Welcoming a Better Nation

Posted on September 2, 2010 by Adam Ramsay | 1 Comment

James “Two Doctors” Mackenzie, Jeff “SNP Tactical Voting” Breslin and Malcolm “Malc in the Burgh” Harvey are well known faces in Scottish blogging. And now, they have launched a collaborative blog – Better Nation.

For those of you who don’t know of them, James is press officer for the Green MSPs, Jeff has recently left Scotland, and so the SNP, and joined the Green Party of England and Wales. And we are told that Malcolm is moving in the same direction. So I reckon that qualifies as a Green blog.

The name comes from the famous quote, “work as though you live in the early days of a better nation”. Which they tell us does not in fact originate with Alastair Gray, but with Dennis Leigh. Who knew?

James and Malcolm seem to be saying that they may continue posting things to their old blogs occasionally, while Jeff seems to have wound his up.

A hearty ‘welcome’ to them (though I suppose, individually, they have all been here much longer than us). We look forwards to future posts – I recommend checking them out – www.betternation.org

Category: Uncategorized

On Scotland’s People…

Posted on August 28, 2010 by Admin | No Comments

This article is cross-posted from Lallands Peat Worrier

Scotland

The Scottish Household Survey “is a continuous survey based on a sample of the general population in private residences in Scotland” which is “designed to provide reliable and up-to-date information on the composition, characteristics, attitudes and behaviour of Scottish households and individuals, both nationally and at a sub-national level”. The numbers of respondents are very large – running into the tens of thousands – and as a result, it is always an exciting moment for obsessives when new annual figures are published. My remarks of last year bear repetition:

I’m a great fan of quantitative social research. While much of the texture of people’s lives are lost by its persistent reduction of lived experience to a webway of percentages, percentiles, means and medians, groups above or below average, the quantitative view invariably tells us something we did not know, or only dimly appreciated. I’ve found that life exercises strong temptations to regard the self and your ordinary life, universalised, as the ordinary condition of most men and women. While sometimes, images and information succeed in temporarily rebuking this jealous sense of one’s own ordinariness, it tends to return, the lives lead by our fellow citizens collapsing once again into our own experience, its tenor informed by the settings in which we loiter and the people we meet. Big, hefty quantitative research is uniquely empowered to give those comfortable assumptions a shoogle. Even if the aggregation of conceptual categories can be problematic, and leave us empty-handed in terms of the whys and wherefores which brings that state of affairs about, the social frame is sketched in in our minds. We know ourselves better. That at least is my polemic on the goodness of quantitative research, and the interest in the Scottish Household Survey…

The survey’s concerns are domestic and civic, capturing forms of life in Scotland in broad quantitative categories, from marital status to housing tenure, internet access to participation in “cultural activities”, rates of smoking to rates of saving, perceptions of anti-social behaviour and attitudes to peoples’ environments. For example, did you know that 51% of Scotland’s adults (folk aged 16 or over) are married, while 1% are in same-sex civil partnerships, while 6% reported being divorced, while a further 3% were separated? Or that 46% of men are in full time work in Scotland, compared to 28% of women, while only 1% of men “look after the home/family” compared to 10% of women? All is not entirely positive. In particular, I get agitated by “ethnicity” statistics. In particular, how can white or black be ethnic categories? Isn’t white a loose coalition of pinkish pigments? I’m at a loss to see how skin colour can plausibly relate to the cultural and social differences that support ethnic distinctions. Indeed, such categories are basically racialising, however innocently the statisticians might have resorted to them. Here are just a few of the other statistics which caught my eye.

On housing tenure…
In 2008-09, 66% of householders “owner occupied”, with 22% in social rented housing, 10% in private rented housing and 2% making some other arrangement. This is much the same as last year, save that social housing loses ground 1%, accruing to private rental tenure. We don’t always notice transformative social changes. If we needed a reminder, contrast 2009’s figures with those a decade previously. While in 1999, owner occupation was still a high 61%, 32% of respondents at that time lived in social rented housing, compared to only 5% who undertook private leases. The shifts are even more telling if we leap back further in time to 1961. At that time, only 25% of folk owned and occupied their own houses. Returning to the “15% most deprived”, the rate of home ownership within this category is 39%, up from 34% last year. Social rented housing remains the predominant form of housing tenure among the most deprived at 53%, decreasing from 57% last year.

