Councillor Jonathan Chilvers explains why he wants to be Deputy Leader - arguing the Greens need to reach out to people outside a lefty political bubble.

Why don’t they get it? Why can’t they see when it’s so important? Fighting for social justice can sometimes feel like a dispiriting experience. Not just because people in power laugh or ignore you, bent on protecting their own interests. 

But also because so few people seem to understand your red hot sense of injustice or anger. I’m proud of the commitment and passion I see of so many people in the Green Party and across progressive politics, but sometimes our frustration gets the better of us and we end up erecting a barrier between us and the very people we are trying to convince. We end up doing a disservice to the very causes – climate change, public services, civil liberties – that we care most strongly about.

I’m standing for Deputy Leader of the Green Party because we have to get so much better at reaching out to people who don’t think like us. As a twice elected County Councillor I’ve got the skills and experience to help us do that.

For some on the left Tony Blair has given good communication a bad name. His pallid diet of soundbites and spin combined with fawning of the rich and a Faustian pact with the private sector make any lesson from TB hard to swallow. However, his ability to understand what voters were feeling and speak to them was peerless in his generation.

Tony Blair started where people were at, not where he wanted them to be. The majority of the population don’t know what the left mean by austerity, couldn’t tell you what PR stands for and don’t have a clue about the Paris Climate Accord.

Too often we use our insider leftie political language that sounds like gobbledegook and has no day to day relevance to people’s lives.

We sometimes then try and get our message across through protest marches which if people even notice them is as alien a mode of communication as sending a fax whilst on a moonwalk. We exclude huge chunks of the population. We then wonder why they don’t get what we’re talking about.

But whatever Tony Blair might have thought, communicating well doesn’t mean ditching being radical. The very opposite is true. The bigger the change the better the communication has to be. If we are going to reach people with a message that things can be different, the Green Party must take it’s big green principles and bring them to people’s doorsteps.

We must show our distinctive policies on a Green economy, social justice, genuine grass roots democracy and pursuing peace using words and actions that people understand. The campaign to save 1000s of Sheffield’s urban trees from the chop has grown so fast partly because it brings large scale environmental and democracy issues literally down to street level that residents see every day on their journey to school and work.

We also have to listen, react, get stuck in and compromise. Unless we’re walking alongside our constituents  and those we wish to vote for us, helping to understand and solve daily problems, what right do we have to tell people how the country should be run? Very little. 

Green representatives have to work extremely hard to get elected. There’s no such thing as a safe Green seat.  Some might say that this on-the-ground work takes us away from the urgent work of combatting the Climate Crisis. I say it opens the ears of many who wouldn’t otherwise hear our shouting.

The Green Party has distinctive policies that can make a progressive, positive contribution to our country in very uncertain times. For the sake of the issues that we care about most, like the climate crisis, we can’t afford to only talk to those who think like us.  I’m determined to help build a party that equips its members and supporters to reach out to people outside a lefty political bubble.

Cllr Jonathan Chilvers is standing for Deputy Leader of the Green Party. You can find out more at www.jonathanchilvers.info and follow him on twitter @jonchilvers

This piece is part of a Left Foot Forward series on the Green Party’s current leadership election. Voting opens on the 30th July and closes on the 31st August, with the results announced in September. LFF is taking pieces from all the candidates.

Got a story or take on the leadership election? Contact josiah@leftfootforward.org

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