The Obama administration will be breathing a sigh of relied today as the House of Representatives narrowly approved the President’s flagship health reforms. A battle still remains in the Senate, of course, and amongst the crazed zealots in the country crying ‘freedom’ whilst attempting to deny millions of the poorest Americans the right to basic health care. But this is the first victory for progressives in what, for anyone on this side of the Atlantic who isn’t a slapheaded idiot like Daniel Hannan, is one of the most bafflingly incomprehensible arguments in history.

It was Sun Tzu who, all those centuries ago, argued that to achieve victory, one must know one’s enemies. But I simply cannot understand anyone who refuses to recognise health care as a universal human right. Not least those FOX News fanatics opposed to a bill that does not even come close to free state-run health care, which should be a basic requirement for any developed nation, and indeed is a treasured asset of many developing nations. Whilst proclaiming their right to choose – an utterly irrelevant criticism in light of Obama’s reforms – they would deny hundreds of thousands of people any choice save death or bankruptcy. And that is not just for the poor and uninsured. That goes for all those whose policies just don’t want to pay out, who pick holes in every claim, because saving money is more important than saving a life in this most inhumane of models.

I can begin to understand the neo-liberals of the New Right who believe society should be orientated around a free market philosophy. I can even begin to understand social conservatives opposed to abortion and stem cell research on the grounds of their own moral compass. But I can never understand anyone who argues that human life should be left to the naked principles of the market. But then, perhaps Glenn Beck will be able to draw me a map of the retarded right-winger’s mind on his blackboard. It’s the only way I’m ever going to get it.

In an exclusive interview with The Third Estate, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg sets out his vision for change

Nick Clegg

It can’t be easy, being the leader of Britain’s third major political party. Caught between a disintegrating New Labour and a resurgent Conservative Party waiting for its coronation, convincing the British public that what you have to say can make a difference to their lives is an uphill struggle from the start. Nick Clegg, however, is a man of firsts. Elected to the European Parliament in 1999, he became the first ever Liberal Democrat parliamentarian in the East Midlands, and the first Liberal since 1931. Ten years later, MP for Sheffield Hallam and Lib Dem leader, Clegg has his eyes on Gordon Brown’s job. “Let me tell you why I want to be prime minister. It’s because I want to change our country for good,” he said at last month’s party conference as he attempted to position the Liberal Democrats to oust Labour as the dominant force in progressive politics for the first time in almost a century. On the back of the conference, as Parliament returns from recess and we prepare to enter a general election year, I quizzed Clegg on some of the big questions facing his party and whether or not his policies in the current economic climate can truly be considered progressive.

Grabbing headlines when you’re a bronze medallist often means you have to shout louder than the rest. And it was Nick Clegg’s call for “savage cuts” last month which became the buzzword for the conference season. I ask him how it is possible to reconcile these kinds of cuts in public spending with the assertion that the Lib Dems are poised to replace Labour as the true progressive force in British politics. Surely retrenchment has always been the antithesis of social justice? “Politics is about priorities,” he says. “Simply spending money doesn’t make you progressive; it’s about what you spend it on. This government has radically enlarged the amount of money spent by the state, but the gap between rich and poor has grown. There’s nothing very progressive about a country in which a child born in the poorest area of Sheffield will die a full fourteen years earlier than one born down the road in the wealthiest part. So it is right to look at the money government spends and work out if we can use more of it to help those who need more support.”

One area in which the Lib Dems certainly have picked up the ball dropped a long time ago by Labour is in their opposition to nuclear weapons. In his youth, Tony Blair was an active member of CND. In his middle age, he presided over the multi-billion pound decision to renew Britain’s nuclear weapons programme. “What’s progressive about renewing Trident – spending billions on a system that doesn’t protect the country from the modern threats we face?” Clegg argues. “We could put that money into helping people on the lowest incomes.”

But are the Liberal Democrats really willing to commit the money necessary to help people on the lowest incomes? One of the party’s most popular policies amongst students of all backgrounds has been its opposition to tuition fees. “I believe tuition fees are wrong, I believe they need to be abolished,” Nick Clegg told the party conference, shortly before saying that they had to be realistic about whether doing so would be affordable given the country’s current debt and fuelling speculation that the Lib Dems were planning to axe one of their core progressive policies. Given that improved access to education is vital for long-term economic growth, I ask Clegg, should we really be backing away from doing the right thing just because it’s easier now?

