When you’re a member of a small party to the left of Labour, elections rarely give you much to cheer. Thankfully, the Greens (in England at least) have provided a somewhat more positive narrative for those of us who believe the Labour party’s dominance over the progressive vote is a dangerous thing.

Reading some of the party material before the election, it sounded as though the Greens were bracing for a setback in Brighton & Hove after Caroline Lucas’s breakthrough result, and losing council seats to a resurgent Labour party would have been very uncomfortable. Thankfully, they held all their seats and won ten more to become the largest party on the council.

Over at Socialist Unity, Andy Player has some good analysis of the challenges the party will now face, and the hope that those to the left of Labour might see in a rising Green Party.

After defending 13 seats and winning 10 new ones, the Green party now has the largest group on Brighton & Hove city council. The Tories dropped from 26 to 18, Labour remained on 13 and the Lib Dems were wiped off the map.

Following on from the remarkable General Election victory a year ago to the day, the Greens have made astonishing progress at a time when votes for smaller parties seems to be diminishing.

In many central Brighton seats the Greens had already replaced Labour as the progressive choice. The results in these wards were cemented by campaigning last year and large majorities increased on Thursday.

The push continued into the Labour suburbs with one seat being turned into three in Preston Park and two seats out of three taken in Hollingdean and Stanmer – with Labour deputy leader Pat Hawkes ousted.

Seats were taken from the Tories in previous Tory / Labour marginals like Goldsmid, but the shock results were in two ‘safe’ Tory wards – Central Hove and Withdean – where a Green candidate came from nowhere to top the poll.

The Greens’ relentless progress in Brighton & Hove should be of enormous interest to those on the left who believe that electoral politics play a part in the fight for a better world.

The Green party won their first council seat in 1996, adding two, then another three, and then another six at subsequent elections, plus a first Hove councillor in a by-election the year before Caroline Lucas won in Brighton Pavilion.

One lesson for the left is that the Greens in Brighton & Hove have achieved electoral success through consistent hard work. They have also built a significant layer of support amongst trade unionists and campaigners with their swift and unambiguous backing of the right causes.

The Greens in Brighton & Hove have a reputation for being honest, active and progressive. That is a breath of fresh air for many voters in this city.

Hard work and the right principles are one thing, but the crucial factor in surviving the current electoral squeeze of smaller parties is that voters believe the Greens can win. After last year’s result, that belief has mushroomed.

The Green party have now replaced Labour in most of their traditional areas and have become the opposition party in most Tory wards. Are we seeing the crumbling of Labourism – the Holy Grail for left-of-Labour electoral parties?

Some big challenges face the Brighton & Hove Green party councillors and the local party membership. The Green platform in these elections was to oppose cuts to services and to protect jobs. Taking over the council purse-strings in a time of savage cuts is not good timing for a progressive party, yet it is what the electorate demanded.

Tories, Labour and many on the left will be rubbing their hands and waiting for the new Green administration to ‘sell out’. To deliver on the local party’s manifesto is not going to be easy. But our local party has not got to where it is by being strategically naïve, vain or politically cowardly. We may have been handed the poisoned chalice, but no-one is forcing us to drink it.

“Vade retro Satana! Nunquam suade mihi vana! Sunt mala quae libas. Ipse venena bibas!” as Saint Benedict of Nursia once said.

On the same day that David Cameron and arch-Blairite former Home Secretary, John Reid, shared a platform to denounce AV, the Evening Standard came out against voting reform, patronising the electorate by basing its flimsy argument on the crazy notion that AV is so much harder to understand. I wonder what’s so hard to understand about ranking candidates in order of preference. Most semi-intelligent people have learnt how to count to five by the time they reach 18. Then again, perhaps the Tories implicitly accept that right wing voters are inherently stupid and that’s why they’re so scared of electoral reform. It might also explain why the BNP are equally opposed to AV.

