There has been an ongoing “re-evaluation” of Green Party policy around scientific evidence recently. This came about mainly due to a few journalists helpfully letting us know that there was some deeply dodgy stuff in policy.

It certainly came as a shock to many of us who had not thoroughly read our voluminous policy documents.

This conference saw the first swath of re-orientating our policy on a more science friendly footing. We passed the motion on abolition of the science pledge – a policy so offensive to scientists and ‘technologists’ that it makes me wince just to think of it. Anyway, it’s gone. Hurray.

This was quickly followed by the passing of the science chapter enabling motion which means that the party has officially endorsed a review and rewrite of our entire science and technology section of the PSS, our core policy document.

That’s going to take some hard work and we’ll be looking for people both inside and outside of the party to help us with that process.
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[image by Gary Barker]

A General Election which always is a watershed moment in any countries political history.

This one will see a resurgent Conservative Party face an increasingly tired looking Labour Party and a Liberal Democrat Party that has aspirations to greatness.

Meanwhile, the Green Party could well be on the cusp of a breakthrough moment in Brighton Pavilion.

It is my sincere belief that David Cameron is wrong when he says that people throughout politics share a commitment to progress and that all the signs indicate the election of a Conservative government (with or without assistance from AN Other in the form of a coalition) will damage the cause of progress dramatically in this country.

Given that the question becomes for progressives; how do we stop this occurring? Do we look to Labour, the Lib Dems or the Greens?
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Guest post by Matt Sellwood

“The very least you can do in this life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance, but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyed nor the destroyers.” – Barbara Kingsolver

British politics is in a mess. That much is obvious to anyone who has spent any time speaking to people about politics over the last year. The issue of expenses was simply an explosive symptom of a much deeper-rooted cause, rather than the cause itself.

The cause, simply, is that very few people are inspired by politics any longer – and even fewer believe that electoral politics has any transformatory potential to offer. This is not limited to the left or the right – politics as a whole is being damned by millions of people. The most common reaction that canvassers of all parties in my constituency receive is “not interested, mate”, followed closely by “what’s the point?”.

And who can blame them? British politics has, it seems entirely lost the understanding that politics is about vision. Its about improving people’s everyday lives, yes – but its also about being able to look to the horizon, and beyond, for a promise of something better. It’s about being able to identify with a party because that party embodies what you believe in – your ideals. continue reading… »

At the Compass rally last week at the Labour party conference, a bust-up between Caroline Lucas (leader of the Greens) and government minister John Denham threatened to overshadow the heavily-over subscribed event.

Neal Lawson, chair of Compass, invited Caroline Lucas to speak at the Compass rally. This was seen as high treason by many die-hard Labourites because she is fighting for a seat in Brighton and Hove against a soft-left Labour candidate.

John Denham was not happy and made a deeply impassioned speech against the move at the event.

But I think he and many others within the Labour Party miss the point.
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As regular readers of Liberal Conspiracy will be aware there has been an ongoing discussion over the Green Party’s attitude to science. While the Greens may have been ahead of the curve on climate change, writers like Martin Robbins have highlighted the fact that “in spite of their sparkling climate and environmental credentials” in many areas “their policies are far out of step with the scientific community”.

He’s right. Whether it’s the pledge, stem cells or alternative therapies there’s plenty of gut churningly embarrassing policy to choose from. What’s been interesting, as a Green Party member, is that the majority of those I’ve spoken to have been equally shocked at these revelations.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find that the key task ahead is not to persuade party members of the need for evidence based policy, most of them are there already, but to actually crack on with the work of a serious review of our science, technology and health policies.
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Cast your mind back a couple of months and you may recall that Martin Robbins raised a number of pertinent questions about the Green Party’s views on science and on evidence-based policy making.

At the time, Martin was pretty forthright in identifying the main problem that the party faces. It’s open and democratic approach to policy-making in which any member can put forward a policy, call for vote and get the policy accepted into the party’s manifesto if it prove popular with members too readily militates against evidence.