“None of these choices are easy, at any time,” he says. “But we’ve got to be straight with people about what can be afforded right now. I’ve set out a radical programme that would make our society fairer, and give every child – no matter their background – the best chances in life. We know that at the moment a poor, bright child will be overtaken by a better off, less intelligent child by the time they’re seven years old. So we have to get in there right at the beginning, with smaller class sizes for 5-7 year olds, and extra support for children from the poorest backgrounds. We would give schools more money for taking on children from poorer families and that big injection of cash would make sure everyone had the best start in life. Then more children from disadvantaged backgrounds would have the opportunity to go to university later on. And yes, I want to get rid of the tuition fees system too – it’s just a question of when.”

Meritocracy is not exactly Marxism, but it is an ideal to which most left-of-centre MPs believe we should aspire. Are the Lib Dems doing enough, however, to distinguish themselves from the other main parties? “I think we have distinguished ourselves very substantially by setting out the radical, progressive programme for change that I’ve been talking about,” Clegg says. I ask him why, then, the party is failing to capitalise on the deep dissatisfaction with the government. Labour suffered its worst defeat in almost a century at the recent European elections. But despite the wars, privatisations and crises, and despite the Lib Dems emerging from the expenses scandal as the cleanest party, why was it that they saw their share of the vote fall by 1.2 percent?

“Of course it would have been great to win more votes in the European Elections,” Clegg says. “But just look at the local elections which took place on the same day. We pushed Labour into a devastating third place, and we now control more big cities outside London than either of the other parties: Bristol, Sheffield, Hull, Leeds, Liverpool, Cambridge – they’re all Liberal Democrat cities, and I could name more. And in places like Bedford, where voters chose a new mayor just the other day, people are realising that Cameron isn’t offering real change at all. In an election where Labour came fifth, the Tories didn’t win – we beat them. In all these parts of the country we’re showing the way we treat power, dispersing it to the people, using it to cut crime, and regenerate areas that have wanted for attention for so long. People see the difference Liberal Democrats make in these places and they vote for us time and again.”

Smart, young, stylish, Oxbridge educated, leader of an opposition party, Clegg is keen to distinguish himself from Cameron as the voice of change in British politics. It was David Cameron who claimed that there was “barely a cigarette paper” between their two parties when he called for “one national movement that can bring real change” – broaching the idea of a Lib-Con coalition should his party fail to win a majority next year. Clegg was having none of it, however, describing the Conservative leader as a “con man” and attacking his hypocrisy on civil liberties. But how would a Liberal Democrat government under Nick Clegg reverse the alarming erosion of civil liberties and human rights that has taken place under New Labour?

“We’ve published a Freedom Bill, which shows how we’d repeal thirty years of Labour and Conservative authoritarian legislation,” Clegg says. “That Bill would restore the right to silence, which the Tories took away; it would bring back jury trials, which Labour have tried so hard and so often to curtail, and it would stop government storing DNA from people who’ve not been convicted of any crime. On day one, we’d scrap identity cards – along with the Government’s massive National Identity Register. It’s an enormous, expensive incursion on our civil liberties; a total inversion of the relationship between citizen and state, where we have to account for ourselves to the government, not the other way round.” Clegg clearly doesn’t think that a cigarette paper is all that separates his policies from Cameron’s. “The Conservatives’ commitment to this kind of reform is just paper thin. I don’t think anyone should take them seriously on the rights of the citizen while they retain their commitment to abolish the Human Rights Act.”

"The weekly pictures of soldiers being returned home to grieving families should give everyone pause for thought about the merit and the purpose of this conflict."

But are Lib Dem commitments on human rights and civil liberties sufficient to see them running against the pack of British politics? I remember marching against the war in Afghanistan in November 2001. Back then, only a handful of MPs opposed the invasion, and only 12% of the country was against it. Eight years later, with Afghanistan in a worse state than ever and British casualties on the rise, opposition to the ongoing conflict is not such a lonely position when it comes to voters, even though a consensus remains amongst Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems on the need for a continued British presence in the country. The Lib Dems were widely praised for being the only major party to oppose the war in Iraq, but with the presence of foreign troops arguably exacerbating the instability of a country that has never in its history been successfully occupied, I ask Clegg if now is the time to take a principled stance against the war in Afghanistan too.