Meanwhile, with a few honourable exceptions, the Greens are out in force campaigning for AV. As Waveney Councillor Graham Elliott reports:

In Waveney I know several people who voted for their THIRD choice candidate in the 2010 general election in an attempt to keep the Conservatives out. They knew their first choice (Green) would not win and they also knew that the Lib Dems (their second choice) were weak in Waveney and the contest was really a two-horse race between Labour and the Conservatives. They therefore voted Labour which was their third choice. Under AV they would have been able to vote 1 for Green, 2 for Lib Dem and 3 for Labour with no increased risk of letting the Tories in. This is just one specific example to illustrate why the current system doesn’t work. Far too many people vote to keep a party out rather than vote for they believe in. AV will allow a more honest expression of voters values.

From my time campaigning with Elliott, back when I used to live in Suffolk, I’ve come to realise that he’s one of those people whom if they’re on your side, you’re probably on the right one. And if it’s a choice between the Greens, Ed Miliband and the Lib Dems vs. The Tories, John Reid, Nick Griffin and the Evening Standard, I think it becomes clear which side has the moral highground.

Of course, as Reid’s appearance with Cameron shows, the debate does cross party lines. But, increasingly it seems, it is running along ideological ones. With a few obvious exceptions, the left are falling behind AV and the right are coming out against it. No one wants to have Nick Clegg on their team, I admit, he’s the spotty fat geek with asthma we got lumbered with because nobody picked him. But set him aside for now. The referendum isn’t about kicking Clegg – we can wedgie him in the changing rooms come the next election – this is about setting the direction of our democracy.

We can go forward or we can stand still forever. It’s time for those on the left who, for whatever genuine and principled reasons they have, have come out against AV, to look around them and see who’s playing for their team and what their agenda is. It’s time for them to ask themselves, whose side are they on?

We all know that the Alternative Vote isn’t the panacea. It’s not going to cure all the ills of our democracy. Only true proportional representation can do that. But since it’s the best we have on offer, it deserves fair consideration on its own merits.

I support AV because I believe that in a democracy, I have the right and the responsibility to vote for who I want to run the country, not who I think would be least bad out of the devil and the deep blue Tories. Under AV there is no wasted vote, no ridiculous need to squander my democratic right on tactics, no dyed pink in the wool New Labourites telling me that if I vote Green or Respect or whatever I believe is best for this country and the world, I’m letting the Tories in through the back door.

The last eleven months of Tory-Lib Dem cuts and fees have already left an unpleasant taste at the back of my mouth. But a decade of Blair’s neoconservative wars hardly made me feel much better. Like so many people I know, I marched against the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. We’d campaign against Blair for five years, shouting from the streets and rooftops, across blogs and broadsheets, but come polling day, so many of them would swallow that sick and stick their cross next to New Labour for fear of the Tories getting in. As George Monbiot told me before the last election, “As much as I dislike and am disgusted with the Tories, I think you have to vote for what you think is right. And if you cling onto something bad for fear of something worse, no one will end up with the government they want.” I will always vote for what I think is right. Under AV, I can do that safe from the fear of something worse. A two party state, after all, is only twice as good as a dictatorship, and I refuse to accept a system that allows me the choice between one of two evils.

This is exactly why Reuben was wrong to argue that AV should be voted down as the most extremist-proof electoral system. True, the BNP are voting against it, which in itself might be enough to make any sensible progressive support it, but there are more compelling reasons. What Reuben has done is mistake radical parties for parties that are unpalatable to the majority, fascists for example, who may well lose out under AV because they are less likely to be able to attract second preference votes from the mainstream, as Rupert Read argues. As Martin Kettle writes, however, the German experience suggests parties like the Greens could do very well out of AV. This is precisely because the progressive majority we hear so much about in this country will no longer feel that a vote for their conscience is a wasted one.

Some radical have argued that AV will constrain extremist viewpoints because it will encourage parties to attract the widest possible range of voters to scoop up their second and third preferences. They’re right to argue that AV is about coalition building, but I see it not as a constraining force, but an enabling one. As Labour MP Alison McGovern explained to me, this process of pre-election coalition building will naturally benefit the UK’s progressive majority. After all, Labour can look to pick up support from the Greens, the Lib Dems and other left of centre parties. In doing so, it will mean the party, already on a leftwards tilt, will be forced to abandon the banal middle ground, get off the fence and start reaching out to progressives with policies that will appeal to them. Who will the Tories reach out to? UKIP? Perhaps, but go too far down the Europhobic line and they risk falling back into their familiar patterns of disastrous infighting. The BNP? I don’t think so.