Safe walking home alone?
In the middle of a very fulsome section on attitudes towards our civic habitats, risks of crime and perceptions anti-social behaviour, they asked three quarters of their respondents if they felt safe walking home alone at night. 75% of adults said they felt fairly or very safe doing so, while 20% of the total feel imperilled doing so. However, the figures also bear out the fact that men and women’s comfort occupying public space and perceptions of endangerment differ. While most respondents of both genders felt safe, there was a 19% difference, with 85% of men feeling safe in the posited situation, compared with 66% of women. On the very unsafe or bit unsafe side of things, only 12% of men reported concerns, while 30% of women thought they were endangered, walking home alone at night.

On smoking…
In 2009,  24.3% of respondents smoked, a decrease on last year in line with an (almost) continuous reduction in smoker numbers since 1999, when 30.7% of the population partook. Men have a higher rate of smoking than women, 26% of the chaps doing so compared to 23% of the chapesses. Smoking is most common among men aged 25 – 34, 33% of them lighting up. While only 3% of those still at school owned up to nicotine use, a massive 59% of those unable to work due to short term illness do so, followed by 51% of the unemployed seeking work and 48% of those classified as permanently sick or disabled. Like so many of these figures, deprivation looms large here. The contrast is at its most delineated when the most deprived 15% is compared with the rest of Scotland. Remember the average rate of smoking across the population is 24%. 41% of the most deprived Scots smoke, compared with 21% of the rest of the country. 

On “life satisfaction”…
A rather irritating phrase one can imagine a vacuous life coach goading their devotees with. However, not an insignificant concern, one’s fundamental happiness with one’s existential lot: “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole nowadays on a scale where 0 means extremely dissatisfied and 10 means extremely dissatisfied?” This question is new to the Survey and happily revealed that 15% are extremely satisfied with life and that 86% of all respondents choose positive numbers, 8 being the number selected by the highest number of people (29%). Women were slightly more disposed to express extreme satisfaction than men, 17% of women doing so to 13% of men. Many older people seem to be having a whale of a time. Just under a quarter of 60 – 74 year olds (21%) said they were extremely satisfied with life. That said, 11% picked the middle point on the scale, presumably denoting neither satisfaction nor dissatisfaction with their continuing vitality. 

On internet use…
In the last quartile of 2009, 67% of households were connected to the internet, up from only 40% in the first quartile of 2003. In 2008, 68% of men use the internet, whether on a personal computer or at work, while 30% don’t. Amongst the ladies, 61% make use of it on the same terms, with a 7% hike in female internet non-use, up at 37%. Recently published figures show that use continues to rise, with 71% now making use of the internet whether at work or at home, while only 27% never make use of it. On the female front, usage now stands at 67%, compared to only 31% who never give it a go. Age clearly plays a part in this. That said, a great many people across the generations now have access. While an overwhelming 90% of 16 – 24 year olds have access, although usage declines slightly from this useful high, usage remains in the 70s and 80 percentages until a sharp decline in those over 60 to just under 50%. On the phenomenon of the “silveriest surfers” in Scotland, the figures show that 90% of women over 75 still don’t use the internet – while 19% of more tec-savvy chaps over 75 “surf”. Affluence makes itself felt here. Only a tiny 4% of those in households with incomes in excess of £40,000 do not use the internet. In stark contrast, of those in the 15% of households which are most deprived, a significantly larger 42% of people don’t connect.

On banking…
Asked, do you have a bank or building society account? 93% said yes, while 4% confirmed they did not, another 3% not owing up, one way or the other. Contrast this with 1999, when 86% of respondents confirmed accounts, while a significantly larger number – 12% – had no account in the household. Here’s an easily overlooked deprivation variable. While only 7% of all respondents had a Post Office card account, among 14% of those who are most deprived have one. Compared to the 1% of the total population with no account of any description, in line with last year’s results, 4% of the most deprived continue without one.

On reading for pleasure…
Books are great friends and boon companions in my life. 63% of the population think so too, reading for enjoyment’s sake, but sniffishly excluding newspapers, magazines and such like. Affordably printed and made available through public libraries, books have a potentially emancipatory, democratic accessibility, partially reflected in the responses. While those with degrees are the most likely to read (82%), 47% of those with no qualifications. Women are keener bibliophiles than men, 69% of them reporting an enthusiasm for reading, compared to 57% of men. Moreover, for most readers, their books are almost constant companions, 83% dipping into one at least once a week, with 10% doing so less often than weekly, but certainly once a month.