“We have taken and are taking a principled and practical approach to Afghanistan,” Clegg says. “The weekly pictures of soldiers being returned home to grieving families should give everyone pause for thought about the merit and the purpose of this conflict. But I want our troops to return when the time is right, with their heads held high, knowing they’ve made a real, long-term difference both to Afghanistan, and to Britain’s security.” Clegg’s approach, however, is not simply a military one. “The Government has a responsibility to our troops, now, to advance a political surge alongside the military surge; the Karzai Government clearly lacks the support of the Afghan people, and it is that among other things which is exacerbating instability. I’ve been calling on the Prime Minister for some time now to press for a Government of National Unity in Afghanistan, so that we can start to divert this conflict off the road of failure. Without that kind of reconciliation between the different interest groups in Afghanistan, we cannot hope to succeed.”

As a long-time opponent of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s a position I can’t subscribe to, but Clegg’s appraisal of the situation is refreshingly honest for a politician sitting on one of Parliament’s front benches. And it is on the question of honesty in politics that I turn to finally, raising, in the spirit of the organisation itself, a question suggested to me by Guy Aitchison of the Power2010 campaign. At the height of the expenses crisis, Nick Clegg responded to David Cameron and Gordon Brown’s attempts to position themselves as democratic reformers by pointing out that the Lib Dems alone had consistently called for reform of a “rotten” Westminster system. Power2010 has received nearly 2000 submissions from members of the public beyond Westminster who also want democratic reform. But what is Clegg doing to mobilise people’s anger with the way we are governed beyond engaging in the very routines of Westminster village politics that puts them off in the first place?

“Well, it would be odd if we didn’t use the platform that Westminster gives Liberal Democrat MPs to make it clear where we stand on political reform,” Clegg says. “We’ve always favoured a much more open, transparent and responsive system of government. And whether it’s freedom of information or the way in which MPs get elected, we’ve always led the way in calling for change. The others just lag behind, and – as we’ve seen after 12 years with Labour – they see constitutional change as a sort of refuge from other political crises, running to talk about it when they’re in trouble and drifting back into their establishment ways the second they think they’re out of the woods.”

As a party that has always been held back by the first-past-the-post electoral system, it is, perhaps, natural that the Lib Dems alone should remain consistent to their message on democratic reform. “For us, changing the way politics is done is a central part of what we’re here to do,” Clegg says. “But you’re right: speaking up in Westminster isn’t enough. That’s one of the reasons I meet people every week in town and village halls around the country. People can come along and ask me, to my face, anything and everything they like; believe me, they do too! One of the great things about Power2010 is that it’s asking for your ideas, from people well beyond the bubble at Westminster. I’m really looking forward to reading what people come up with after November 30th. Politicians don’t know it all, and we have to ask people directly if we’re to know what they want.”

Wisest is he who knows he does not know, goes the old Socratic belief. But philosophers are not kings. Nick Clegg is the third most likely person to be Prime Minister next year in a country that is still a two-party state. Until we see the kind of far-reaching democratic reform that he touches upon, that will not change. And change is what it’s all about. All politicians are either gamekeepers or gardeners and Nick Clegg clearly wants to be seen as the latter. Whether he has done enough to convince a public hungry for politicians to be the change they want to see in the world, only time and an election will tell.

Guest post by Oli

Baroness Scotland

The government’s chief legal adviser, Attourney General Patricia Scotland, was fined £5000 today and forced to make a public apology for employing an illegal immigrant as her housekeeper. Sad to say, I first discovered this story via the front page of the Daily Mail.

That a positive case for immigration is rarely put across, is one of the major failures of Labour. Instead of taking the Daily Mail to task for its scaremongering moral panic headlines, the government has trashed its own sentiments on immigration and the positive impact it has on Britain by trying to match the hard-faced reactionary stance of the right-wing press.

Some border controls and rules for employment are important, and it is obvious why high profile government employees should not employ illegal immigrants and why Baroness Scotland should be culpable for this, but it is plain wrong to see immigrants used as ammunition for a braying media and their readers – perpetually shouting ringside about the decline of Britain.