Some on the left have argued that the best reason to vote against AV is to deal a blow to the Lib Dems and cripple the coalition’s weak link. Hate Nick Clegg, vote against AV. Hang on, isn’t David Cameron doing the same thing? Don’t we hate him even more? I think we need to be more sensible in picking both our enemies and our battles. The Lib Dems may be the weaker part of the coalition, but it won’t come apart if AV fails, the Tories have thrown them enough bones and there’s no where else for them to go. It might ruffle a few backbench feathers, it might irk the rank and file, but the Parliamentary Lib Dems will stay behind the coalition because they’ve lost their clothes and the wilderness is too cold without them. AV, on the other hand, will benefit genuine progressive reformers. It is childish to put short term political gripes that we all share ahead of long-term democratic reform. Nick Clegg deserves to be the punchbag he wishes he weren’t. He deserves every expletive, every hate-filled column inch, every ounce of fight we can possibly bring to him, but the future of our democratic system is not the right battle.

And let’s not forget, this really is about the future of our democratic system. AV is far from perfect. It’s a sop, another Tory bone, a limp excuse for listening to the people and above all, it’s not proportional representation. But it’s all we’ve got for the moment. We can either say yes to meagre change, or stick with what we’ve got. If we vote down this reform, we will derail all attempts for genuine democratic reform for decades to come. Our opponents will say ‘look, no one wanted AV, there’s no demand for PR’. And the debate will die there for another generation. If we vote to pass AV, we have a platform. We have an argument to say this is just the beginning, we want more and we’ll have the power of a referendum behind us.

Rome wasn’t built in a day. But when Honorious saw the Visigoths coming over the hill and decided to do nothing, it was sacked much more quickly.

That is why I’m voting for AV on May 5.

There’ve been some interesting posts around about the launch of the Big Society, from Harpy Marx and Anna Raccoon’s pieces on how it’s all to be funded, to the typically naive optimism of Left Foot Forward. Ed West at the Telegraph has an interesting spate of religion-bashing, though not half so daft as the knee-jerk ‘the muslims are everywhere’ approach of Harry’s Place. And as Reuben pointed out yesterday, A Very Public Sociologist does a good job of defending the idea of an actual big society.

However, what’s slightly gone under the radar is how we’ve been preparing for all of this for a while. What’s genuinely interesting is that no matter how see-through the Coalition’s vile politics are, the rise to counter-power seems stagnant and silent. Let’s re-cap on what the Big Society means, which I think I can do it in 2 points:

1) Stop Paying People for Doing Useful Jobs
The idea of pushing volunteering isn’t to instigate a tradition of community support, but is a way of stopping paying people for public services. Out with the librarians, in with the volunteering middle classes.

2) Give People with Useless Jobs More Control
The whole push on community control over all aspects of life is to make sure that private business can get a say in any of it. This way we can not only sell off parts of the state that would otherwise be really difficult (hospitals, the post office, schools, the remaining housing), but it also means that we can set up community trusts and boards which business execs can sit on, and control ‘local’ ammenities like pubs and newsagents.

However, the underlying ideology of all this is a bit more complicated and pernicious. It’s not just a recycling of One Nation Toryism, or anything entirely new either. Rather, I think the idea can be seen in a lot of green-austerity gumph quite clearly. As a good material example, here’s Tesco, the ruler of our stomachs:

militaristic jingoism

I saw this advert next to the 303 in Camberwell, a great arts space. We’d just been preparing various things for this year’s climate camp. What struck me was the pared down, austere feel of that little egg-box-punnet, the grey typeface used for even the usually brightly-coloured Tesco logo in the bottom right hand corner. Along with this, the clear One Nation circular sticker, with its slightly cuddly Union Flag, and the bold, imperative EVERY LITTLE HELPS motto. And of course the prominence of the word ‘British’ in the top left.

