Response to Next Five Years

From Chris Hennesey in response to East Lincolnshire Green Party - The Next Five Years

1.   East Lincolnshire party split

This is a good idea, but I feel there should be joint meetings regularly so that we do not become isolated; perhaps we should also have occasional joint meetings and with Grimsby, Cleethorpes and Scunthorpe, and Lincoln too.

2.   MP and council watch

Although government ministers will be shadowed by the party centrally, perhaps we too should also shadow some ministers. I am thinking particularly of Amber Rudd with the energy and climate change portfolio.

This is an area in which Alison and I can give some help but we can’t help with monitoring social media.

3.   Membership

Across our three constituencies 3,639 voted Green on a turnout of 142,936 (2.54%). I do not know what our total membership is, but perhaps not as many as voted Green. So there must be some scope for further recruitment.

Across the two constituencies of Louth and Gainsborough the Green vote was 2,389 on a turnout of 99,597 (2.39%).

For information only, across the ten constituencies of historic Lincolnshire, there were 10,689 Green voters (2.37%).

I have not had time to compile the figures for district councils.

One of the things where Alison and I feel we can contribute is to do a series of talks (presentation/film/discussion) to community groups in this area on green issues, peak oil and climate change. We have been trying to compile a list of groups who might be looking for speakers (community groups, WI, parish groups). This hopefully would lead to more members and votes.

4.   Press

I may be able to help with writing short articles.

5.   Regional meetings

The regional group seemed to us in danger of becoming too unwieldy. Perhaps attendance should be limited to two delegates from each local party. The important principle is that there needs to be a systematic method of feeding back between the local parties and region.

We could help with regional training to candidates on public speaking, presenting the facts/argument?

What is the relationship with young greens? Can we draw on them for local events?

6.   Policies

I wondered if you had seen the recent post on the GP site by Andrew Brown, candidate in Skipton and Ripon. It raises a number of important issues, one of which is that he felt that the national campaign failed to put over the radical thrust of the green message, but got tangled up in the details of policy. I agree with this and I would go further by saying that currently I detect some haziness over what the Green Party stands for. I feel this may be caused by a failure to work out fundamental problems. Some key issues, I feel:

Are we anti-capitalist or do we feel we can work within a capitalist framework? And, since there are different forms of capitalism, what kind of capitalist system?

What is our attitude to the state and what do we feel is its role within society?

Do we accept the neo-liberal agenda that the market can decide any issue and that all problems can be reduced to quantifiable cost-benefit analyses? If not why not?

Related to this, as well as economic institutions, are there other institutions, civic and democratic, that are of equal importance?

Etc.

Without addressing such problems with some clarity, it is inevitable that policy will appear ambivalent and even fudged. And our message can too easily be knocked off course by tactical issues in fighting an election. Though it is early days for me as a member, I so far feel there may be a lack of intellectual formation in the national party. Is there a think tank nationally to consider strategic issues of this sort?

7.   PR

You are right.

8.   Climate and Environment

I fear that the Paris summit will already have been hi-jacked by those institutions in whose interest it is that fossil fuels continue to be used, and I think that the event will be a combination of Davos and Ted ‘how amazing’ talks and that everybody will go home having agreed something with plenty of get-outs.

First, there has been massive lobbying by the fossil fuel interests at the highest levels in US and Europe.

Next the carbon trading ‘solution’ has seriously dented national resolve to cut emissions. We must attack this at every opportunity.

Next, many fossil fuels companies have ‘greened’ themselves by giving money to climate and environmental NGOs, who in turn have colluded on a massive scale to put about the story that we can, for example, make a transition using natural gas, that we can use hybrid cars and change our brand of detergent and everything will be OK. The public generally have been led to believe that there is no real problem and that we can make a gradual change to renewables and continue to consume as before.

The chief culprit is the drive for economic growth which over the last few years has driven our carbon emissions hugely beyond the 2 degree target. A feature in today’s (18^th May) Guardian shows that Shell have produced an internal report predicting 4 degrees.

I absolutely agree with you that we must use Paris to explain the issues, but the task is huge and once more I detect a haziness over the fundamental premises of the Green Party offering. What is our stand on economic growth? What is our position on the challenges that, in the name of free trade, the World Trade Organization has consistently made on the attempts to nurture green industries?

Perhaps the present awareness of Shell’s imminent drilling in the Artic could be an immediate point for action.

Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything. Penguin 2014 (£8.99). This is a must read. I will try and communicate the main points for those who are busy and don’t have much time to read.