Those are just a few, hastily collected bits and pieces. The report itself runs to over a hundred pages, with innumerable graphs and divisions by category. For those of you who enjoy a good going bout of social research in your spare time, you can read the whole publication here.

Category: Uncategorized
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Philippe Legrain at the Edinburgh Book Festival

Posted on August 27, 2010 by Alasdair Thompson | 2 Comments

A vision of a world fairer, safer, richer and greener.

AftershockThomas Friedman says the world is flat – Philippe Legrain doesn’t think so. What matters most to how you do in life is where you are born and who your parents are. Philippe’s envisioned world is one where the benefits and opportunities of the middle classes in the West are extended to everyone.

In Edinburgh to promote his new book, Aftershock, Philippe told us that to reshape the world economy banking, tax, migration and the climate all need to be reorganised and fixed to prevent another collapse and protect the very existence of liberal democracy.

On banking he says banks should be broken up and re-regulated and governments should use their stakes in bailed out banks to force them to lend to small business if they won’t do it themselves. Bonuses should only be paid in shares which cannot be quickly sold, to ensure bankers have a personal stake in the long term future of their institutions. All pretty sensible if not terribly radical.

Tax should be shifted from labour, which we think is a good thing, perhaps, onto carbon and land. Land tax would be harder to avoid, would pay for infrastructure improvements, like high speed rail into Scotland, which it is ‘criminally irresponsible’ to be taking so long to achieve. I’ve talked about LVT before, and, indeed, I quoted Philippe then, so it’s no surprise to hear it as part of his suggestions now. Shifting to land tax would make the vast bulk of the population better off, and perhaps do something to tackle the distribution of property in this country where 0.3% of population owe 69% of the land, more unequal than Brazil. Carbon should be priced so that business can take that cost into account in planning for the future and to encourage clean technology but emissions trading creates the same problems as financial markets, with prices too volatile to provide a good incentive.

He’s right in identifying the problems with the current European and planned (now scrapped) US trading systems, but I’m not sure he should be so keen to dismiss the idea out of hand. Quotas don’t have to be a give-away to big business, a scheme that gave permits directly to citizens on a per capita basis and then forced companies to buy them back could provide a direct incentive to consumers whilst forming the basis for a basic income. But I’ll come back to this in another post.

Philippe doesn’t like to see himself as left or right. And it’s true, ideas like land value tax, for example, or open borders, really aren’t left or right wing intrinsically. What’s more important, he believes, is whether you are for progress and change or trying to prevent it. Whether you are for an open or a closed society. He says government should have a role equipping people for change, ensuring equality of opportunity and protecting those that are disadvantaged by change, when factories move abroad or replace manual labour with machines, for example. Speaking of which, he predicts that, as with agriculture, manufacturing will progressively employ fewer people, manufacturing jobs in China are now decreasing even as it’s share of the market increases due to productivity improvements. But this is also a man who says t-shirts selling for £2 are a good thing, because even workers earning, what appear to us as, very low wages in China are earning more than they would in subsistence farming and the process of industrialisation and urbanisation inevitably raises living standards in the long run.

Asked about the immediate plans for our economy, he says we need to bring the deficit down eventually, but it is still too early and the recovery too fragile to cut now. You get out of recession by growing the economy, it is unlikely the private sector can make up the difference if the public sector is cut now. Where that has worked in the past it has been where a small country can devalue its currency to boost exports and where the banking system has been functioning properly, neither is true for us. Cuts in education and capital spending are even worse as these have direct benefits in increased productivity and taxes in the future. The cuts are less about good economics and more about a political decision to shrink the size of the state, get cuts out of the way well before the next election and reduce the deficit quickly enough to give away tax cuts before the next election.

Which all sounds remarkably close to conventional Green thought. Where I suspect he diverges from many of us, however, is when asked about eh limits of growth. Growth fundamentally comes down to two things in the mind of Philippe Legrain, ingenuity and energy. Human ingenuity is virtually unlimited, and till now we have only exploited a tiny portion of it, the rich, male, western part. As the developing world grows and women gain more power our capacity for invention will grow too. If we continue to burn carbon the world will fry, but the solution is not to drastically cut our living standards but to switch to a different fuel. There are huge quantities of energy from the sun, wind and atom (he didn’t go into great detail on his preferred mix, or whether atom referred to fission, fusion or both). With energy we can desalinate water, and there is plenty of salt water, with food we should be able to increase yields by 50% by 2050, which would be enough to feed 9 billion people (again relatively few details in the talk on how this can be achieved). With other resources the prices will go up as supply decreases or demand increases which will stimulate new technologies with fewer requirements.