The whole advert is an appeal to WW2 British romantic sentimentalism, a vision of those glorious 1940s were ‘we’ all pulled our socks up and did what was best. There’s a real pride in doing with a bit less, but for a greater good. And it’s this same raw nationalism which engenders any sympathy for the big society of volunteering, all pitching in, no matter how crap the situation or out come.

I’ve seen this a lot in elements of the green movement, especially with Green Party members and think tanks, which push the idea of a big society based on ‘us all pitching in’, support the idea of the necessity of business in the face of climate change; the idea that we need capitalism on our side in this fight. So it’s typical that here we have Tesco’s natural image of native British strawberries jostling with militaristic austerity jingoism.

I’m not claiming that the suited-up members of the green movement got us into this ideological mess, but we need to look hard at how it is that, faced with the total decimation of a welfare state it took the best part of a century to win, the vast majority of people who have so much to lose (including the professional middle classes, e.g. journalists and civil society moguls) seem ready to tighten their buckles and buy their strawberries rather than make a red strawberry flavoured mess all over McKinsey‘s latest scheme. (Oh, sorry, I mean the Tory Party’s).

Well the election is over, the dust is settling, back-room deals are being made to find new ways to screw the country over, you’ve forgotten your towel and things are looking grim. DON’T PANIC!

It’s not as bad as it seems.

Across the lefty web, journalists and bloggers are taking stock of their situation, looking for explanations as to why things seem so bad and desperately trying to work out where to go from here. Some want to retreat into localism, some are still clinging to the hope that constitutional convention will override democracy and save us from a Tory government, most are swearing at the Lib Dem lie and the state of the socialist left and almost all are hanging their heads. But I’m an optimist. And here on The Third Estate, I’m going to give you a little glass half-full election analysis. Don’t worry, be happy; always look on the bright side of life; and most of all, DON’T PANIC!

The Cloud

First of all, we have to recognise the realities. There’s no point running away from them. The Conservatives have won. I’ve seen a number of left-wing commentators clinging to outdated conventions which give the incumbent Prime Minister the first right to form a government, even if he or she were clearly defeated and the party they want to help prop them up against the wishes of the electorate was even more resoundingly trounced. But as socialists, as republicans, as democratic reformists, we should not be relying on Queen and convention to save us. Moral rights have always been more important to us than constitutional ones. That’s why we boycotted South Africa. We have to accept that the Tories gained the most votes and the most seats. A coalition of losers is not an anti-Tory majority anymore than one could argue that Labour should not have been allowed to form a government in 2005 because the vast majority of the electorate didn’t vote for them. The Tories may well fail to reach a deal with the Lib Dems, but they have the strongest mandate of all the parties to govern alone.

The Silver Lining

Firstly, and most obviously, the Conservatives didn’t win a majority. After 13 years of New Labour, after two unpopular wars, the worst financial crisis in almost a century, the total ideological abandonment of Labour’s traditional supporters and a raft of scandals, that the Tories didn’t win by a landslide is nothing short of a miracle. In two-party politics, enforced by our archaic and deeply undemocratic electoral system, parties enter parliament on a wave of support, they become increasingly unpopular the longer they’re in power, then the other party gets in and the cycle repeats. That’s how politics works. Not this time. Clearly there is a deep dissatisfaction with the way politics operates and there is a yearning for change. That will have to come, and the case for PR has never been stronger.

Unless the Tories can offer the Lib Dems PR, they are likely going to have to govern alone as a minority. Their priority, as they’ve consistently argued, is to reign in the country’s deficit through severe cuts to public spending. This is going to be a catastrophically unpopular move. Even before the election, Mervyn King was arguing that whoever wins will be out of power for the next 30 years for precisely that reason. This sounds to me somewhat alarmist, but should the Conservatives move immediately down the cuts route, they will find their already limited popularity significantly dented. They have a moral mandate to govern. But unlike Tony Blair in 1997, they don’t have a mandate to do whatever the hell they like and screw whoever the hell they like over in the process. Meanwhile, they will find it increasingly difficult to operate as a minority government, particularly on the most contentious pieces of legislation. If they are unable to compromise, it is a real possibility that they will lose a vote on the Queen’s Speech of the Budget and bam, that’s a vote of no confidence and another election. An election which, if their popularity has already been severely hit by proposed cuts, they may very well lose. Winning the election in this way may very well be the worst thing to happen to the Conservative Party since 1997.

