Caroline Lucas' U-turn on taxes

Channel hopping between Question Time and 10 O'clock Live, I caught the following exchange...

David Mitchell: The key is that ultimately, surely to save the environment things have to be made more expensive - the things that are destroying the planet have to be made as expensive monetarily as they are to the environment and that's going to involve a lot of sacrifice, don't you have to be honest about that?

Caroline Lucas: Well I will be honest about that, what I think it needs is a shift in taxation, not an overall increase in the burden of taxation, but if we taxed carbon instead of taxing income so much for example that would be a very good thing, we'd get more people into jobs, we'd also tackle the environmental crisis, so it's not rocket science...

This is a far cry from the Greens' general election manifesto that called for massive tax increases to close the deficit.

Whatever happened to "left wing plus"? Don't get me wrong here, I agree with the policy - but it is not a left wing one - the left much prefers taxing income to taxing consumption. I also agree with the question - if the Greens can't be honest about the sacrifices they expect, it is a bit rich to accuse other parties of being all talk and no trousers.

But more significantly, whatever happened to the Green Party being the last bastion of big tax and spend politics, appealing to the disaffected left? Is it really quite so shallow as to switch its whole politics from the hard left to the centre now it thinks there might be more mileage in attracting disaffected Lib Dems?

And has this monumental step really happened in an interview on a comedy news and politics show? Does the rest of the Green Party know anything about this? What do they think?

I am feeling a little stunned here.

Greenpartywatch: the manifesto

Recently I blogged on the difficulty Greens have reconciling their disdain for economic activity with their policies on public services that seem to involve unlimited public spending. I concluded that by failing to support economic growth, the Greens would have to be, before too long, the biggest cutters of public services of all.

Their manifesto has now been published, so let's see if it challenges what I said.

In contrast, the Green Party is open about what we would cut, what we would defend, and about the fact that we need to raise taxation from 36 per cent of GDP in 2009–10 to around 45 per cent in 2013. This would halve the gap between Government expenditure and revenues by 2013–14 (as the Labour Government proposes) and progressively close the gap thereafter.

Wow. It's different, I'll give them credit for that. Increasing taxes overall by 20% is courageous, minister. Is it true that this would halve the gap between expenditure and revenues? Yes, if economic growth happens as forecast. Government forecasts, remember, rely on future increases in tax revenues due to economic growth.

But would that growth still happen under the Greens plan? Or would the 20% tax hike dampen it? Would the Greens' disdain for growth kill it off altogether before they even implement any policies? Is in fact a 20% tax hike designed to reduce growth? That would make some sense in a parallel universe of strange priorities.

And even if growth was unaffected, is this the right idea?

Unlike Labour, we would not focus on encouraging consumption but protect public services, spend on investment in the new green economy and create greater quality. Labour’s approach will sow the seeds of future crises by encouraging crippling debt and unsustainable consumption.

What seems to be said here is that money in your pocket is consumption and therefore bad, whereas public spending brings equality and is therefore good. And yet this consumption, we commit with the lucre in our pockets, is how we feed, clothe, and house ourselves. A tough challenge for millions of hard working people, who would pay more taxes under the Greens, however much they aim the bulk of their tax rises at the better off.

It's an understandable position. The Greens, like all parties, are pretty much middle class, and don't really get this, just as Paxo wasn't impressed at a tax cut of £300 for somebody on £8000 under Lib Dem policies.

And a lot of people on £8-20,000 don't use a lot of public services, face high food and fuel bills, can't afford housing, and aren't getting an awful lot for the taxes they pay. Equality through public spending can ring very hollow. The problem is a lack of consumption.

Now let's look at a few of these new taxes:

End the zero-rating of VAT on new dwellings, putting them on a level with conversions and renovations of existing dwellings, raising £5bn in 2010 and £7.5bn by 2013.

Oh, but won't this reduce the supply of housing when we could do with more housing really? (Although there is a policy to increase social housing.)

No longer offer zero VAT rating to financial services and betting duties, which are of limited value to the real economy, raising £5.6bn by 2013.

Gradually increase alcohol and tobacco taxes by about 50% to match anticipated increases in expenditures on the NHS, raising £1.4bn in 2010 rising to £5.6bn by 2013.