While there’s certainly some truth in the idea that there’s plenty of clean energy out there if we make the effort, and that with enough energy we can overcome quite a lot of other problems, there is, perhaps, a little too much reliance on our ability to always find technological solutions in time in this part of his argument. Certainly I’d like to see a little more evidence at the least an hopefully that’ll be something he addresses in the book. I’ll let you know.

Philippe Legrain’s book Aftershock: Reshaping the world economy after the crisis is out now

Category: Culture, Economics
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In Praise of Politics

Posted on August 26, 2010 by Alasdair Thompson | 5 Comments

We’ve been accused recently, and perhaps with some cause, of focusing too much on the machinations of the English and Welsh Green Party and not enough on what’s happening up here in Scotland. It’s certainly true that in the run up to GPEW conference next month, and with two of our editors and most of our contributors living South of the border, much of our coverage has had a decidedly English (and Welsh) feel to it. In recognition that our focus has shifted somewhat since we launched, we’ll soon be re-branding and re-launching as a UK-wide site (more of which shortly) but nevertheless it got me thinking. Why have we had so little Scottish material recently?

The geographical distribution of our editorial team is one factor, and for my own part the festival is never my most productive period. But there’s more to it than that I think. We carried a lot of pieces from GPEW members because we’ve had a lot of offers from GPEW members. There seems more of a willingness amid the English and Welsh party to talk about politics. There’s an increasingly vibrant blogging (and tweeting) scene that’s debating the future of the party and the direction it wants to take, and I don’t see the same engagement with politics up here. There’s a willingness to accept that not everyone has the same idea of how to take the party forward and that there are important issues which need to be debated and need to be debated publicly.

It would be nice if we all got along and everyone always agreed with each other. It would be simpler if we all agreed on strategy, if we all had the same priorities and all had the same prescriptions to improve society. We’d only ever have to meet to discuss how to distribute the various tasks required to run a party and run campaigns and elections. You’ll arrange the placarding runs, you’ll coordinate volunteers, I’ll do this hustings, can you do the next one?

Unfortunately, we don’t all agree all the time. That makes things harder to organise but it’s also inevitable and trying to pretend that we do all fundamentally agree and get on only makes it that much harder. So here’s a radical idea. Let’s stop pretending. Let’s accept that we have different visions of our party’s future and debate them publicly. Some people will think we should focus on our traditional vote of environmental protection and climate change, some will think we need to focus more on core Green issues of social justice, on cuts and the economy, some will be more liberal and some more left but perhaps that pluralism is a good thing. Perhaps, if we stop trying to hide our disagreements and talk openly about where we’re all coming from and where we want the party to go we’ll actually come to a better position.

That very act of debating can allow us to hone our policy, to understand where other people with different backgrounds, who we will inevitably meet when out campaigning, are coming from and make it easier to relate to them and to best explain our positions. Most people we meet aren’t going to be environmentalists, many of them will come from a very different background to ourselves, but that shouldn’t dissuade us from trying to persuade them of our policies. Knowing why another Green with different politics to you still supports the same programme you do can be invaluable to making that connection and knowing how best to make your case.

Accepting that we don’t all agree and that that is no bad thing can help protect a plurality within the party that is beneficial to us all. It stops us becoming too single minded, forgetting our core vote or the need to expand, it shows those outside the party there is a place for them even if they don’t agree with the official line on some issue of the day.

So, members of the Scottish Green Party (and interested outsiders) this is our site, but, as with GPEW, we want it to be a platform to debate the future of our party and our movement. Let’s hear where you want us to go. We’re a political party, let’s all talk a little more about politics.

Category: Green Party, political strategy
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Total Politics Poll 2010

Posted on August 25, 2010 by Adam Ramsay | 6 Comments

Total Politics have released the Green results of their annual poll (see below).

So, thanks to everyone has written for us, commented, read pieces, and, of course, voted for us since we launched six months ago or so. Also congratulations to the lovely Jim Jepps from The Daily (Maybe) – deservedly the king of Green blogging, to our fellow Scot, James at Two Doctors, to everyone else on the list, and involved in Green and progressive blogging in general.

As Jim says, blogging, like politics, is about a team effort, not competition. We would like to be cool, and pretend that we don’t care about this kind of thing at all. But the truth is that we’re pretty pleased.