You Could’ve Been a Contender

Of course, no election analysis would be complete without looking at the minor parties. The failure of Respect, since the split, is disappointing, but not all that surprising. They simply don’t have the national structure on the ground to be a serious political force, and local politics, no matter how strong, is not enough. Galloway’s failure to turn up at the count is the clearest sign that the Respect project is dead in the water. The loss of his seat, however, is not the end for Galloway. In fairness, he never really engaged much with parliamentary politics anyway. But like him or loathe him – and I continue to believe that on balance he is a force for good – Galloway is a tireless campaigner and whether he’s sitting in the Commons or standing on a speaker’s podium, the struggle carries on.

Respect, of course, remains the strongest traditional socialist party in the country. The dismal position of the TUSC demonstrates that. But all the minor parties found themselves getting squeezed in this election.

The one exception to this rule, and by far my highlight of the night, was Caroline Lucas’s election in Brighton Pavillion. She deserved to win that seat and win it she did. The country has gained a truely radical MP, a powerful voice for progressive change and a firm kick up the backside. The Greens have a much stronger national operation than Respect ever had, even before the departure of the SWP, and with a little luck and a whole lot of hard work, they can build on this historic win to become a new force in national politics. And for all the lefties who claim they’re still a bunch a middle class liberals with beards, read their manifesto. It’s as socialist as they come.

At First, When I See You Cry, I Go Ahead and Smile

The BNP got pwned! Yes pwned. I can use that word, because nothing else can describe it. This should make any decent human being incredibly happy. I never believed the hype and fear that they would gain their first seat at this election. They didn’t come close. In fact, they lost over half their council seats and were utterly wiped out in Barking and Dagenham. With the amount of money they will have lost in this election and the in-fighting threatening to tear them apart, this may very well be the beginning of the end for the BNP.

So you see, it’s not all doom and gloom. There’s plenty out there to cheer. In the meantime, the struggle carries on. As I write, a rally is just starting in Trafalgar Square for democratic reform. If this election proves anything, it’s that we need it now more than ever.

It’s been a dark, dark night thus far. But the election of Caroline Lucas in Brighton Pavillion as the country’s first ever Green MP is fantastic news. With any luck, this will lead to future successes for the Greens. A true radical and an excellent MP has been returned to Parliament. Congratulations Caroline!

Radio 4 keep blurting out interviews with various smaller party leaders – UKIP, the Greens, the BNP – I think just to keep people’s interest up in what is other wise a surreal but not particularly interesting special edition of Strictly Come Bullshitting.

John Humphrys as God of Liberalism

What struck me was the total difference in the way Caroline Lucas (Green Party leader) and Nick Griffin (BNP) were treated in interview. John Humphrys, the bulldog of broadcasting, completely grilled Caroline Lucas last week. He asked her if she would be a ‘responsible’ leader, and if the Greens were a responsible party. When she said yes, he denied this was the case, asking whether a self-defining anti-capitalist could be trusted in charge of the UK economy. He continually brought up this point: you’re an anti-capitalist, aren’t you, aren’t you. Yes, as a leader of a party, she should be able to take the heat. But as someone who’s done a fair bit of media work for anti-capitalist groups, I really sympathised with her position. Humphrys spent the most part of the interview not talking about or attacking her policies, but using anti-capitalist as a curse word against her. He felt this was insult and exposé enough.

Jump forward a week to yesterday’s interview: Nick Griffin. No Mr Humphrys here, and all round a far more peaceful, amenable bit of radio. The interviewer felt that the correct tactic to deal with the BNP leader wasn’t to call him a fascist, a racist, a pseudo-Nazi. No, the correct tactic apparently was to just let him talk through his policies. The closest she got to criticizing him was asking a leading question over the legitimacy of internationally binding treaties.

And here’s why: the BNP are extremists, the Greens are not. The BNP could say what they wanted to about race, immigration and borders because they’re views are an extreme of what we have already. Their fascism is no more than an exaggeration of what Clegg, Cameron and Gordo already say and want.