Ouch. Gambling, smoking and drinking all to be hammered. Won't the effect of this be just a tiny bit regressive? Not that the Greens are joyless puritans or anything.

Levy eco-taxes on non-renewables or pollutants, in particular pesticides, organo-chlorines, nitrogen and artificial fertilisers and phosphates. [amount not specified]

Tax on food. Who'll that hit most? Not all of these things are even big environmental problems.

I've not added up all the other tax increases but you can probably guess the sort of thing. I dare say the numbers add up to the promised(!) increased tax take, but ignore the economic impacts of all these extra taxes.

So was I justified in saying the greens would be the biggest public service cutters of all? Certainly if my reading of the economic chicken entrails is correct - and if it isn't the Greens should come back and fully explain their attitude to economic growth and its role in deficit reduction. And even if not they may be something even worse - the biggest ever cutters of consumption at all earnings levels.

That's not to say the manifesto is all bad. Some of the eco-taxes hit important environmental problems, and some of the extra public spending would be useful to many people. On the other hand a lot of it is more based on the Greens' peculiar sense of what is virtuous than any concrete environmental or social impact.

They are making a strong pitch for the hard left tax-and-spend vote. I expect this to fall flat because they do not understand the aspirations of the left, for working people to earn more, not less. Greens celebrate that wind creates many times more jobs per TWh/yr than other similarly priced forms of energy. That's almost equivalent to celebrating that those jobs are much lower paid. And the idea of economic progress through abandoning labour-saving technology would end with us all as dirt poor peasants. Would we peasants then still enjoy great public services? Nope.

Greenpartywatch: Supporting the stabbing industry

Caroline Lucas was on Question Time yesterday, taking a fairly straightforward pro-Union line on the BA strike. It can be seen here on iplayer, starting about 13 minutes in (until the next episode replaces it).

"...I deeply regret that the dispute has been allowed to escalate to such a point that we are now looking at a strike..."

Is this the same Caroline Lucas, who considers flying to be as bad as stabbing? (Yes it is.)

This raises the obvious question - why would you not want the stabbing industry to be hit by strike action?

As I said on Twitter at the time. "Lucas pretends to back the workers though she would really have them all out of a job. #bbcqt" (Thanks for the retweet @bbcquestiontime). I got a response to this suggesting that under the Greens, there would be jobs for these cabin crews on the railways. But it is hardly supporting the workers to suggest that you can just get another job! That is basically supporting the management: take what you're offered or clear off.

This reveals what is probably the most fundamental contradiction at the heart of the Green Party's thinking these days. One day they try to put the environment first: flying is evil, economic growth is wrong, etc. On another day they are pro-Labour (!), pro-Union, pro-worker, socialist, "defending jobs", "avoid the double-dip recession".

So one day it is make do and be happy with less. The next day it is supporting one group or another demanding more for their members, even if those members are engaged in trashing the planet.

One day it is "prosperity without growth". The next it is opposing cuts to public services. Yet without growth to reduce the deficit, cuts to public services will have to be so huge, it would position the Greens way to the right of the Tories. Yes, the Greens would be the biggest public service cutters of all.

I wrote earlier about the Green New Deal policy of the Green Party which becomes a little preposterous when you notice that they haven't agreed or can't say whether they want the economy to grow or not.

There may yet be some merit in either of the Green Party's two faces, but they had really ought to pick one and run with it if they want to make any sense. Socialism or the environment -they're not compatible.

Greens and Keynes: total muddle

You'd think it would be a simple question. Do the Greens support the fiscal stimulus to get the economy growing again, or do they, like the Tories, consider it more important to balance the budget sooner?

Logically, as the Greens are not supposed to be that keen on economic growth anyway, you would expect the latter answer. But that has to be weighed against visceral knee-jerk opposition to the Tories.

So I've been intrepidly commenting on Green blogs trying to get to the bottom of this. Natalie Bennett at Philobiblon was cheering the return of Keynes but wouldn't explain whether she wanted the growth that Keynesianism is thought to deliver.

When Jim Jay attacked Cleggy over the "savage cuts" remark, I asked whether opposing growth won't mean even savager cuts in the long run. And I get some vague guff about a "paradigm shift away from a capitalist economy", which is a rather vague answer to quite a specific question.