1 (1) The Daily (Maybe)
2 Bright Green Scotland
3 (2) Two Doctors
4 (5) Barkingside 21
5 (4) Another Green World
6 Gaian Economics
7 (21) George Monbiot
8 (8) Rupert’s Read
9 (11) Mabinogogiblog
10 (9) Ruscombe Green
11 (19) Weggis
12 Jane’s Political Ramblings
13 Suitably Despairing
14 Flesh is Grass
15 (10) Green Reading
16 Greens Engage
17 (15) Caroline Lucas MEP
18 Stuart Jeffery
19 (3) Peter Cranie
20 (14) Bloggy Blanc
21 Scottish Greens
22 Greening Kirklees
23 Greener Leith
24 Chadwell and Seven Kings Greens
25 A Week Is a Long Time

Category: Uncategorized

Climate Camp – why RBS?

Posted on August 25, 2010 by Adam Ramsay | 4 Comments

The camp for climate action came to Scotland this week.

To those wondering why so many people are angry with this bank, the answer is pretty simple: when it comes to climate change, RBS make it happen – and they do it with taxpayers’ bail-out money. RBS is Europe’s biggest financer of the fossil fuel extraction driving climate change. According to a report last year by banking expert Nick Silver, the bank is financing projects and companies which deliver 3% of carbon emissions worldwide: more than the whole UK economy.

And RBS also seems to specialise in facilitating and financing the most destructive projects. Since they were bailed out, they have used €2.3bn of our money to prop-up companies operating in Canada’s tar sands. This mega-project in Alberta – the largest in human history – is up-rooting an area of crucial carbon-sink forest the size of England and Wales. It’s poisoning the land and water and so killing the indigenous people who live there. It’s doing this to extract vast quantities of oil mixed with sand and mud – a substance so dirty, and so plentiful, that NASA scientists tell us that, unless we stop extracting these tar sands, we can’t stop runaway climate change.

RBS is also behind disastrous oil projects inflaming war in central Africa. When they lent around $100 million of our money to Tullow Oil earlier this year, they were financing a project drilling for oil right on the border between the DRC and Uganda. The resource war between these countries has killed roughly 5 million in the last 15 years. That’s nearly 1 in every thousand people on earth. When Tullow moved in with their partners Heritage Oil, they decided to arm both sides in the conflict as they mobilized around the area where oil was discovered. Which helped.

Most recently, they were the funders behind Cairn Energy’s deep drilling project in pristine Arctic waters. Cairn’s Chief Exec recently welcomed climate change. He said that the melting ice will give access to more oil. Nice.

And since they were bailed-out, they’ve been doing all of this with our money. At a time when the Government claims it can no longer afford to finance the much needed switch to a low carbon economy, it is allowing RBS to throw billions of our money down the fossil fuel drain – which can only lead to long term losses, if the world is weaned off fossil fuels, or to catastophic climate if it isn’t.

RBS is a failed bank. Their insanity with sub-prime mortages kick-started the credit crunch. They are 84% owned by the taxpayer because we had to bail them out with billions. We must stop mis-using this money, or my generation will pay a much bigger price.

Category: Economics, Environment
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Climate Camp tackle Cairn energy

Posted on August 24, 2010 by Adam Ramsay | 1 Comment

Category: Uncategorized

Jilted Generation – book review

Posted on August 24, 2010 by Adam Ramsay | 10 Comments

If you were born after September 1979, this book is about you. You are a member of the jilted generation. We are the jilted generation. Or so Shiv Malik and Ed Howker tell us in their book of the same name, coming out next week.

And they make a pretty convincing case that our generation has been screwed over. Replete with shocking statistics, fascinating graphs, and punchy sentences, the first half of the book is hard to argue with.

29% of men under the age of 34 live at home – they can’t afford to leave. Compared to our young parents, those of us who have left home live in smaller, lower quality houses. We are less likely to own them, and much more likely to be kicked out. It’s harder for us to find work than it was for our parents – much harder. And that was before the credit crunch. The work we do find is likely to be temporary, part time, and badly paid. Unlike our parents, we are expected to work for free as interns for long periods. And the credit crunch has disproportionately impacted the young more than any previous recession.