This is the Daily Mail at its apex –  inventing statistics and selectively editing reports to attack some of the most vulnerable people in Britain. Instead of highlighting how immigration has benefited Britain wholesale, the Daily Mail tirelessly drones about public sector pressures, asylum seekers spreading diseases and illegal immigrants plaguing the streets. Its biased reporting has become so dangerous that the Association of Chief Police Officers published a report about how ill-informed media coverage is a significant risk to public disorder. That the paper has such a powerful sway over middle Britain, makes its lies about immigration a crime of epic proportions. It quite literally has blood on its hands.

Where it really sticks the boot in, is on illigal immigrants, not least becauce the majority of them make life decisions that you and I will never have to. Many are supporting families in their home countries and, rather than being lecherous, criminal, swarthy types as painted by the tabloid press, they are brave human beings used to inhumane work conditions, often fleeing a life of extreme poverty and war. Instead of demonising them, we should raise a glass to those who make it through the reactionary border controls, make their money and send it home, rather than looking to the Daily Mail to bludgeon the truth and fuel potential race wars.

It is a shame that as soon as somebody is branded an illegal immigrant, all else about their personality is erased, and they become a criminal statistic. I just hope their families back home have their fingers crossed, because global warming and tough immigration policy in the West is not a good combination for men and woman struggling to make the best of life, unfortunate enough to be born into one of a depressing list of circumstances – corrupt political systems, geographic oddities cut off from the blood supply of the city, superstition, war, misogyny or cruel religious oppression – that in the scheme of a world no different from Russian roulette may be their curse.

Strict immigration controls mean people being channelled through irregular migration networks. So instead of our fruit being picked by migrants working for a fair wage and with legal rights, illegal immigrants are smuggled to work on the black market under the jurisdiction of a gang master – or to clean the house of Baroness Scotland.

A grown up debate is needed about illegal immigrants because hysterical newspaper headlines are not the answer if we care about human rights and tackling the profit-hungry invisible labour market that puts clothes on our backs and food on our tables.

And now for something completely indifferent…

Last week, I reported on the case of Dana Ali, an Iraqi immigrant being held in Oakington detention centre because of an apparent Home Office mix-up in his paperwork. Tonight, Dana has been released and has been allowed to return home while his case is considered. He has not yet been granted leave to remain and the campaign continues, but increased public exposure will hopefully ensure the situation is resolved. Thank you to all the blogs and sites that carried the story and helped raise awareness of the injustice served to Dana. Sometimes we can win.

Iraqi immigrant, Dana Ali, faces deportation after an alleged Home Office blunder fails to recognise his marriage to a British citizen.

Dana Ali was born in 1975. He grew up in Halabja, the Kurdish town in northern Iraq that the world first heard about on March 16th 1988 when 5,000 people were massacred by Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons. “Many of my family died in that attack,” Dana tells me. His story is the story of the Kurds, a stateless people facing the brutal repression of a tyrannical regime. It is little wonder, then, that Dana became a vocal critic of Saddam’s government. “When I grew up, I began supporting the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq,” he says. Dana would distribute leaflets and newspapers for the party. That was how he came to the attention of the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan, an Islamist group that held power in the region. “They saw us as a threat to them,” Dana says. “They arrested me and I was threatened by them. I had to leave in the end. If I had stayed there, they would have killed me.”

Fearing for his life, Dana fled to the UK in July 2000. After being granted a work permit, he found a job at Buxted Chicken Factory in Suffolk. It was there that he met his wife, Taina Mason. “I was Dana’s boss,” Taina tells me. “We hit it off so well. We went out together for about eight months, then we were talking romantically and discussed getting married. So we eloped.” Dana moved to Lowestoft to live with Taina and they married in 2003. The year that Britain and America invaded Iraq, Saddam’s regime was toppled and the Islamists in the Kurdish north were crushed. “I didn’t support the invasion,” Dana says. “I was glad that they got rid of Saddam, but so many civilians were killed.”

