Love and Liberty

With Mr Cameron’s ambitious attempt to seize the green mantle, a continued firming-up of the small but awkward Green Party vote on May 4th, and now Mr Blair’s macho commitment to nuclear power, environmental issues have rarely been further up the political agenda. For Liberal Democrats who’ve been plugging away on the green agenda for years, it’s ‘Be careful what you wish for’; the only party not being talked about is us. No wonder one of the big debates that the local elections sparked up in the Lib Dem blogosphere is how to tackle (trans: obliterate) the Green Party.

Liberator published an article of mine on what to do about the Greens a couple of years ago – I won’t repeat it all here, but I wrote it after Lib Dems topped the poll in my patch but won only 7 councillors to Labour’s 11. The small, ‘ignorable’ Green vote never had a hope, yet if we’d attracted it instead, we’d have more than doubled our seats to 15. We’ve all spent so long fighting to make the two-party battle a three-party one that it seems unfair to have to watch over our shoulders at fourth, fifth and sixth parties. The truth is, though, that among the smaller parties jostling for position, one is both a problem and an opportunity for us.

We used to attract protest votes on any old thing – now we don’t, probably for two reasons which are both good and bad: we’ve been more successful, so we look more establishment and don’t get so many anti-establishment ‘give them all a kicking’ votes; and we’ve got more of an ideological profile, which is bound to turn some people off. Liberal Democrats can’t in all conscience sound remotely like UKIP or the BNP, and while in many ways Respect is trying to hoover up some of the voters we’re after for their opposition to the Iraq War, we shouldn’t try to ape Mr Galloway’s hysterical demagoguery (let alone their peculiar brand of theocratic Trotskyism). Of all the ex-Labour voters likely to share similar views to ours, we should go after the Greens.

This hasn’t just emerged on May 4th – the example I quoted was from the 2002 London locals, not this year’s. It’s become an uncomfortably reliable pattern: their local results show their effect as spoilers where they manage to try; in every PR election, Greens are polling strongly to the detriment of the Lib Dem share, where it’s difficult to show them as a wasted vote; and a small number are now sticking with them even at a General Election, where they grow even when squeezed. The Green vote seems to be tidal, coming in further under proportional representation and falling back without it, but each time finishing a little further up the beach. It helps that the media give them an easy ride and report uncritically the most misleading Green spin instead of treating their spurious claims with the same cynicism as the rest of us (look at the way Green gains to, oh, still not 100 seats nationwide received better coverage than the Lib Dems holding 4,700). Even they recognise that their main job is to eat into the votes we’d normally expect, if their record of spending more time attacking the Lib Dems than any other national party does is anything to go by.

I’ll return to what to do about the Greens on a national level in a later post, but first I’m breaking my usual habit of making everything up as I go along by presenting a digest of the analysis from fellow Lib Dem bloggers, most of which I agree with and which – if you missed it first time round, as I did until catching up at the weekend – is food for thought (I hope they won’t mind some selective reprinting).

It springs from a discussion kicked off by James Graham in which he notes that “In numerous wards, the Green vote made a difference between who won and who lost”; adding to the results I noted in 2002, Anders Hanson comments on the rise of the Greens costing us seats in Sheffield, and one of the comments to Richard Huzzey from a Lib Dem in Merton volunteers the same effect again. Angus J Huck comments to James: “A fresh menace is the Green Party. A vastly increased Green vote cost us control of Islington, and probably other places, too. We need to know why people vote Green and what we can do to get them to support us instead.”

Former Green Party activist Joe Otten picks up the ball to ask why people vote Green and what we can do to get them to support us instead, offering his analysis of the Green Party rather than just Green support:

“It is essentially socialist, albeit not "central planning" but "local planning". Solutions to almost everything involve more government spending and more regulation… Hostility to trade, and in particular an impractical vision for third world development that would achieve very little. (The desire to support development is genuine.) The evidence is that trade and prosperity go together, and evidence beats dogma in my book. Opposition to medical research on animals. I am clear that benefits to humans, and for that matter to other animals in the long run make this research a morally good thing…

“At the heart of Green thinking there are more problems. Ambition for spending on public goods and redistribution is not reconciled with a shrinking pie as the private sector is squeezed. There is considerable hostility to science, from various philosophical perspectives. Yet it is science that makes environmental problems comprehensible, and scientists who have led the way. "Conventional" progress is rejected, but there is little clarity as to what to replace the idea with - giving a somewhat directionless culture to an appropriately leaderless party.”

His answers to ‘So why do people vote Green?’ include “to send a clear message that the environment should have more priority; if you are a socialist; as a protest vote; in response to good local campaigning; if you actually know and agree with the policies.” He thinks people voting for a socialist alternative should be left to do so, but “As for the rest - we need clarity. Clear and effective green policies, not one snippet per page of the manifesto, but few, simple, substantial commitments. We need to make the case for trade - that millions of lives are at stake worldwide if development is impeded by anti-traders. We need an optimistic vision of the future.” He also says in response to a comment that “All I would expect from us is an honest and principled position, and to point out the moral shortcomings of the Green position.”

Richard Huzzey, who faced the Greens in his central Oxford ward, continues the chain on ‘Beating The Greens’, agreeing with Joe’s piece and applying his own experience of Greens as an established force in Oxford:

“The Green party has a tiny vote from people who actually want to vote for eco-communism. However, for the vast majority of people who vote Green, it seems to me that they think they're ticking a box to say "I care about the environment". It is frustrating for Lib Dems that we talk so much about the environment, but rarely get any media coverage or credit for doing so, simply because the press have historically found it a boring topic. But… an authoritarian, apocalyptic response from the Greens will score very poorly with most voters, compared to Lib Dems' attempts to green modern life through smarter solutions.

“On a second point: those who vote for the Greens to express their passion for environmentalism will often do so because they think a single-issue party is the best way to do that. The irony, as Joe notes, is that the Greens are not a single-issue party. They have a vast hinterland of extreme and unsettling policy, which goes unnoticed, I'm sure by most of their voters.

“There is a danger of sounding overly-partisan and bitchy in attacking the Greens in this way. Indeed, "when people know what they're really for, they won't vote for them" is a taunt often made against Lib Dems. However, I do think the Greens occupy an unusual position, in that people vote for them in the belief they are prioritising a single issue, rather than actually choosing a political party, with its own political economy and policy positions.”

Stay tuned for what I think we should do about all this…