Young people have always been poorer, they tell us. But we are much poorer. And this isn’t just an affliction of our youth. The baby boomers – under the leadership of Thatcher – sold the family silver, and cashed it in for a 20 year consumer binge. The right to buy turns out to have been one generation taking the housing stock their parents had built for them, and selling it to themselves at a discounted rate. Instead of saving this money for their pensions, a criminal lack of foresight means that we will have to pay for their retirements too. We will bear these costs for the rest of our lives.

The generation who paid tuition fees have often felt that we are worse off than our parents. The first half of this book has the stats to back it up. They examine housing, jobs, and the public assets – and debts – that we will inherit. The case is convincing; the narrative compelling. We are the jilted generation. We will spend the rest of our lives paying for these mistakes.

The second half of the book attempts to explain this phenomenon. It explains rational choice theory, and Philip Gould’s government by focus group. It demands that politicians provide leadership – and that democratic decisions are devolved to the lowest level, where they are likely to be made better. It argues for land trusts, and co-ops.

But I’m not sure that it names the beast. Because at the end, after a whole book about how the Thatcherite experiment has failed – how treating voters as individual consumers has conned baby boomers into to stealing from their own children, the authors claim to support capitalism. And for me, if they support workers’ co-ops, radical democracy, and a more economic planning, then they are not supporters of capitalism.

But the book is a timely call. As the eldest baby boomers’ children enter their thirties, many still waiting for the adult lives they were expecting to begin, it demands that we start this debate. It’s time to work out what went wrong. Because until we work out how the generation which gave us free love accidentally gave corporations free reign, we risk leaving an even worse mess for our children.

Jited Generation – how Britain has bankrupted it’s youth – is published by Icon Books and comes out on the 2nd of September.

Find out more and buy the book at their website and join the discussion on the Facebook page.

Category: Economics
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Why the Green Party should elect a ‘Shadow Cabinet’

Posted on August 23, 2010 by Admin | 24 Comments

This guest post is by Jonathan Kent, and was first published on his blog, The Headstrong Club.

This September, when the Green Party of England and Wales meets for the first time as a party represented at Westminster, members will be asked to vote on a proposal to elect a Green Shadow Cabinet.

In some ways it’s a significant step, just as it was a big step to elect a ‘leader’ rather than two ‘principal speakers’.

There has been a lot of sympathetic support, some scepticism and some opposition. But let me, briefly, set out why I believe this is the right step to take and why this is the right time.

In some ways the Green Party set out from its inception in the early 70s as ‘People’ to be an ‘anti-party’ – hence the steadfast opposition to the style of leadership and organisation shared by the big UK parties.

But after thirty odd years of clinging to the fringes a new generation emerged, a pragmatically minded and ambitious generation, that sees green politics as more than a gesture or a protest. We see it as a framework of principles by which our society can become happier, healthier and sustainable. However we have come to accept that it will be none of those things if we indulge our penchant for opposition and yell impotently from the sidelines.

The Green Party faces a challenge – to continue to professionalise whilst keeping its soul. I believe our soul is hardwired into our commitment to the rights of the individual, to empowering communities to take control of their own futures and to the belief that power should flow upwards. It’s indivisible from our desire to have a country and a planet that we can leave our grandchildren and they theirs.

Green thinking emanates from these core beliefs and colours our approach to every area of government and life. Yet for too long we’ve largely been heard on issues that the media and the wider world consider to be ‘green’ – primarily the environment and peace.

However any serious Green Party needs to communicate its thinking in every area and nothing signals our intention to do that more seriously than our electing a Green Shadow Cabinet.

Let me say at this juncture that I’m not irrevocably wedded to the name. There is a touch of hubris about it. However as a descriptive term it leaves us with the least room for misinterpretation. The Green Shadow Cabinet’s purpose would be to shadow the main cabinet portfolios – though with only 13 members (including our leader and deputy) some briefs, for instance Foreign and International Development, might need to be combined.

By choosing to establish such a body we do a number of key things:

We widen the franchise within the party. The Greens are more than the Caroline Lucas fan club (though while I’m about it I’ll squeeze in a quick ‘Yay Caroline!’). We have talent in depth. Our leader and deputy are not islands of sanity in a quirky and unelectable party; they’re merely the two considered most able from a considerable pool of talent and ability. The GSC (one can never have too many acronyms) rather than detracting from the lustre of the leader will surely add to it. Furthermore by electing the shadow cabinet as a single list we maximise the opportunities for people of diverse views, from every region, of different races, both genders and a multiplicity of sexual preferences to be represented.