Even in the darkest days of the occupation, with hundreds dying every day and the country on the brink of a civil war between Shi’ahs and Sunnis, Kurdish Iraq was held as a success story. That elusive island of calm in a sea of chaos. Dana, however, has no desire to return. “I don’t know if I will be safe,” he says. “There are still kidnappings in northern Iraq, the media here don’t cover that really, but if you look at the Kurdish newspapers you can see it, and I don’t know if the people who made me leave are still about.” Dana’s wife tells me he has no family left there. “His family are here, there’s no reason for him to go back. He’s worried he might be arrested or shot.” Hoping to settle in the UK to start a family with his new wife, Dana applied for a marriage visa and it should have been a happily ever after.

“We heard nothing back from the Home Office,” Taina says. She tells me that despite sending their passports and marriage certificate, the Home Office curiously failed to recognise their marriage. Taina believes that her husband had been confused with another person called Dana Ali. “We kept getting police phone calls and credit card companies saying you’ve taken out loans. They were looking for someone in Yorkshire. And we said that’s not him. He’s not allowed a credit card, he’s not allowed loans, he’s never been to Yorkshire.” Mistaking him for the other Dana Ali, the police turned up at 3.30 in the morning one day last year and arrested him. “They had a picture of this guy and they realised they’d mixed the papers up.”

The situation was soon resolved, but Taina believes that the mix up of the papers is the reason her marriage was never recognised and Dana was denied a visa. “At first they approved my application,” Dana says. “Then they said my leave to remain paper was a mistake because my file had mixed me up with someone else.” A UK Border Agency spokesperson denied the allegation that the papers had been muddled up, but declined to comment as to whether a marriage visa application had been received. “We would not remove anyone from the UK while there are outstanding applications or representations on their case,” the spokesperson said.

“They told me to go home and wait 3-6 months,” Dana says. “I waited and nothing happened. My solicitor phoned them and sent letters to them. After a couple of years, they just refused me.” As a result, Dana was forced to leave his job at the chicken factory. He has been out of work since 2004, unable to claim benefits and unable to help his wife with the mortgage, living in the country pending immigration investigation. “They told us, when they want him, they’ll come and get him,” Taina says. “He was getting so down; he just wanted to get out of the house. So a couple of nights a week he would help out his friend at the kebab shop and have coffee with him. He wasn’t working there and he wasn’t getting paid, and the manager told the Home Office that, but the authorities said that he was working and they issued him with a form telling him he had to sign in at the police station every month.”

Told that if he was caught helping out his friend again, he would be arrested and the owner of the kebab shop fined £5,000, Dana has been reporting to Lowestoft police station once a month since March. One day, however, he didn’t come home. When he turned up at the police station on July 31st, they took him into custody without warning. “I asked them why and they told me they had papers to remove me from the United Kingdom,” Dana says. “I haven’t been home since that day.” Dana has barely seen his wife since they took him to Oakington, the Cambridgeshire immigrant detention centre exposed by a 2005 BBC documentary for the violence and racist abuse carried out by some of its staff. “You think you’re not going to do anything ‘cos a white person tells you what to do. Well I’m afraid you’re wrong,” employee James Martin was filmed saying to a detainee. “My great-grandfather shot your great-grandfather and nicked his fucking country off you for 200 years,” he says before tipping the immigrant out of bed. In December last year, inspectors investigating Oakington declared it had “lost direction” and inmates felt unsafe.

“I think it’s like Auschwitz,” Taina tells me. Whilst it is probably a little unfair to compare Oakington Immigration Reception Centre to the Nazi concentration camp in which over a million people were killed, hearing Dana describe the razor wire, the guards, the dogs and the cramped conditions, it is easy to understand why he and his wife are frightened. “He’s had to see a doctor and a psychiatrist since he’s been there,” Taina says. “On one of his arms, he started scratching his skin to bits. He doesn’t realise he’s doing it, he’s so stressed. They’ve put him on anti-depressants, which took over a week for him to get. Even the doctor said she’s disgusted at how he’s being treated.”

“I’m being treated like a criminal,” Dana says. In the past, the British government treated the country’s poor as though they were criminals. Now that status is accorded to its immigrants. Dana has lost a lot of weight since his detention. Hearing about his experiences, it is not hard to imagine Oakington as some kind of Dickensian workhouse. “When we go for dinner, if you ask for one more piece of bread, they won’t give it to you. When I’ve complained, I’ve been told, I’m illegal in this country, I shouldn’t be here, why am I asking questions? This camp, the way they treat you, it’s somewhere else, it’s not England.”