9.   Human Rights

It appears that we are about to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights. I am horribly suspicious about this. Tom Bingham, ex-Lord Chief Justice, wrote The Rule of Law in 2010, a superb book that I fully recommend you read, if you haven’t already, (it is very readable and also contains a stunning refutation of the legality of the Iraq War). On the Convention he concludes (p. 84):

Critics of the Convention must ultimately answer two questions. Which of the rights would you discard? Would you rather live in a country in which these rights are not protected by law?…There are probably rights which could be valuably added to the Convention, but none which could safely be discarded.

I have no idea how we fight this, but fight it we must. It could make challenging this government almost impossible.

10. Economics

You are right. There are several models of retail banking apart from the present system.

As regards the viability of economic growth at present levels see:

Tim Jackson. Prosperity Without Growth. Earthscan 2009. I have heard Tim Jackson lecture. He is superb. He has a web site.

Simon Wren-Lewis, ‘The Austerity Con’, London Review of Books 19^th February 2015 gives a devastating critique of government policy. He is Professor of Economics at Oxford. Available on web.

11. Housing

You are right.

For the arguments against right to buy, see the following excellent article: Owen Jones. ‘If you vote for right to buy, where will your children live?’ Guardian 15 April 2015

For a discussion of property tax see Caroline Lucas. Honourable Gentlemen? Portobello 2015. pp.145-150.

12. Education

I worked in adult education and Further Education for some years. I have before now run an intra-college news-feed on education issues. I might have time to do similar again. I know next to nothing about primary and secondary sectors, so I couldn’t do that.

13. Basic Income

You are right. I need this explaining.

14. Transport

Pressure is mounting in the City to get on with HS2 and build the Heathrow extension. I have no idea how to fight this. We could apply pressure for local improvements in rail and public transport however.

An obvious way to cut emissions and pollution is to cut the national speed limit to 50 mph. The USA have done this since the oil crisis of the 1970s. Why haven’t we?

15. Energy

The fight over fracking will be nasty. It will be said that natural gas forms a less harmful transmission to fully renewable energy. It doesn’t. Its methane content makes it a highly dangerous fuel. I can’t myself yet understand the full import of the 2015 Infrastructure Act, but I think it will make it easier for fracking planning applications to be got through in the face of local opposition. We need a discussion on how to tackle this.

The so-called green tax that forms a component of energy bills is being set up as responsible for the high cost of energy. We must think of ways to counter this.

Hinckley Point will now go ahead with even less opposition. We must counter this.

Although some jobs are being created in the Grimsby area related to marine wind farms, are the turbines manufactured in this area? I don’t think so, and yet they could be. What will stop it is the World Trade Organization and TTIP. I believe that local start-up industries should receive protection and should not be exposed to free competition. You may disagree. Let’s discuss.

16. TEQs

I don’t know anything about these.

17. Farming

For industrial farming uses a vast tonnage of fertilizers and insecticides that are petroleum based. I see that problem being: how do we move to organic farming? I have no idea. Please help.

Wild life protection. Industrial farming is wiping out whole species of bird, insects and wild flowers. I know that in the small East Riding estate village in which I lived until recently, there was a resident game-keeper and pheasants bred for hunting, and farmers were mostly pro-hunting and regularly complained about foxes and badgers. If I had declared my allegiance to the Green Party I would have been branded as a troublesome leftie. Getting over these sorts of barriers will be difficult.

18.  EU referendum

I would welcome a discussion on how to handle this and what people think the main issues are.

I feel that the EU is about to change greatly in any case. I think TTIP will initiate huge reforms and recast the EU much more as a vehicle for global capitalism driven by free market principles. Greece may well leave and this will be of little concern to those countries who consider themselves doing well out of all this. With TTIP signed, Cameron will be able to claim the changes have been agreed that allow us to stay in.

All this is part of that trend by which the world is inevitably experiencing a greater and greater concentration of wealth in fewer hands. The divisions are between countries, between regions of countries and between people. However this trend is politically very destabilising. It will become especially so as those who are now at the bottom end of the middle class and just getting by, start to lose their position and this trend spreads upwards to hurt more and more.

Of course, this connects with housing, because as more and more drop out of the housing market, the power of rentiers will become greater. There is great danger of political instability here, because for most of the twentieth century living off private rents has generally been regarded as unjust and unfair.

Thomas Piketty. Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century. Harvard, 2014 explains why this is happening under the present dispensation. This is an important book and I am near completing my reading of it and I can try sometime soon to give the gist of it as best I can. Would this be useful?

19. Other issues

We must discuss what we can do to take a stand against nuclear weapons and demonstrate that the UK deterrent represents a moral monstrosity, that even in purely military terms it is a logical absurdity, and is being misrepresented by vested interests.

 Chris Hennesey 19/05/2015