Green Leaders
Article posted by Simon Maine
DISCLAIMER: This article contains the personal views of the author and should not be inferred to be the views of Unlock Democracy.
Politics without leaders? This has been the philosophical mantra behind the Green Party ever since its inception in 1973. The party is unique in British politics by adopting a policy of collective leadership with two principal speakers. But this may be set to change as Britain’s persistent niche party debates the possibility of joining the mainstream by adopting a single leader.
The issue is set to dominate the party’s conference in Liverpool next week and a binding poll amongst members in November offers the opportunity to elect someone to lead the call for a more environmentally sustainable way of life. The ‘Yes’ campaign has already begun; Caroline Lucas MEP explains in a press release:
“Other Parties are incapable of leading on critical issues, such as dangerous climate change: their commitment to the chimera of endless economic growth – and their having been captured by corporate interests – make it impossible for them to do so. The Green Party needs to be visibly seen and shown to be leading on this, the central issue of our time: but how can we do so, if we don’t even trust ourselves enough to have a Leader?â€
She makes a good point. It’s admirable that the party doesn’t want to rush headlong into copying the centralized models of other parties but maybe it’s time that some real leadership was exercised on the ‘green issue’. The Green Party knows it can never become a party of government. Under the current electoral system they would be lucky to get even one MP. Its real raison d’être is as a pressure group and in the coming years it will become less likely that the political mainstream can ignore the calls from the Greens. No doubt there will be much philosophical hand wringing at the party conference but it would be best if the Greens wised up to face the world as it stands and not the world they would like to live in. Collective leadership is admirable but ineffective.
September 10th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
The Green Party will become a party of Government, and can be seen as the only viable future party of government – but to get there it does need to unlock the current log-jam which makes it incapable of answering the simple question “Who would be your Prime Minister then?”
At last it seems the party is starting to confront this dilemma and looks set to become the real credible alternative to the grey parties that we so desperately need.
They already have the policies and ideas to run this country on a sustainable basis, now they need to step up to the mark and attract a credible team to do it.
September 10th, 2007 at 7:27 pm
Our country, and our generation, is crying out for leadership. Britain is almost unique in western Europe in playing out its political decision making through the prism of the Labour and Conservative parties. Both are in hock to vested interests: the greed of the few at the expense of the many. Only our electoral system, and the inability of a small radical party to make a parliamentary breakthrough, stand in the way of a once-in-a-generation re-alignment of the political system.
The Labour party took approximately 30 years from its inception to form a government. The Green Party has been in business for longer than that but has spectacularly failed to gain a single MP. Arguably the reason d’etre of the Greens is of far greater moral and scientific significance than the Labour movement represented in the 1900s.
It is time the Green Party got real, got serious, and got into Parliament. Only a professionally organised and led political party can succeed in our age of media spin. Millions of people are counting on the Greens to get their act together.
November 11th, 2007 at 8:56 pm
As a Green Party activist for almost 20 years I will certainly be voting against this proposal.
It is overly simplistic to think that having a single Leader will propel us into the political ‘big league’. There are over 300 political parties in the UK. Yes, the 3 parties who are more succesful than the Greens have a single Leader, but so do hundreds of parties who are less succesful than we are. Perhaps they’re frequently going through a similar but opposite debate – “If we didn’t have a Leader, we could be as succesful as the Greens.”
The Green Party relies on the hard work and commitment of its activists across the country to win Council seats and move us forward. We need more and more people to take the initiative and show leadership and inspiration in their own communities. This is the antithesis of having a single Party Leader – a proposal which has consistently been defeated by the Party activists who attend Party Conferences.
Roger CO’s claim that this would allow us to answer the question “Who would be your Prime Minister then?” is disappointing. Answering a naive question with an even more naive response has little to commend it. Under our First Past The Post electoral system we have a two party dictatorship – in which only a member of the Labour Party or the Conservative Party has any realistic chance of being the Prime Minister. Even the idea of a Lib Dem PM is a joke. But to suggest that the Green’s have a realistic candidate in waiting, when we don’t have a single MP and have never stood enough candidates to even have a mathematical chance of winning a Parliamentary majority, is not a credible position to take.
The Greens need to be challenging the political as well as the economic culture of the society we live in. That must go further than simply electoral reform to bring about Proportional Representation. It’s about advancing the ideas of bottom-up democracy, and putting them right at the heart of Central Government. It’s about getting rid of many of the present powers wielded by an individual Prime Minister and placing them with the Parliament itself. Green policies on central government challenge the very nature of power as it currently administered.
“Who would be your Prime Minister then?” What makes you imagine that we think there should be one?