A prime example of just this kind of problem is currently to be found in Southampton and South-West Hampshire where members of the local Green party are behind a campaign that is attempting to overturn a recent decision by the local Strategic Health Authority to use legal powers conferred on it by the Water Act 2003 to compel the local water company to fluoridate the local water supply.
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Scratch Jean Lambert, get Lavrentiy Beria; Green politicians are totalitarians in the making, just itching to refound a carbon-neutral Gulag Archipelago.

This, anyway, is the position of Times hack Antonia Senior, who has obviously given the matter a great deal of thought. Her stark warning must be heeded at once by anyone naïve enough to cast the odd tactical vote for the Green Party, in the misguided belief that they are a harmless enough functional equivalent for the old-style moderate social democracy unavailable elsewhere on the ballot paper.
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Reading the vastly entertaining whinge by Rupert Read last week over the European elections reminded me that many people are not aware of Paskini’s laws of elections:

1. If you want to win an election, you have to be prepared to work harder and do more disagreeable things than your opposition. “Disagreeable things” for this purpose includes spending time doing things like delivering leaflets, knocking on people’s doors, phoning them up etc etc, but also includes concentrating on telling people about what they are interested in (even if you find it tedious), not what you personally are interested in. And it means working together with people who are on the same side as you, even if you don’t like them or find them annoying.

Whichever party has more people who follow rule 1 will win an election. If, however, despite your best efforts you do happen to lose, then rule 2 comes into play.

2. If you lose an election, you should not spend your time whinging about the people who beat you, no matter how disgraceful their behaviour or how repulsive they are. Instead, you should figure out what you did wrong and put it right for next time so that you are able to beat them next time.

Last week, Frank Swain and I wrote a piece for The Guardian in which we questioned the various parties on their science policies ahead of the elections. We heavily criticised the Green Party of England an Wales, in spite of their sparkling climate and environmental credentials, and in doing so kicked off a debate that ran for much of the week on blogs and in The Times. On one side, many people thanked us for exposing deeply troubling attitudes.

On the other, Greens angrily claimed we had misrepresented their views. So are the Green Party anti-science; and if so what should they be doing to correct this?
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Nothing is certain until the votes are cast, but the polls over the last fortnight have been very encouraging to the Green Party, putting us on an upward trend. UKIP last week commissioned a ComRes poll that put the Greens across the ‘South East’ (which includes my Region, Eastern) in third position on 16%, and on 11% nationwide. This week, the Green Party commissioned a ComRes poll that had UKIP on 17% – and us on 15%, only just behind UKIP – and ahead of the LibDems! That hasn’t happened since 1989.

In fact polls ahead of European elections usually underestimate the actual Green performance. It’s worth remembering that before their historic 2.2 million-strong vote in 1989 the Greens were polling at about 7-8%, but the actual vote turned out to be 15%.
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by David Birchall

In her Monday Guardian column Madeleine Bunting wrote: “The most useful vote this week would be for the Greens – a protest vote that will help push the environment up the agenda.”

Her mention of a protest vote for the Greens was merely an aside in another aside about the probability of a Labour wipeout, but it represents a common subliminal attack on the small parties for whom a vote is an attack on the larger parties, rather than a true belief.

This is a demonstrably fallacious idea.
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Is the Green Party bandwagon gathering pace? After polls that consistently show the highest supporter numbers for a generation, the campaigner and actress Joanna Lumley has today come out in support of the party.
She tells the Evening Standard:

Caroline Lucas is a tireless campaigner in the European Parliament, staunchly defending human rights and strongly promoting greater protection for animals.

I urge you to cast a positive vote for a better future by voting Green in the European elections.

It is widely held that Euro-elections are little more than an expensive white elephant, a charade conducted in order to put various failed and eccentric politicians on the gravy train to the continent. This year, however, they have taken on a new importance as there is a very real possibility that the fascist British National Party could gain representation for the first time at a European level. Voters are turning away from the established parties in droves, and I believe it is likely that the rise in support for the minor parties will prove to be understated on the day.