His wife, Taina, is in quite a unique situation for a woman in Suffolk, a county seemingly immune to demographic changes, to mass immigration and to ethnic diversity. In fighting Dana’s corner through the years of alleged blunders and stalling from the Home Office, she has written to local MP Bob Blizzard, to Tony Blair, to George Galloway, and she has approached the national papers, but none of them took up her case. Married to an Iraqi immigrant, part of the problem she faces comes from the right-wing tabloids and the relentless stream of anti-immigrant propaganda they publish. “The government pays attention to the Mail,” writes Nick Davies in his book, Flat Earth News, describing the paper’s tendency to omit all the benefits of immigration in its reporting, quoting highly selective and distortionary figures to sell its own reactionary, and often false, line. “I’ve become immune to it, really,” Taina tells me. “Dana is such a loving person. Before this happened, he was the soul of the party, he’s such a brilliant host. When people start saying the immigrants come over here and get this and that, I think, well my husband’s not like that.”

Dana desperately wants to return to his wife. “There are many people here in the same situation,” he says. “They’ve been here for a long time, and they’re married, and they just want to work and get on with their lives and their families. Some of them have kids as well.” He tells me he’s hoping to start a family with Taina. “I want to have children. We haven’t been able to because I have a sperm problem and need to have IVF treatment. But that costs a lot. If I were allowed to work, I could afford it. I would like to have one baby or two.”

Having once again submitted his documentation to the Home Office, Dana is awaiting their response. Taina says that if they do not recognise their marriage and his eligibility to remain in the country, she will take the case to the High Court. “I spoke to my solicitor last night and he said if we go to the High Court it will probably cost £5,000 to get him free,” she says. “Where is the justice in this world if you have to pay for someone’s freedom?”

Dana’s life story, from his fight against Islamists in Halabja to his fight to remain in Britain, is testament to the fact that the price of freedom can be very high indeed.

Salman Shaheen

www.thethirdestate.net

Dana’s niece, Claire, has set up a Facebook group in support of their campaign.

Friends, lefty bloggers, socialists, I’ve got a guilty secret. I’ve been actively campaigning for the Green Party in the upcoming European Elections on June 4th.  It’s been a difficult time for me politically. With the split in Respect, the failure of John McDonnell and the Labour left to leave a scratch on the New Labour hegemony and the absence of that new mass party of the working class that’s been promised for so long, I’ve found myself in search of a new political home. To a lot of people on the left, the Greens are, unfairly I think, still perceived as a soft option, a middle-class environmentalist party first with a few social policies tacked on. This is an image that many in the Green Party are seeking to shake off, and none more so than a certain human rights activist who stood for Labour in 1983, stood up to Mugabe in 1999 and wouldn’t stand for homophobia or hypocrisy when it came to The Pogues in 2007. In a Third Estate exclusive, I quizzed Peter Tatchell on what makes the Green Party much more than just a green party, their prospects for the future and why they are the only thing standing between Nick Griffin and the European Parliament.

The Third Estate: You’ve traditionally been a supporter of a red-green alliance and helped launch Green Left. Many socialists, however, continue to view the Green Party as a largely middle-class environmentalist party. Do you think, in light of Labour’s shift to the centre and the failure of Respect, that the Greens can fill the vacuum in British politics left by the absence of a genuine working-class socialist party?

Peter Tatchell: As Labour has shifted to the right, the Greens have moved to the left. We are now the party of social justice, as well as environmental protection. On trade union rights, for example, the Greens are much stronger than Labour. We support the Trade Union Freedom Bill, Labour opposes it. We are more radical than Labour on every issue – from jobs to health, education, housing and pensions. Many Green Party members are left-wing socialists like myself. Many of us resigned from Labour, appalled by its pro-big business policies and its support for privatisation, war-mongering and its attacks on civil liberties, such as the draconian anti-terror laws. The Green Party’s Manifesto for a Sustainable Society sets out a radical agenda for fundamental social change, to benefit working class people, end the impoverishment of two-thirds of the world’s peoples and to save our planet from devastating climate chaos.

