Green party

I know an anti-Tory pact won’t work

I appeared on Radio 4 with Shirley Williams recently and as we were leaving I asked her if she thought Labour might split if Jeremy Corbyn were re-elected. Would the history of the SDP, which she helped set up in 1981, put off Labour moderates from trying something similar? She thought it might, but suggested an alternative, which was a ‘non-aggression pact’ between all the left-of-centre parties. ‘We can unite around the issues we agree on and get the Tories out,’ she said. I didn’t have time to explore this in detail, but I think she meant some kind of tactical voting alliance whereby supporters of Labour, the Lib Dems,

Green Party struggles to get to grips with its minimum wage

It’s difficult being a Lefty. You come up with principled positions and stances and then people expect you to stand by them. So, spare a thought for Caroline Lucas. Although the Green Party has campaigned for a £10 per hour minimum wage, today the Green MP’s team placed a job advert looking for a press assistant for the not-so-princely sum of £9.23 per hour. https://twitter.com/MitchellAT/status/778192445792194560 When brains at Green HQ clocked the error of their ways — apparently down to an admin error — they came up with a simple work over. Rather than increase the salary to something slightly more liveable, reduce the time by three hours a week: Given that the lucky

Barometer | 8 September 2016

In it together Caroline Lucas and Jonathan Bartley were elected co-leaders of the Green party. Has a political party had co-leaders before? — The Green party of Aotearoa, New Zealand, founded in 1990 from an earlier Values Party, has been co-led since 1995, when Jeanette Fitzsimons and Rod Donald were elected. The party, which gained 6.9% of the vote in the 1990 general election, is currently the third largest political party in New Zealand with 14 seats and 10.7% of the vote in the 2014 general election. — Inspired by its example, New Zealand’s Alliance Party also adopted co-leaders in 2004, but failed to arrest its decline. It was de-registered

Caroline Lucas could breathe new life into the Greens

Winning the Green Party leadership race on a joint ticket makes Caroline Lucas and Jonathan Bartley the first ever job share at the top of an English political party (the Scottish Greens have been doing it for years by having two co-convenors at the top). The pair won convincingly, picking up 86 per cent of the vote in the first round. Yet whilst the margin of their win was clear, what’s less obvious is how the job share will work in reality. There is, though, one valuable asset that Lucas will certainly be able to offer the Greens. Whilst her predecessor Natalie Bennett might have upped the party’s share of

The Spectator podcast: David Cameron’s purge of the posh | 4 June 2016

To subscribe to The Spectator’s weekly podcast, for free, visit the iTunes store or click here for our RSS feed. Alternatively, you can follow us on SoundCloud. Naming the best columnist in Britain is like naming you’re the best Beatles song: it varies, depending on what kind of mood you’re in. But who would deny that Matthew Parris is in the top three? The quality of his writing is, itself, enough to put him into the premier league but that’s just part of the art. What sets Matthew apart is his sheer range, and his originality. You never know what he’ll be writing about, whether you’ll agree with him, or

The Spectator podcast: David Cameron’s purge of the posh

To subscribe to The Spectator’s weekly podcast, for free, visit the iTunes store or click here for our RSS feed. Alternatively, you can follow us on SoundCloud. Naming the best columnist in Britain is like naming you’re the best Beatles song: it varies, depending on what kind of mood you’re in. But who would deny that Matthew Parris is in the top three? The quality of his writing is, itself, enough to put him into the premier league but that’s just part of the art. What sets Matthew apart is his sheer range, and his originality. You never know what he’ll be writing about, whether you’ll agree with him, or

Green Party MEP accuses BBC of bias over party broadcast

These days the BBC can’t seem to get anything right. On top of regularly riling Brexit-ers with ‘EU bias’, the corporation has been accused by some — including former BBC pol ed Nick Robinson — of showing anti-Corbyn bias. Now they can add a new one to their list; anti-Green Party bias. Yes, Green Party MEP Molly Scott Cato has made the peculiar claim after the BBC failed to publish an article on her party’s new video broadcast: The video features young children pretending to be today’s politicians — arguing that while other parties are childish, the Green Party are not. As amusing as the video may be, Cato appears to barking up the

Get ready: these climate change talks might actually do something

The Prince of Wales is right, and I appreciate that this isn’t something people say very often. Now and again, certainly, Prince Charles does turn out to be right about things, such as the need for interfaith dialogue or the horrors of some modern architecture, but the manner in which he tends to be right about them does rather have the feel of happy coincidence. In the future, as Warhol didn’t quite say, we will all be right for 15 minutes. Unless it’s about homeopathy. This week, you see, the Prince told Sky News that the war in Syria may be linked to climate change. Not, please note, that it

Green MEP defends ‘loony’ rabbit hutch policy

When the Green Party revealed their manifesto ahead of the general election, they were the subject of much ridicule as they promised to abolish the monarchy and get rid of the army. However, the policy that perhaps gained the most attention was a pledge to ban rabbit hutches. Now, even party officials appear to agree that the policy is somewhat mad. Speaking in a debate at the Left Field stage at Glastonbury, Green MEP Molly Scott Cato said the ‘loony policy’ was not created by officials, but instead was a result of their members having input in the manifesto: ‘We had a debate yesterday in the green field about why we have all

The new Lib Dem party strategy: drown voters in leaflets

If you want an idea of how exhausting this election has been for some voters in marginals, just watch this video of a Green supporter in Bristol West: I profiled the seat, where the Lib Dems are trying to hold off a ‘Green surge’ among middle-class voters, here and I was rather impressed with quite how many leaflets Stephen Williams had managed to produce even before the short campaign got underway. It will be a tough seat for the Lib Dems to hold, even if the Greens don’t win, as Labour appears to be in front currently. But perhaps Williams is trying a new ‘get out the vote’ strategy, in which

