointed her father — a violent paedophile — as her election agent. According to the moderators on the Reddit group r/UKPolitics, Aimee has since been hired by the tech firm, which is now zealously blocking content about

Is the Green party determined to make its female members feel unwelcome? After voting down women’s sex-based rights at their spring conference, the party has now suspended the co-chair of its women’s committee, Emma Bateman. The reason? According to Bateman, her decision to question whether trans women are female is to blame. As a trans woman, who also happens to be a science teacher, I know that trans women are most definitely male. Indeed, it is only because we are male that we can be transwomen. But where gender ideology is concerned, the Greens appear to have lost touch with reality. Bateman is no transphobe but – as with many other women –