Robert Hutton has an entertaining and interesting Critic piece on the launch of the Green Party election campaign in Bristol.
Organic snake oil salesmen
The Greens have an easy answer for any question (well, almost any question)
“Woooooaaaaah!” In Bristol, the Green Party were launching their election campaign. This involved a lot of whooping and cheering. The four candidates reckoned to be in with a shout of actually winning seats were brought on stage like contestants in a game show. Carla Denyer, Bristol Central, COME ON DOWN!
Queueing up outside, the audience had seemed a pleasant crowd of retired Bristolians, taking a morning off from looking after the grandchildren or their Senior Zumba class. As the launch began, we realised they were the other kind of pensioner, who would, had they not been yelling their hearts out at this event, have been gluing themselves to the Severn Bridge in the name of Just Stop Oil.
The whole piece is well worth reading, both for Hutton's amusing take on Green pretensions, but more seriously on their addiction to easy answers for complex problems. All political parties have that addiction, but the Greens do it in an entertainingly silly way.
They do it in a somewhat sinister way too. People can be duped in large numbers by simple answers to complex problems. Doing it deliberately as a route to power has a sinister aspect which isn't trivial at all.
Outside the event, there were boxes and boxes of leaflets for activists to deliver around the constituency, bundled up by street. Oddly, these were rather lighter on the hopey-changey message. Indeed there was nothing at all about carbon reduction, cycle lanes, or even the NHS. “An Important Letter To Bristol On Gaza”, it was headlined, in the colours of the Palestinian flag. “It has been just six months since Keir Starmer ordered his MPs not to vote for a ceasefire,” it began. It was probably an oversight that this subject, on which the party is campaigning so hard locally, didn’t feature in the speeches for the TV cameras.
But there was no opportunity to interrogate any of this, because it turned out the Green Party wasn’t taking questions. This is always the best way to make sure the answers are easy.
Outside the event, there were boxes and boxes of leaflets for activists to deliver around the constituency, bundled up by street. Oddly, these were rather lighter on the hopey-changey message. Indeed there was nothing at all about carbon reduction, cycle lanes, or even the NHS. “An Important Letter To Bristol On Gaza”, it was headlined, in the colours of the Palestinian flag. “It has been just six months since Keir Starmer ordered his MPs not to vote for a ceasefire,” it began. It was probably an oversight that this subject, on which the party is campaigning so hard locally, didn’t feature in the speeches for the TV cameras.
But there was no opportunity to interrogate any of this, because it turned out the Green Party wasn’t taking questions. This is always the best way to make sure the answers are easy.
2 comments:
The movement of the Greens away from sustainability and towards Gaza-ism is both interesting and malign. They might just be looking for a new focus of attention as people catch on about net zero. Or perhaps they have consciously adopted an "anti-colonial" stance to avoid being seen as single-issue simpletons. Or maybe there has been something of a takeover by the anti-Semitic hard left, as a way of getting at Starmer.
But overall, having an overcrowded slummy settlement with intermittent power supplies and kids being told lies and everyone threatened by a foreign power is what the Greens object to in Gaza, but what they would impose on us here in the UK.
Sam - the move away from sustainability does come across as an opportunist widening of the narrative, as if the Greens realise they have to become more like shouty Lib Dems. Infiltration by the hard left seems likely too, because the Greens are hard left with a green tinge.
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