Tories have an easy if rather peculiar alternative in the UK Independence Party (UKIP), and that group’s support is rocketing predictably. For disaffected Labour voters however, the choice is not so easy. Those on the left who half-heartedly call upon people to vote for “the political expression of the working class” are wasting their time, and in any case are selling people a turkey. The idea of asking the working people of the UK to vote for a party that has overseen their houses being reposessed, their jobs being lost, their children being sent to war and their public services being privatised, has me reaching for the sick bucket. I cannot conceive of the thought process that allows people to continue reciting the same tired old doctrines about “historic ties to the labour movement” which lead them to call for a Labour vote. In any case, the electorate are not going to listen on June 4.
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Recent polling since the expenses scandal broke shows the Greens have been reaping the rewards of public anger at the main Parliamentary parties. Some indicate we may even receive a result rivaling the 15% highpoint of the ’89 election.

A ComRes poll this weekend put the Tories at 28%, Labour at 20%, the Lib Dems on 14%, below UKIP’s 15%, with the Greens on 11% and the BNP on just 4%. A YouGov poll out yesterday showed that could be the tip of a more radical, positive mood: 34% said they may vote Green at this election.

But here’s the funny thing: the primary focus of the media, and the BBC in particular, has been on the BNP. It remains a party that appears to be falling short of expectations for them.
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Yes, it will be a chore. But whatever you do on June 4th, make sure you vote in the European elections. If nothing else, the higher the turnout, the lower the chances of the British National Party securing a clutch of seats in Strasbourg.

Sadly, the momentum behind the British far right now looks unstoppable, and that tragedy is compounded by the reality that many of its supporters are working class people that would formerly have numbered among the Labour heartland vote.
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Unless Brown calls a snap election in the next month or so, we’ll have a General Election by June of next year whether we like it or not.

Personally, I couldn’t care less. Like the famous South Park episode, this election will offer the tempting choice between a giant douche and a turd sandwich.

Now I know the usual Labour commenters will hurl a volley of abuse at me. About how the Tories are so much evil’r – and of course, they are. But seriously, having been a Labour-leaning voter and blogger for many years, I have become to view this relationship as an abusive one. Labour kicked the stuffing out of me, and I just put up with it.

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Last week Sian Berry, the Green candidate for London Mayor, picked a fight with some of the Grand Old Men of the green movement over their ambivalence about nuclear power.

On her blog, she referred to the Grand Old Men as: “…chaps [who] have a few physical and biographical characteristics in common, largely a tendency to be over 45 with the haircut of a WW2 fighter pilot and the experience to know better than play so crudely into the hands of an industry on the make.”

This drew a spectacularly bitter response from George Monbiot, who announced that he was so cross at this “stupidity” that he’d have to think very carefully about whether he could bring himself to vote Green in the future.
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The next big electoral test in this country is the Euro-elections, next June. I’m the lead Green Party candidate for Eastern Region, one of our two top target Regions (the other being NorthWest) for the Euro-elections.

So what?, some of you may ask. “What has all this got to do with me? What do I, as a Socialist / Labour supporter / LibDem / independent care about the Green Party’s performance next June?”

The answer lies bang in the centre of the ‘remit’ of Liberal Conspiracy: because of the electoral system that the Euro-elections are fought under, and because of the arithmetic.
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The abortion law in England, Scotland and Wales is far from perfect. The unnecessary two-rule, the restrictions that prevent women who choose to do so completing medical abortions at home, the prevention of nurses and midwives providing the service. But those problems are slight compared to the situation for women in Northern Ireland, where women have almost no access to abortion at all.

As a result of past and present cowardice, grubby dealmaking and other political skulduggery, the 1967 Abortion Act that applies in England, Scotland and Wales does not apply in Northern Ireland. The basic rules date back to 1927 – but there are no clear guidelines. So only 70 to 80 abortions are carried out each year in Northern Ireland, under extremely restrictive conditions.

Otherwise, by the official count, more than 1,300 women last year, and 50,000 women over the past 40 years, have had to travel to England, Wales or Scotland, or even further afield, and to pay for their abortion, since if they give a Northern Ireland address they cannot have an NHS abortion.
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Caroline Lucas, who is standing to be the Green Party’s first leader in September, today issued a stark warning that only the Green Party has the answers to combat the BNP. continue reading… »