We make the party more democratic. Presently the External Communications Coordinator recommends candidates to GPEx. If Alistair Campbell or Andy Coulson had played such a role under Tony Blair or David Cameron we would have heaped ridicule upon them. To those who say you can have too much democracy in the Green Party I would say this; trust the members. Their choice of leader and deputy showed they have common sense aplenty and they’ll soon sort the wheat from the chaff amongst the GSC candidates.

We shift the elected centre of gravity of the party decisively away from administration and towards policy and towards the voter. The Green Shadow Cabinet would be as outward looking as GPEx and GPRC are, necessarily, for the most part inward looking.

We ensure the making and communication of policy are brought more closely together. Each shadow cabinet member will handle one or more key briefs and will coordinate policy development in that area with members from each region contributing to the process. The Green Shadow Cabinet and shadow spokespeople will be better placed to respond to the 24 hour news cycle to communicate our wider agenda when opportunities come up. We have a panel of clearly identified policy spokespeople, with a mandate and who meet regularly as a body to discuss policy and the way we apply it and put it across.

Lastly, and arguably most importantly, as we start to mirror the activity of government in other ways we stop thinking about governing in an abstract and sometimes idealised environment and become more disciplined about considering the real world implication of the policies we suggest.

If we do choose to establish a Green Shadow Cabinet I believe it will be another step on a journey towards our becoming a serious force in British politics with various emphases on ‘serious’.

It may be a while before we are ready to participate in government. Indeed it may yet be a generation. However if we start acting now as we mean to go on not only is that time likely to be nearer but when it comes we might be better prepared to decide who we best do that.

Category: Green Party
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Green lessons from Down Under

Posted on August 23, 2010 by Admin | 5 Comments

by Kevin Meaney (@oxkev) it first appeared on his blog

I grew up and worked in Australia before moving to the UK 13 years ago. Having recently become more actively involved in the UK Green Party I have been following the 2010 Australian election and the performance of the Australian Greens closely.

Because I am looking at Australian Politics from a progressive perspective I will mix the Liberal Party (like the UK Conservatives), the National Party and the Liberal National Party into a single pudding the called the LNP.

Up until the last 8 or so years during the gradual rise of the Greens in the Australian Parliament*, Australian Politics had been dominated by 3 parties, the LNP, Labour and the Australian Democrats (AD). The AD always struggled to gain decent electoral success and the most influence they ever gained was to have 9 Senators and often held the balance of power in the Australian Senate**. Like the LibDems in the UK it was often hard to know what the AD stood for. In April 2001 Natasha Stott Despoja became leader of the AD and pulled the AD to the left on social and economic issues, but bitter infighting continued amongst the leadership of the AD and Stott Despoja resigned from the leadership in August 2002. Since then the AD have been in electoral meltdown with their vote collapsing and in 2008 lost the last of their remaining seats in the Senate. In the 2010 election the total vote for the AD in the Senate was 1.3% and the vote in the House of Representatives was 0.2 %. The Australian Greens have completely taken over as Australia’s third
party.

In the 2010 election the total first preference Green vote in the House of Representatives*** was 11.4 % and in the Senate the Greens polled from 10% in New South Wales (NSW) to 20% in Tasmania. The Green vote in the two territories ACT and the Northern Territory was also high but didn’t result in the election of any senators because both Territories only send 2 Senators each to the Senate. I believe that the number of Green Party Senators is a fair reflection of their national vote. In the 2010 election 2 of the 5 Green Party Senators were up for reelection and they were returned to office plus the Green Party gained 4 new Senators equalling the best results of the AD in 1999.

In the 2010 election The Australian Greens gained their first seat in the Australian House of Representatives in the seat of Melbourne, but they have also done well in a number of other seats, for example Batman also in Melbourne where they came second, Grayndler in Sydney where the electoral commission needs to do a recount**** of the second preference votes and there is still a slim chance that the Greens will win. The Greens also did well in the Seat of Denison in Tasmania though this is more complicated. The seat was won by a former Green Party candidate standing as an Independent who beat the Green Party candidate by 2% and as a result the the second Preferences of the Green Party candidate flowed to the Independent helping the independent to defeat the sitting Labor Party candidate. The Greens also did well in a number of other inner city seats like the seat of Sydney. Here the Greens were just beaten into 2nd place by the LNP and if the Greens had come second the second preferences by the other parties would have meant that they would have unseated the sitting Labor Party member. Because the Green Party came third and not second the second preferences of those who voted Green went predominantly to the Labor Party making the final Labour winning margin high.