The Greens however (along with others like TUSC and Animals Count), put forward a genuinely different ideal. Our politics are ridiculous and we’re ridiculed, because Anti-Capitalism is not an extremism, it’s a total non-conformism. It’s not some magnification of what already exists. When push comes to shove it’s not the police that are protecting the fascists: it’s the right-wing appeasement by self agrandizing liberals in the political class and the media.

Hagley Road to Ladywood has an excellent piece by Third Estate hotseat alumnus, Peter Tatchell, on why we should vote Green. Well worth a read.

Labour has lost its heart and soul. It has become the party of war, privatisation and the erosion of hard-won civil liberties. The Lib Dems support free market capitalism, use dirty tricks during election campaigns, and when they get into office they always drift to the right. The Conservatives are split between modernisers and the reactionary old guard. Their green-friendly image is contradicted by their anti-green policies of supporting new motorways, aviation expansion and more nuclear power stations – just like Labour.

As I see it, the Green Party is the most progressive force in British politics, with a visionary agenda for democratic reform, social justice, human rights, global equity, environmental protection, peace and internationalism.

With an empowering new political and economic paradigm, the Greens offer the best hope for radical reform, as set out in our Manifesto for a Sustainable Society.

Unlike the far left, the Greens often win. We’ve got elected representatives in local councils all over Britain, and in the London Assembly and the Scottish and European Parliaments. Opinion polls suggest that the Greens are poised to win their first MPs. Caroline Lucas is leading in Brighton Pavilion and the Greens are also polling well in Norwich South and Lewisham Deptford.

The Greens are not just an environmental party. We are also a social justice party, with commitments to industrial democracy, workers cooperatives and trade union rights. Our aim is a democratic economy, which gives all employees a real say in how their institution is run and which utilises their accumulated skill and experience to improve private enterprises and public services.

We want to make society fairer and more equal, and to redistribute wealth and power. This democratisation and socialisation of the economy is necessary, we argue, to improve productivity, prevent a repeat of the reckless decisions that led to the economic meltdown and to reorient production to meet people’s needs. This includes switching from weapons production to the manufacture of renewable energy and advanced medical technologies, which are socially useful and have huge export potential.

The Greens are not retreads of the old Left. Traditional socialism is flawed. It is based on a left-wing version of big business growth-driven economics, with the goal of producing more and consuming more. This uncritical drive to maximise economic expansion is destroying our planet, causing life-threatening pollution, climate chaos and species extinction. It is also dramatically depleting reserves of natural resources, such as oil, that are vital to the global economy and to the long-term maintenance of a decent standard of living. This old-style growth-fixated economics, which is shared by both the left and the right, is outdated and reactionary. It is time for fresh thinking.

The Greens argue that quality of life and fair shares for all are more important than the left’s simplistic agenda of spending more on public services. Greens would, of course, invest more in health and education. But we also believe that government needs to radically rethink basic premises, like shifting the focus in the NHS from curative to preventative medicine. Our aim is to ensure that many fewer people get sick in the first place, rather than merely throwing more money into treating people once they become ill.

The Greens realise that the whole economic system has to change, in order to meet people’s needs and to ensure the survival of life on this planet. We propose a synthesis of the best bits of red and green, combining social justice with sustainable economics.

A good example of how we would do this is our proposed Roosevelt-style Green New Deal. It would stimulate the economy through large-scale government investment in socially and environmentally valuable energy conservation, renewable energy and cheap, hi-tech public transport. This would slash carbon emissions and tackle climate change, as well as creating hundreds of thousands of green jobs.

We’d fund the Green New Deal by axing Labour and Tory plans to waste £160 billion on Trident nuclear missiles (£76bn), super aircraft carriers (£4bn), Eurofighter aircraft (£20bn), A400 air transporter (£3bn), national identity register (£10bn), the Afghan war (£5bn), motorway building and widening (£30bn) and NHS computerisation (£20bn).

