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We need an alternative to neo-liberalism
With less than six months to go before the most wide-open General Election of our time, a true insurgent party is on the rise, and – despite what the media tell you – it’s not the one you are thinking of. The Green Party’s membership has been skyrocketing (growing proportionately faster in Scotland than has the SNP’s since the referendum), and the Greens have caught up or overtaken the governing Lib Dems in several polls. People are waking up to the reality that the old politics is dead. Ever since Tony Blair repositioned the Labour party towards “Thatcherism with a human face”, they, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, have held…
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Economist-kings?
Spring 2007: the high-water mark of self-confidence for economic neo-liberalism. In March, both Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke publicly stated that they saw no danger of recession, and that the subprime fiasco had been ‘contained’. As late as mid-May, with the sub-prime crisis in full throe, still Bernanke felt able to say this: Importantly, we see no serious broader spillover to banks or thrift institutions from the problems in the subprime market. In July, Paulson claimed: This is far and away the strongest global economy I’ve seen in my business lifetime; and on August 1st, I see the underlying economy as being very healthy. Neo-liberalism remained a movement triumphal around…
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Guardians of Britain's future generations?
Last week in Parliament the new ‘Green House’ thinktank launched with a report I’ve authored on how to restructure our democratic institutions to take account of those who are not here yet: future people. The 30 page report prepared with the assistance of the new ‘Alliance for future generations’ umbrella-group of NGOs is called Guardians of the Future. The starting point of my thinking on all this is this question: ‘Democracy’ means ‘government by the people’, but who are ‘the people’? I insist, following Burke, that society exists over time and decisions taken today can have significant consequences for people yet to be born. My report argues therefore that the…
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The British should heed Free Libya’s call for a no fly zone
Britain’s responsibility to protect the Libyan people from Gaddafi’s crack-down is unavoidable. We must not be so fixated on our past mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan that we fail to help Libya to free itself. Let’s pressure our government now to back a no-fly-zone and break with Britain’s sorry past. The most crucial argument in favour of a no-fly-zone is that it is what the free Libyans, at least as manifested in the Transitional National Council in Benghazi (the fledgling caretaker-government-in-waiting), have themselves called for. Just as we supported sanctions against South Africa because it was what the black South Africans themselves called for, so we should do what the…
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AV means you can stick to First Past the Post if you really want to!
I’ve made the case for AV in detail here and here. I thought I had worked out all the pro-AV arguments. But sometimes a question comes along that makes one realise that there is still more to learn. Example… I was recently asked this question: “Will there be an option, in AV, to just vote for one party when not wanting any of the others in at all?” The answer is YES. Under AV, if you simply place a ‘1’ next to your favoured candidate (rather than a cross), then you are voting as if it is FPTP (the current system), and that is completely allowed. To be clear and…
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Could a Green Norwich change local rule across the UK?
The Green Party in England could be on the verge of another breakthrough, after the election of their first MP to Westminster this May. Already the joint-largest party on Norwich City Council (both Labour and the Greens now have 9 seats each on the Council), the Greens could very well find themselves responsible for running Norwich after the special local elections being held there on September 9th. If the Green Party’s manifesto and record so far is anything to go by, then this could mean change that would resonate well beyond Norfolk, and act as a new vision for how local government can work. A central theme of the Norwich…
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Why Greens should get behind AV
So, it is indeed going to be May 5, as I wrote in breaking the news, last week. The battle-lines are already being drawn – it is clear that there will be big money behind the campaign to stop change, and retain the status quo. Beside the predictable nonsense from these wreckers, some of ‘the forces of conservatism’ are also (rightly) pointing out some problems with the government’s plans – such as the reduction in seat-numbers, which is liable to be anti-democratic, especially in a country whose population is continuing to rise. But it is important to be clear that, when it actually comes to the referendum, those problems will…
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Caroline Lucas does it for the Greens
Now is not the time for soundbites, but I feel the hand of history on my shoulder, so I can’t help it. A century ago, the Labour Party won its first seats in Westminster. Just a generation later, it formed its first government. And another generation later, it formed perhaps the greatest government that this country has ever had, the 1945 Labour government. Now the torch has been passed. The first Green Party MP. Now, we’ll be similarly unstoppable, I believe. (And the time-scale needs to be shorter. The planet can’t wait 50 years.) Here in Norwich South, where I’m writing from, we have achieved a phenomenal result. In 2005,…
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Reflections from outside Parliament: The political class and the crises we face
I spent yesterday ‘on point’ for Green Party Deputy Leader (and my fellow Norwich Councillor) Adrian Ramsay, in a series of interviews on College Green just outside the Houses of Parliament. Adrian spent the afternoon speaking live to Sky and the BBC, and doing pre-records with numerous other media outlets (from across the world), as the great and the good of politics-as-usual came and went, doing much the same: Peter Mandelson, Alan Duncan, Michael Howard, Ming Campbell, Ben Bradshaw, Ed Balls, David Miliband, Frank Dobson, etc etc. We spoke with Peter Kellner about our prospects of victory in Norwich South; we spent some time chewing the fat with Martin Bell…
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The real scandal in the hacked climate change e-mails controversy
It is day six of the ‘scandal’ over the hacked emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia’s School of Environmental Sciences, in which a thousand or so private email messages between climate scientists were hacked into and made public. According to the ostriches hoping that Copenhagen will fail, these emails demonstrate that climate-science is in serious trouble. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you need a full backgrounder on the ‘scandal’, see the University of East Anglia’s statement, which includes a direct rebuttal of the single seemingly most-damaging e-mail, which read: I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps…