The leading Green Party blog, The Daily (Maybe) brings news that the Green Party has a new leader. Yes, that's one leader, not two. They have finally grown up and realised that co-leaders do not work.The new leader is the very media friendly MEP Caroline Lucas. Her new deputy is the very able 26 year old Green councillor from Norwich, Adrian Ramsey, who is largely responsible for the fact that the Greens are now the second biggest group on Norwich City Council, and could conceivably take control in 2010.
It's very easy to deride the Green Party as an irrelevance now that all three main parties have signed up to an environmental agenda, but their role as a pressure group rather than a political party is still an important one. At the moment they are still able to retain a certain innocent idealism. If they actually take control of Norwich City Council it will be interesting to see if they are able to retain in while exercising political power. Lessons from other countries show that gaining power normally splits them right down the middle, with the more fundamentalist elements accusing the more practical ones of selling out.
Anyway, congratulations to Caroline and Adrian.
23 comments:
They are still watermelons. Green on the outside, red on the inside!
Private ownership is a better preserver of environment and resources than nationalisation, state control and rationing, as favoured by the Greens.
Ecomentalists, the lot of them. Utter and total waste of space.
If these idiots had their way we would all be living in caves banging rocks together.
Predict they will be a part of the Cameron coalition at westminster within 10 years
She looks younger (im 42) than me! Well done. It must be the healthy green living.
The cnd credentials are at best a communist(you rememeber) pile of xxxt. peter hain was in the communist party and cnd and look how far it got him.
I have a £20 bet at evens that they don't win Brighton Pavilion at the next General Election. Also some rumour that they might steal Norwich South.
Anyone have any thoughts?
I'm sad enough to have read their long-term manifesto. It's a recipe for mass inflation, high taxation and economic collapse. These people would do more damage to the fabric of this country than the BNP (who actually have some Greenish economic policies).
Sanctimonious, preachy, bossy, know what is good for us.
The Greens are part Marxist, part National Socialist and anti libertarian.
It was a disgrace to hear Sarah Montague sucking up to Lucas on Today’s Today Programme
I am an activist in norwich south. The greens are very strong and do well in the local elections, but a lot of the thatat stems from the sheer aount of people they pump in accross the country to their few target areas, two years ago at the count a friend of my in labour students esstimated that at least 15 of them he had seen and met while he was based in london includeing their previous mayoral candiate. The greens will improve on their 3000 odd, and could even double it but I cant see them winning....yet. If anything the greens are good for the tories here, as they steal mainly labour and lib dem votes.
Isn't it ironic that they use a representation of the sun as their logo, when they steadfastly deny even the tiniest possibility that variations in sunspot activity are more likely to be the cause of variations in the Earth's surface temperatures?
I heard this awful woman on the Today Programme this morning.
They've got rid of that wild Trotskyite blogger man then?
Caroline Lucas supports an economic and cultural boycott of Israel. At least she's media friendly eh (apart from the media that those jews control eh Cazza??)
As noted at Harry's Place, Ms Lucas and her party supports the academic and economic boycott of the only democracy in the Middle East, while giving a free pass to the most reprehensible regimes on the planet.
The Greens have made some seriously bad calls on environmental issues, and Ms Lucas has opinions on everything, including subjects on which she knows little. I fear, for all her media friendliness, she is just another sanctimonious leftist prig.
At September 05, 2008 10:52 PM , Anonymous said...
Predict they will be a part of the Cameron coalition at westminster within 10 years"
In 10 years when our enery supplies have collapsed the Greens will have fled taking Al Gore with them.
The Green agenda has meant at least 1.4% less growth per annum across the developed world over the last 40 years. That means that we are being deprived of the equivalent of 80% of the current British income by "environmentalists".
How much of this is the fault of the Green Party as such & how much of politicians of all parties & the government bureuacrats of the BBC using "environmentalism" to enhance their & government bureaucrat's power is a different question.
All the comments on Lucas' dottiness are spot on. It was indeed nauseating to hear Ms Montague toadying to her on the Today programme. To call Mz Lucas a fruitcake would be an insult to the bakery trade.
The Green Party only has 7,565 members ?
Still an idiot though.
The last thing I heard from her was on QT when she was talking about the need for public transportation in the country.
There are two possibilities for this oxymoron:
1) Marxist nationalisation of transport meaning like the good old days in the Green utopia that was the USSR (Chernobyl was all the fault of capitalism you know) you stay on your farm until the state sends for you.
2) She thinks the Home Counties count as the country.
Either way, she's an idiot.
I listened to highlights from her platform speech today.
It was full of class hatred based on a total misunderstanding of basic economics.
These people are the nasty heart of the real Nasty Party.
I'll take all this far from rational name calling, labelling and frankly largely inaccurate criticism as a compliment. The Greens have come of age, got real, have very much been noticed and are now a much bigger threat to anyone to claims that 'all three main parties have signed up to an environmental agenda'. Caroline Lucas is smart, experienced and comes across extremely well in the media.
No other political party has a coherent and consistent program that will create a green society - the current govt talks of being green whilst favouring more coal-fired power stations, expansion of air travel, building hundreds of miles of new roads, and has so far failed to windfall tax the excessive and in some cases obscene levels of profit of energy companies. As it hasn't been in the past it wouldn't now be much different under any other political party, except the Greens.
"Private ownership is a better preserver of the environment"
Hmmm, it's working great so far ...
Communism/watermelon metaphor: you can search long and hard for phrases such as "the dictatorship of the proletariat" or "the total domination of society by the working class" in the Green Party manifesto. We support strong unions, living wages, and we do support nationalisation of things like public transport. But that's a mixed economy (social democracy), not communism. And the way we want to achieve it is bottom-up local control, not top-down state bureaucracy. There's no point in nationalised public services if they are just as remote and uninvolving and faceless as private industry.
Incidentally, are all nationalisations Marxist? Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac?
"Communism/watermelon metaphor: you can search long and hard for phrases such as "the dictatorship of the proletariat" or "the total domination of society by the working class" in the Green Party manifesto."
That ia what "watermellon" means. Green outside, red inside so obviously the taking over the means of production stuff tends not to go on the outside. Idiot.
Actually I think it is a bit of an insult to Marxists to compare them with the Greens. Nobody, not even Adam Smith, was more keen on economic & industrial growth than Marx. Most of these watermellons not only aren't really Greens thay aren't really Marxists either they are just Luddites who want to throw all their toys out of the pram & think that makes them revolutionaries.
Neil Craig - name calling, labelling and insult mate, not genuine debating points.
I'm actually a Lib Dem supporter(former labour but this faith schools/ban offensive stuff nonsense put me off), and I think we must have strong measures to tackle the threat of global warming, species extinction(plants can=new medicines), but even I don't like the greens.
The whole precautionary principle rubbish about genetics modification and engineering is a load of claptrap, the precautionary principle is fallacious, and if we used that consistently we'd be stuck in the dark ages, they're a bunch of rainbow land neo-luddites.
Government investment and incentives for nuclear and genetic research could provide huge benefits for health and give long term cheap fuel.
But they everything that involves the evil corporations, yes some corporations do bad things, but technology can be used for good or bad, nuclear can produces weapons or clean power, genetics viruses or hardy food crops for the 3rd world.
I'll admit I'm also a little biased against them as I got called evil simply for applying to the Army,not because of terrorist paranoia but because of altruism and "western" sins of the past, yet apparently I'm still an evil murderous warmonger.
Saying that I realise not all of them are going to be like that but it is a rant.
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