Russell Brand says vote (but not for Ed Miliband)

At a recent screening of his new capitalism documentary the Emperor’s New Clothes, Russell Brand, the revolutionary who refuses to vote, said he was too angry to say nice things about today’s politicians: ‘When I watch it [the Emperor’s New Clothes], I sort of think come on Russell people really want to hear you say something about the election like Caroline Lucas is lovely, or Natalie Bennett is lovely, or Tom Watson is lovely or Ed Miliband is really trying his hardest, but when I watch this I think “nooo! Justice!”’ However just a week later and the comedian has changed his tune. After Ed Miliband paid a late-night visit to his

Real life | 30 April 2015

‘I suppose,’ said my dad philosophically, ‘I could always vote Green.’ ‘Oh, for goodness sake! Not you as well!’ I screamed, as the entire restaurant looked round to see what manner of family crisis was brewing at our table. ‘Look, dad, it’s very simple. Do you agree with 60 per cent income tax?’ ‘Of course not,’ said dad, a look of deep concern on his face. ‘Well then. Enough of this “ooh, the Greens are harmless, aren’t they? They like animals and trees and they don’t have any particular views about anything important one way or the other so they wouldn’t make much difference.”’ Stop! The Greens are harmless the

Miliband country

Imagine rural England five years into a Labour government led by Ed Miliband, and propped up by the SNP and perhaps also the Greens. If you can’t imagine, let me paint the picture for you using policies from their election manifestos and only a small amount of artistic licence. The biggest house-building programme in history is well under way, with a million new houses mainly being built in rural areas. Several ‘garden cities’ have sprung up in Surrey, Sussex and Kent, though in truth the gardens are the size of postage stamps. No matter, because having a big garden is a liability since right to roam was extended so that

The Greens’ regressive message has lost them student votes

‘If you’re not a socialist before you’re twenty-five, you have no heart; if you are a socialist after twenty-five, you have no head,’ goes the old, oft-misattributed saying. But if you’re a Green party supporter on a university campus today, you’re more likely to have no friends. It was reported last week that the Green party’s share of the student vote has almost halved in the past two months – falling from a peak of 28 per cent to a paltry 15. In January, the Greens’ vote was creeping up on Labour (the consistent student favourites) but it has now plummeted below even that of the so-called ‘Tory scum’ you hear so

What’s more disturbing than a group of discredited old Nazis? The Green Party

Yesterday’s Mail on Sunday had an interesting account of a meeting in London of Nazis, neo-Nazis, British National Party types and anti—Semites of various other hues. The paper infiltrated the meeting and exposed what was said – which is a very good service and deserves praise. But I challenge anyone to look through the photos and biographies of the few participants who gathered at Victoria station and then in a nearby hotel and not reflect that this is a gratifyingly washed-up and pathetic movement. During their deliberations they appear to have gone over the usual stuff about how they think the Holocaust was made up and been used by Jews for their own advantage and

Who would have thought the Greens would be so rubbish with rubbish in Brighton?

On Thursday Natalie Bennett spoke during the BBC Challengers’ Debate of the positive change Caroline Lucas has brought to British politics since she was elected as the MP for Brighton Pavilion. However, word reaches Steerpike that not everyone in Lucas’s constituency is so enamoured with the Green politician’s work. Several Brighton residents have taken to Twitter to complain to Lucas along with the council’s recycling and refuse service that their rubbish is not being collected on time: We’re now clearing other’s #waste in front of our home @RecyclingRefuse thought was job of @BrightonHoveCC #rubbish pic.twitter.com/jiAxY3lxVg — mel poluck (@melpoluck) April 13, 2015 @RecyclingRefuse why no recycling collection on friar road for last 3 weeks? Recycle

If level-headed Oxford graduates are voting Green, what hope is there?

I’m disappointed that Ed Balls’s suggestion that the Office of Budget Responsibility should audit the parties’ manifestos was never taken up, not least because we will never know what Robert Chote thinks of the Green party’s claim that all its proposals are ‘fully costed’. Believe it or not, this includes the commitment to spend £45 billion on loft insulation in the next parliament. It’s quite something, the Greens’ manifesto. No doubt you’ll have already read about some of their more reasonable measures — such as the ‘complete ban on cages for hens and rabbits’ and the insistence that ‘UK taxpayers’ money is not used for bullfighting’. But the sheer scale

Ed West

The Green Party manifesto reads like a pamphlet for a religious sect

Of all the contradictory ideas in the Green Party’s manifesto, I love their plan to raise the age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 14, while at the same time lowering the voting age to 16. So in just two years someone could go from not understanding the basic difference between right and wrong, to being able to decide who runs the country and sets its macroeconomic policy. That’s a steep learning curve to say the least. As I wrote before, the Green Party is an organisation living with extreme cognitive dissonance. They support secularism, environmentalism and population control policies, yet also open borders and pacifism, even though this would

The Green Party’s animal policies: where the ridiculous outweighs the sensible

Lo, the official Green Party manifesto was released, and the animals they did rejoice. Or did they? The British Association for Shooting and Conservation, for one, have already come out and said that the party’s policies ‘will cause chaos in the countryside’. ‘Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they’, I hear you say. But despite their natural bias, there’s certainly some truth in it. Economically, of course a ban on what they call ‘grouse shooting and other “sport” shooting’ will affect the rural economy. Shooting alone, never mind other sports, is worth £2 billion to the rural economy, and supports 74,000 full-time jobs. If there are plans to increase the rural