The Green Party rejects the failed neo-liberal economic policies that are backed by the three main parties – policies that recently pushed the world to the brink of a second great depression and which leave billions of people malnourished, illiterate, homeless, diseased and impoverished. But amid the gloom, we say: A different world is possible. The future is bright – bright Green.

“Not all companies get the urgency of climate change yet but their customers have more power than they think. Last week, I left the outer packaging of my shopping on the till at Tesco.” – Tamsin Omond demonstrating her commitment to environmentalism by leaving an underpaid cashier to clear up her mess.

I winced yesterday as I read of Tamsin Omond’s latest stunt. Under the banner of her newly established “Commons Party” she plans to run against the Greens and against left-wing labour MP Glenda Jackson in the newly created Hampstead and Kilburn constituency.

It is hard to get a detailed picture of what exactly this initiative is about. The Commons Party website is extremely light on politics and policy. What instead comes through in this campaign is an emphasis upon what I recently described as the “infantile politics of good behaviour“. Tamsin has proudly told the Evening Standard that she will donate a third of her salary to the local commuity and do one day of community work a week. Indeed theses pledges dominate the Commons Party website along with a challenge to other candidates to “match them”. Please forgive me, but I really couldn’t give a flying fuck. What legislators do with the great levers of state power, and the use they make of their significant public platform, is infinitely more important that demonstrations of personal virtue and self-sacrifice.

This patronising approach to her constituents is reinforced by certain unorthodox campaigning methods. Her canvassers will be “going door-to-door offering to draught-proof houses and sort out insulation.” And there I was, thinking that the “treating” of constituents by candidates went out in the 19th century.

As Random Blow notes Tamsin Omond “has a habit of setting up and leading her own organisations rather than working with others”. I am not implacably against people founding new political parties, but context really is everything. Right now the Green Party – with whom I have no affiliation – really are making tremendous leaps forward in gaining popular support, while simultaneously embracing a genuinely radical agenda. As their membership stats demonstrate, they are drawing thousands of new people into progressive and environmentalist politics. Against this background, Omond’s decision – not merely to do her own thing, but to stand against one of the Green Party’s most prominent candidates – smacks of a narcisstic disinterest in engaging with fellow activists.

Needless to say, Tamsin doesn’t have a hope in hell of  actually getting in. Yet this constituency will almost certainly be finely balanced Labour and the Tories. If this campaign prevents Glenda Jackson from gettng back in, this will not only help Cameron into power. It will also remove a prominent voice on the left of Labour, as the party considers its post-election future. If the Greens also risk splitting the labour vote, they do so for the sake of build large and established and increasingly important progressive movement. The  same cannot be said of Omond’s Commons Party.

Hat tip to Derek Wall for this report from an attendee of the Green Party conference. Encouraging signs for those of us on the left who see the Green Party as the most promising vehicle for progressive change in British politics and for those who see the party as much more than a single-issue environmental pressure group. My one disagreement with the author is that I would actually go so far as to say, from their manifesto, the Greens are quite explicitly socialist.

At its conference in London over the past weekend, the Green Party provided more evidence of its gradual evolution from a narrow environmentalist sect into a left social democratic party with a strong emphasis on ecological issues.

First, the conference passed with large majorities two resolutions drafted by members of Green Left, the Party’s ecosocialist tendency; one pledging support for the National Pensioners’ Convention and its election manifesto, and the other calling for the imposition of a top limit to the pay and bonus differentials in all organisations, so the maximum wage that any organisation could pay would be ten times that of the lowest paid worker.

Second, in its revue of the Party’s health policy, conference removed all the egregious anti- science references in it that had previously been such an embarrassment, and reversed its previous opposition to the use of embryonic stem cells in medical research.

Third, the make-up of the membership is clearly starting to change. Over the past year, party membership has increased by around two and a half thousand and is now hovering close to ten thousand (and rising). The number of young faces at the conference has clearly grown over the last year or so, as has the number of new members coming from the ranks of the ex-Labour diaspora. As one member, attending her first conference, remarked “I used to think of the Greens as single issue obsessives, but now I believe the Party represents the principles I spent thirty years fighting for in the Labour Party, informed by a realisation of the scale and urgency of the environmental crisis we face.”