Green Party

Tom Griffin (London, OK): Iain Gray has just been announced as the new leader of the Labour Party in the Scottish Parliament, the BBC reports. Meanwhile the Greens are set to become the latest Scottish Party to change their leader, with the news that Robin Harper is to step down.

Rupert Read (Norwich, The Green Party): Last night, on September 5th, the Green Party made an historic decision.  We elected our first leader. This result, achieved after years of exhaustive internal debate, cannot be underestimated, for three reasons.

Firstly, as I've said previously here on OurKingdom, I believe our new leader Caroline Lucas MEP to be the most inspirational, intelligent, passionate and relevant politician in British politics today.  Faced with the looming triple crisis of the credit crunch, potential climate catastrophe and a peak in oil production that is causing energy prices to sky-rocket, the Greens are the only Party bold enough to take a stand and say what needs to be said, whether it be popular already or not. Caroline has embodied that spirit for over a decade, spearheading our Party in Europe and increasingly on the national stage.

Rupert Read (Norwich, The Green Party): I am a local Councillor. Green Councillors want a Party that works well, a Party that punches above its weight, a Party that will deliver the successes and the desperately-needed policy-changes nationally that Greens are already achieving all over the country, locally.

That prospect is perhaps now within sight. For, in a fortnight's time, the Green Party will make history. Having had a system of ‘Principal Speakers' for the last generation, the Party is currently holding its first-ever election for a Leader (see here and here for the history of how this came to be). The entire membership has been balloted; the final votes will be cast at our national Party Conference on Sept. 5; the result will come out on Sept. 6.

My friend and colleague Adrian Ramsay is unopposed for Deputy Leader. For the Leadership position itself there is an intriguing contest going on, between our MEP and current Principal Speaker Caroline Lucas, and Ashley Gunstock, a grassroots member mainly well-known for his acting appearances on TV's "The Bill".

Rupert Read (Norwich, The Green Party): The Green Party stood in Haltemprice and Howden on a clear platform of being 'to the left' of David Davis on freedom in general and on civil liberties in particular. David Davis did all he could to marginalise and exclude us. The media didn't help, painting the by-election as a freak show, because neither the LibDems nor Labour were standing while a huge field of also-rans were standing.

And yet we have come through well. While virtually everyone else lost their deposits, the Green Party last night scored our highest-ever percentage in a byelection (beating our previous high, back in our best-ever-yet year of 1989), and claimed an unprecedented second place (see the full result and a pertinent comment from our candidate, here).

Rupert Read (Norwich, The Green Party): The powers that be at Our Kingdom are welcoming the way Davis has called this highly-unusual byelection. I can understand that; I can understand the desire to applaud and welcome what he has done and what he is making possible. I said as much myself, in my earlier post on this on OK.

But I think what we also need to be very clear about is that no way is David Davis any kind of poster boy for civil liberties. Much of what he believes in and much of his record is extremely antithetical to what many on OK take for granted. I fear that this fact has not fully emerged in most of what has been written on OK about this byelection campaign.

Rupert Read (Norwich, The Green Party): So, it's Boris. Gulp.

I'm not looking forward to Boris Johnson's Mayoralty, partly for reasons of personal familiarity with his political methods (as indicated here). But one has to congratulate him on the audacity of having stood, and won - a year ago, him winning seemed a very distant prospect indeed.

OurKingdom is running a short series of posts looking at various aspects of local government - you can read the series in full here.

Rupert Read (Norwich, The Green Party): Right now, I'm spending a lot of my time on the stump. In a week's time, we'll know the results of this year's local elections; a good time to reflect, then, on the prospects for local government in Britain.

Rupert Read (Norwich, The Green Party): Local election campaigning kicked off this week - what will it mean for the UK's fourth party?

A lot of focus will inevitably be on the situation in London. The London Mayoral race is hotting up. At the top, it is closely-contested by Ken Livingstone of Labour and Boris Johnson of the Conservatives. But the election system used for Mayor of London means that voters can pick as their first preference whoever they want, and transfer their vote tactically using their second preference vote. The Lib Dems are polling poorly, and are likely to drop below their score in '04 - the Green Party candidate (Sian Berry), on the other hand, is charismatic and dynamic, and it may well be that it is the Green Party that profits from the AV system. Sian Berry will quite probably get the highest-votes ever received by Mayoral candidates for the Green Party in a mayoral race.

Rupert Read (Norwich, The Green Party): My first prediction is that a news event that is already today ongoing will be big, and will run and run. New Labour are determined to push nuclear power through, this year. This will arouse huge opposition. It is a litmus-test issue for any politician wishing to don green clothing. Because it is a lie that nuclear is a low carbon source of energy: if, as one must, one factors in the energy needed for mining, transporting and processing uranium, and if (as one must, and this is crucial) one includes the vast amount of energy needed to decommission monitor and protect nuclear waste for hundreds of thousands of years, then nuclear ends up with a stupendously huge carbon footprint.

Rupert Read (Norwich, The Green Party): I knew and worked with Chris Huhne long ago, back as a student in Oxford in the 1980s, when we were both in the SDP. He always impressed me, and he would have been a serious Leader for the Lib Dems. But not for me: I left the Lib Dems eight years ago, terminally dismayed at their (lack of) direction. The critically important thing, from my perspective as a Green, was that the Lib Dems, like New Labour and Cameron's ‘New Tories', had become thoroughly committed to neoliberalism and to globalisation. That is why it didn't really matter to us whether Clegg or Huhne triumphed today. The differences between them in terms of underlying political economy are negligible: Clegg is marginally more right-wing, marginally less green, and marginally more vacuous - but the key word here is "marginally".

Rupert Read (Norwich, The Green Party): I wrote previously in Our Kingdom of the need for the Green Party to embrace Leadership, under the pressure of the climate emergency. Last week, the Party did indeed come out overwhelmingly in favour of adopting a formal leadership model, for the first time ever. By 73% to 27%, the Green Party members instituted a new system, whereby we will elect next Autumn a Leader and Deputy (or Co-Leaders). This means, thank goodness, that when it comes to the next General Election and the '09 European Elections, we will be able to compete on an equal footing with the other Parties. Our Leader will be able to take on the LibDem Leader or the UKIP Leader in debate. When the media cover what the Leaders of the political parties are doing on Polling Day, it won't only be Nick Griffin, Gordon Brown and David Cameron who get a look-in: our Green Party Leader will be up there on the airwaves and in the headlines too.

Rupert Read (Norwich, The Green Party): A crisis can provoke the best in political leadership. Immediacy and clarity, brought on by the realisation of danger, can make middle-of-the-road administrators step out of their everyday roles, and do great things.But global over-heat is a different sort of crisis. Decisions now may create a better future, but the effects, good or bad, won't be known for a long time. If we're successful, then we'll never know how terrifying it might have got.

Jean Lambert (London, MEP): The Green Party is about to ballot its members on whether we should change one of the most unique aspects of our organisation - the absence of an official leader. At the moment we are represented by two 'principle speakers', elected on a yearly basis (see this Guardian debate). Should we now be moving towards a single identifiable leader, elected for a longer term? I am supporting change.