We're the only pro-EU party that offers a transformation of British society - our message will only grow in 2018.
The Green 2018: a certain election, a possible election, an essential referendum. Most crucial: making Britain a democracy
Twelve months ago, I was furiously preparing for an election. It always seemed obvious to me that Theresa May would call one before summer 2017.
This year, however, the crystal ball has been cloudier, and anyone who claims they know what will happen in politics in 2018 really should be devoting that amazing clairvoyance to the racetrack or the lottery.
For the Green Party, 2017 was a difficult year. We went into the election with a clear offer:
- Support for a ratification referendum, the only democratic option available for future Brexit decisionmaking, in which we’d campaign strongly for remaining a member of the EU,
- Oppose benefit cuts that have seen the poor and disadvantaged continue to pay for the greed and fraud of the bankers,
- And an understanding that we have to live within the environmental limits of this one, fragile, struggling planet.
By contrast Labour had a manifesto that claimed, factually incorrectly, that leaving the EU meant ending free movement (a right that the Green Party continues to strongly defend and fight for), which kept more than half of the Tory benefit cuts, and backed HS2, Heathrow expansion and Hinkley C.
That despite the fact that on many issues – tuition fees, rail nationalisation and fracking – Labour had adopted large chunks of the Green Party manifesto of 2015.
It was hard to get the differences across, however, in an election that curiously was not at all about Brexit but about Tory culpability for suffering of individuals and communities under austerity.
But the Green Party still won its second-largest ever vote, stood in a high percentage of seats, and starts 2018 as a part of the political landscape that many people wish to see playing a rightful share in the government.
The elections that we know we will have this year – for local government — are thus shaping up well for us.
The West Midlands continues to go from strength to strength, in London there’s a clear chance to be the effective opposition voice to Labour councils that are hacking down council estates for social cleansing, closing community facilities and failing to tackle the health crisis of air pollution.
In many places – like Sheffield with its privatised tree-felling – the Greens face Labour councils that often look not so much Blairite as further to the right.
But what of the national picture? I don’t know if there’s going to be another general election. I don’t know if there’s going to be a ratification referendum once the terms of the “deal” – well what the EU decides to offer us since our government is clearly incapable of deciding or winning for itself – are clear.
What I do know is that we all have to be ready for another election. Theresa May’s survival as Prime Minister is on a knife-edge. Whether the Tories could swing behind Boris Johnson or Jacob Rees-Mogg or Andrea Leadsom is quite a question.
But in our hopelessly undemocratic system an election won’t solve anything. In 2017 Labour entirely fudged its Brexit position.
Like the government, it still doesn’t have a stance on where it wants the country to be post-transition period. A two-party system in which neither party has a firm position on the key issue of the period is surely a broken system.
A referendum – in which the people could decided whether they were satisfied with the chosen Brexit destination – would be decisive.
But then we’d need a government, and a parliament, to deliver the people’s decision. Which means we need a democracy – people taking back control of Westminster – electoral reform, an elected House of Lords, a complete reshaping of our politics.
An age of acute institutional and ideological crisis is not a comfortable time – but it is a time rich in possibility, for the country, and the Green Party.
Our offer of democracy, of humanity and care, the understanding that we have to stop trashing the planet, is clear and different. The fact that we know what we stand for, with solid principles and values, is going to look increasingly attractive.
The future of politics doesn’t look like the past – and the future could be very Green as voters realise that there’s only one pro-EU party that offers a transformation of British society so that it works for the common good within our environmental limits.
Natalie Bennett is the former leader of the Green Party. She tweets here.
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2 Responses to “It’s been a tough year for the Greens – but our pro-EU and radical principles prevail”
Chester Draws
We need a government to deliver the people’s decisions, do we?
What about when that decision is to leave? Ah, that decision needs to revisited. That was a wrong decision, and they don’t count.
You talk about respecting democracy, but you don’t actually like it very much.
I’d also like to point out that Green parties around the world are failing. Because instead of being about Green issues they have moved to be merely radical. The two are not be necessarily aligned. Currently an environmentally concerned Tory cannot vote UK Green. Worse, having painted the Tories as evil incarnate, the Greens cannot work with them — even to achieve their stated goals.
If the Green party stay radical they cannot expect to pick up more than the 2% of radical votes. It’s a losing strategy.
David Lyons
As millions of people are chorusing, the non binding advisory referendum was not on the likely deal that will be on offer. Why would a Democrat be against a binding referendum on the deal…what makes such a notion radical?