The Third Estate: In the current elections the Greens have been going out of their way to present themselves as much more than a single-issue party, highlighting in particular their social policies, whilst you yourself have a very strong record on human-rights. Do you feel the message is getting across and public perceptions are changing? What more do you think could be done?

Peter Tatchell: For more than two decades, the Greens have had a very progressive social agenda. Unfortunately, the media tend to cover us only when we campaign on environmental issues. That is beginning to change. As a result, more and more voters recognise that we have imaginative policies for a fairer society on a wide range of issues. That is why many of our new supporters are ex-Labour voters, left-wing independents and disillusioned voters who gave up voting years ago. They are fed up with the way Labour has ditched the working class and the trade unions. They saw Labour take us into an illegal war on false pretences and how Labour pandered to George Bush. Increasingly, people realise that the Greens offer a progressive alternative.

The Third Estate: In the past, Muslim voters have often tended to gravitate towards the Labour Party. The election of George Galloway in Bethnal Green and Bow in 2005 was, perhaps, the clearest indication that Muslim voters are increasingly abandoning Labour in the wake of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. With Respect not standing in the 2009 European Elections (and specifically endorsing the Green Party in the North West), do you feel the Greens can offer a natural political home to disenfranchised Muslim voters?

Peter Tatchell: The Greens took a strong, unambiguous stand against the Iraq war, right from the outset. Before the war began, I did a one-man protest; running out in front of Tony Blair’s motorcade, forcing his limousine to halt. It was a small symbolic gesture, but it was great to see Blair’s exasperated expression. For Muslim (and non-Muslim) voters who are disaffected with Labour’s pro-war policies the Greens offer a comfortable, welcoming, progressive political alternative. Many Muslims will, I think, also be attracted by the Green Party’s anti-consumerist, anti-materialist message. We emphasise quality of life, not quantity of possessions. Ours is a people-centred party that puts people’s needs first. Unlike the other parties, we are not obsessed with economic growth and GDP. We want everyone to have a decent standard of living – here in the UK and worldwide – but we also recognise that there are many other important things that are essential for happiness – a loving family and friends, good neighbours, clean air to breathe and a safe neighbourhood. Empowering people to support each other and sustain good community relations is part of the Green agenda.

The Third Estate: You’ve been campaigning in the North West where you’ve argued that a vote for the Greens is the surest way to stop the BNP. How is the campaign shaping up and what do you think the chances are of a red/green/anti-racist alliance succeeding in preventing Nick Griffin from winning a seat?

Peter Tatchell: A big vote for the Greens is the surest way to stop Nick Griffin and the BNP. The battle to win the last seat in the north west is between the Greens and the BNP. This means that a Green victory will keep Griffin out. The BNP is a divisive, bigoted, sectarian, nasty party. All that it offers is rage and hate. It has no practical solutions to the economic crisis, mass unemployment, climate chaos and the corruption of parliament. It has a sick history of scapegoating and vilifying black, Jewish, gay and Muslim people. Lots of people realise that the number one priority is to stop the BNP. When out canvassing, we have met many people who will be voting Green for the first time, partly to defeat Nick Griffin, partly to show their anger at the expenses scams by Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs, and partly because they have decided that the Greens have the best policies. Right now, the Greens are on 9% to 13% in the opinion polls. If this level of support holds up, and our supporters turn out to vote, Nick Griffin will be toast and the people of the north west will elect an anti-racist MEP, Peter Cranie of the Greens.

The Third Estate: By all polls and results, it would seem support for the Green Party has seen a steady increase in recent years. Can you envisage this support translating into MPs at the next General Election?

Peter Tatchell: In the wake of the banking and economic crises, a lot of people are realising that the Greens offer an alternative that is both credible and radical. Our support is rising. We have a good chance of electing MPs in Brighton and Norwich at the next general election. We would get many more MPs – perhaps 40 – if Britain had a fair voting system. That’s our biggest problem. The election method is rigged to favour the big three parties. We are pressing for major constitutional reform to enhance democracy and popular participation in politics. As well as proportional representation and fair votes, I want to see other reforms like an elected head of state, an elected second chamber, a written constitution, a Bill of Rights, the right of voters to recall their MP and the devolution of power to democratically elected regional parliaments. Changes like these will help make our political system more open, representative, accountable and fair.

www.petertatchell.net