The Preferential Voting System is far from proportional. The Greens received 11.4 % of the vote but have managed to win only 1 seat, a proportional system would have resulted in around 18 seats in the House of Representatives.

I wrote this piece because I wanted to think about the implications of the performance of the Greens in the Australian election and what this means for the Greens in the UK. In the end I don’t think there is a lot that we can learn. But there are a few things.

1. I think the advantage of the Preferential Voting System over First Past the Post is that it makes the support for smaller parties like the Greens more visible. I think that the 11.4 % vote for the Greens still under represents the support for the Australian Greens because some people are confused how the voting system works and still only vote for the main parties because of the fear of wasting their vote. However, I believe that the total vote of 1% for the Greens in the UK 2010 hides badly their real level of support because the first past the post voting system frightens people into voting conservatively.

2. The electoral results in the Australian Senate for the Greens
demonstrates the potential for success that the Greens can achieve with a decent electoral system.

3. I think the biggest lesson from Australia relates to the LibDems and the demise of the Australian Democrats. Party members were mostly to the left of their representatives in the Senate and when the membership elected a leader who more accurately reflected their views this resulted in instability at the top level of the party and permanent infighting. The infighting continued after the removal of Stott Despoja and the return of the AD to their usual vague politics turned off the Australian electorate.
4. The Greens in the UK need to do everything they can to show that it is normal to vote Green. They should be highlighting where possible not just Caroline Lucas’ win in Brighton but also the results of the elections for the European Union. This is not deceptive in relation to Westminster elections because the first past the post voting system makes voters who support smaller parties fearful to vote for the party they believe in. But once they understand that voting Green gets results support for the Greens will increase.

5. That for the Greens the Democrats reduce their voice for being heard. The electoral success in Australia for the Greens only blossomed after the AD self destructed. Once that had happened the Greens started to do well. Not just because they picked up former AD supporters but because they stand for decent social democratic policies as well as environmental policies. Their voice as the third party in Australian politics is much clearer than that of the old AD and that their voice in the media is now heard more often because they are the third party. Unlike the AD the Greens I believe will hold and sometimes even exceed the 9 Senators that they have elected because they represent a truly socially left progressive party.

The similarity of outcome between the recent UK and Australian elections is considerable. Neither of the main parties are able to form a Government on their own, the result in both cases makes it slightly easier for the Conservatives to form a Government though I think in Australia the result is more finely balanced than in the UK. The biggest difference is that the Senate in Australia is really going to be hard going for the Conservatives because Labor and the Greens hold a clear majority which will only increase in size when the Greens get to add their new Senators. The Conservatives will find negotiating with the Greens much harder going than they did when they had to negotiate with the Australian Democrats to get their legislation through the Senate.

* The Australian Parliament has two chambers, the House of Representatives often called the Lower house and the Senate often called the Upper House.

** The Senate has 76 members 12 for each state and 2 each for the two Territories (NT and ACT). At each election all of the Senators from the NT and ACT are up for reelection and half of the Senators from each state are up for reelection unless there is an Double Dissolution of Parliament triggered by a political crisis. For example the sacking of the Whitlam Government by the Governor General Sir John Kerr in 1975 in which case all Senators are up for reelection. Senators are elected for a fixed term of 6 years which means that the Senators do not take up office until the completion of the term of their predecessors in the Senate. During the first 7 months of the Rudd Government the Senate was controlled by the opposition as the Senators elected in December 2007 did not take up their seats until July 2008. Since each state has the same number of Senators NSW with a population of 7 million is underrepresented whilst Tasmania with a population of 500 thousand is over represented.

*** The House of Representatives has 150 members and at a General election all members are up for reelection. The party that controls the majority of seats in the House of Representatives forms the Government. Voting uses the preferential voting system.

**** Preferential Voting system is different from the Alternative Vote (AV) system or AV+. The Preferential Voting system in a House of Representatives allows voters to show their first preference thus making it possible to see what kind of electoral support a party like the Greens has unlike the the first past the post system in the UK. However in terms of electoral outcome the Preferential Voting system is still strongly biased in favour of the two major political parties.

***** The need for the electoral commission to do a recount is because during the count on election night the electoral commission counted the second preferences based on assumption that the contest was between the Liberal and Labor candidates. The recount will not start until Monday.

Category: Green Party, political strategy
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