Don’t get me wrong. I am exceptionally grateful for the hours of tireless work members of the Green Party put in recently to help get a young former refugee elected as the first Green MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber. Yet I don’t think that should blind us to the risks involved in being someone who has a particular interest in a set of political beliefs.
Never have those risks been more in evidence than it is in British politics right now.
The Conservative Party is in the process of being brought to its knees by its own members. It is increasingly obvious that no one can get elected to be leader of that party if that person tells the members truths that they don’t wish to hear. Theresa May has spent two years running headlong into harsh realities and as a result has utterly failed to deal with the Brexit mess. Now anyone who wishes to succeed her has to tell the members that they will negotiate a better deal than May got and do it in 8 weeks. They also have to sound tough about being prepared to see the UK leave the EU without a deal. If they dare to even hint that there might be a few problems associated with losing every trade agreement we currently possess and losing easy access to our main markets they know they will not win the contest to win the votes of members of a very unusual club. If they suggest for a moment that leaving the EU might actually be rather difficult, they will be dismissed as weak and lacking faith in the collective vision. The whole country is therefore being held to ransom by a few tens of thousands of people who hold a particular – and very unusual – set of political views with such enthusiasm that they have chosen to join the Conservative Party.
The most likely outcome of this is that the UK gets landed with a Prime Minister who has just demonstrated that he is completely duplicitous and, as a consequence, we will crash out of the EU in 4 months time without any kind of trade deal or agreement. The country is about to suffer permanent economic and social damage because no one can tell the truth to a very small group of people with some very narrow minded views and still win. The country is about to be led by a deeply irresponsible politician who is prepared to promise a small group of fanatics whatever they want to hear and then almost immediately discover that it is impossible to deliver the fantasies those party loyalists believe in.
The situation in the Labour Party has similarities but is rather different. Labour is following the lead of a caucus of Momentum members who are very good at ensuring that they dominate the agenda of a party with hundreds of thousands of members. It doesn’t seem to matter how enthusiastically the bulk of the members back Remain or what programme they put forward. The ones who attend the meetings most often, the ones who control the Conference agenda, the ones who write duplicitous motions and the ones who interpret those motions have succeeded in blocking all efforts to commit that party to a second public vote. It has now become far too late for Labour to make a serious impact on public thinking about Brexit. The vast bulk of the new members who joined but aren’t that interested in attending meetings, sitting on committees and going to party conferences have solidly opposed Brexit from the start. So have much of the old guard. But they have been badly let down by a faction which believes in its heart of heart that heavy industry and trade union dominated factories will all somehow magically return if we leave the evil capitalist club of the EU. In other words some of the strongest supporters of the Labour Party have actually been very busily engaged in weakening that organisation.
All of which leaves me to reflect on the situation in the Green Party. There I think we have equally difficult problems with our most enthusiastic members dominating the policy setting agenda without necessarily thinking as hard as they might about the consequences of their latest, or indeed their lifelong, political enthusiasm. The Green Party is riding high in the polls and doing well in elections because it has proved right about all of the big issues. We were right about the Iraq war and austerity. We have also proved to be hugely correct in alerting people to the extent of the environmental emergency we are now living through and the need to rethink lifestyles in order to tackle that emergency. That doesn’t make us right in every jot and comma of our party programme. Indeed, sometimes our policies seem designed to lose us votes and to be difficult to explain.
Is it, for example, necessary or wise for us to campaign for a four day working week when millions of people are struggling to put together enough hours on a zero hours contract to pay the most basic of bills. Being a political enthusiast who is interested in these things I can see why the Green Party is campaigning for a more pressured lifestyle and I’ll do my best to explain the idea to anyone who asks about it when I’m out campaigning. But in my heart of heart I am not remotely convinced that the best way for us to articulate this argument by saying we are in favour of a 4 day week? Isn’t that just a silly headline grabbing soundbite that works much better as a free gift to our opponents than it does as a practical political programme. Is it really helpful to give the Daily Mail the ammunition it is looking for to portray us as silly and impractical people?
What struck me most at the last Green Party conference was that the members who were enthusiastic enough to get involved in writing policy are very keen and very good at competing with each other to ensure that the most radical possible policy gets passed. That is rarely the same thing as the approach which will win us the most votes and allow us to actually implement the most needed and the most urgent policies.
Up and down the country we now have several hundred Green Party councillors trying to ensure that decisions are made that limit the climate crisis and around 50,000 members trying to build on the 2 million people who voted Green in the MEP elections. It takes months and years of local campaigning to build a reputation that the Greens can be trusted to fight on behalf of their local communities and are the most responsible people around. It takes about five minutes for a journalist who has an entirely negative agenda to trawl through the Green Party policy documents on our website and find something daft enough to put millions of people off voting for us for many years. Why, for example, is the Green Party committed to supporting “Positive Money”? 99.99% of our members don’t understand what that means or care a jot about it. As one of the few people who is actually sad enough to read documents on monetary policy I can assure you that Positive Money is an interesting fringe view that seriously garbles the best way to manage banks and finance but not remotely a necessary part of Green Party policy. We are committed to it because a few enthusiastic members like the idea and got it through conference.
What we need in the Green Party right now is a lot more discipline about what we put forward as policy. We need to learn how to mature into being a major political force. That means listening to our voters. It also means listening a lot to reasonable people who didn’t vote for us and figuring out why and what to do about that. Our members need to be really good at figuring out which issues have traction with local voters and very careful indeed about articulating interesting ideas that have not yet been fully thought through.
There are, of course, plenty of times when it is necessary and right to state things publicly that are unpopular. I am not arguing for chasing public opinion shamelessly like Tony Blair did. What I am asking is that party members constantly reflect on the fact that those with a strong enough interest in politics to join a political party aren’t typical. By the very nature of our decision to join a party or to attend a party conference we mark ourselves out as unusual. We therefore need to be aware of the dangers of that and be careful about how we use our interest in politics.
Self-indulgent obsessions with areas of policy that are only of interest to a very small minority but are expressed with the greatest purity are a good way to end up in the same mess that Labour and the Conservatives are in. Open minded humility about the need to persuade a very large number of people that we have to make some drastic changes to their lifestyles has never been more necessary.