And now Rupert Read adds mud to the water with a pithy condemnation of growth. So is he against the fiscal stimulus? He wouldn't say.

This muddle is all the more surprising when we consider that it would actually be quite easy for no-growth Greens to come up with a clear and consistent position. If you think that the Tories are correct that balancing the budget now is better for prosperity in the long run, then go with Keynsianism. And if you think the Keynsians are right that a fiscal stimulus now is better for prosperity in the long run then go with balancing the budget. You'd have to half agree with the Tories either way, and I guess this is the problem.

Now it turns out that growth figures are about how much the goods and services we supply each other are worth to us, and not about how much environment is destroyed, and so the greens really ought to be a bit more specific and focus their attentions on the actual destruction of the environment rather than on an aggregate statistic like GDP that includes a great many good and unobjectionable things.

But no. Far from being more specific, their solutions just get vaguer. Paradigm shifts. Alternatives to capitalism, as yet unspecified. Read's suggestion of a stimulus to stabilise the economy is at least specific, but suggests that his green new deal should stop dead as soon as growth figures go positive.

Often on specific policies the Greens sound like what is simply a high tax-and-spend party. And this too, would make sense particularly if you want to strangle the economy. But ask them about economics or political philosophy, and they will never say this. Why choose this vague waffle over a simple policy that meets your objectives? Is some deeply held contradiction at work here?

This is a breathtaking shortcoming for what claims to be a serious political party. What have they been thinking about for the last 20 years?

Greenpartywatch: Greens admit their policies are weak

Anders Hanson picks up a story in the Times covering some blogging covering the various parties positions on science related policy questions, and generally bemoaning the Greens' medieval denialist attitude to any science that doesn't support their agenda.

Anders quotes Green MSP Patrick Harvey, and it is worth repeating

I recognise that the Green movement has taken some time to develop from a single issue group, and perhaps in some areas we’ve some way to go yet… The best way of supporting our continued development is to subject us to parliamentary scrutiny, so that our policies can be tested alongside the rest.

Oh dear. And Adam Ramsey [Edit: not Adrian Ramsey, a Green PPC in Norwich]

I am an active member of the Green Party, but this policy is frankly moronic. It is not a manifesto commitment, so MEPs elected this year will not be pushing for it. Please consider what Greens parties are going to prioritise rather than some out dated policy the party hasn’t got round to changing.

Oh dear. Make some allowances please, for a movement in its infancy. Except that it isn't. Founded in 1973, with policies of nuclear deterrence, anti-immigration, women should stay at home, etc, etc, it has clearly been a long road to here. 

Let's put that aside. Let's regard the Green Party as beginning with that big 15% vote share they got in the European elections of 1989. By then they had more or less the policies they have today. Perhaps they would support some roadbuilding, but not very much. That's 20 years ago. Since then there will have been 40 party conferences, and therefore probably around 80 to 100 major policy papers agreed.

Now the body of "outdated" policy that Ramsey refers to is called the Manifesto for a Sustainable Society and can be found here. This is where those 80 to 100 policy papers will have ended up. How many sections does it have? 37. So each of them has been updated on average 2 to 3 times since the party's coming of age in 1989.

Riiight. And you've still got some way to go. OK. What could possibly be the problem?

Well, I suggest that the problem is a great deal of incoherence at the heart of Green Party thinking. The core value, that economic activity is the cause of all our ills, is not reconciled with the desire for increased public spending on everything. The demand for social justice is not reconciled with their opposition to the economic and technological innovations that have freed or will free millions from serfdom and servitude. Their demand for a whole different kind of economic system is not tempered by any kind of detail on what that system would look like - not least because they can't agree.

Denialism on science, denialism on the benefits of free trade, wishful thinking on energy; they may not understand what is wrong with the world, but at least they have their comfort zones.

Ways to Save the Planet 2 - if it isn't beneath you

We've had two more episodes of the series Ways to Save the Planet, that I discussed earlier. And, surprisingly topical for once, the Greens' spring conference has unanimously passed a motion condemning geo-engineering.

For the full text see page 30 of this pdf, but I will bring you some edited highlights.

Ocean-fertilisation poses an unknown but potentially serious threat to marine biodiversity, which plays an essential role in regulating the global carbon cycle, as well as putting fishing communities at risk.

Pity they didn't see episode 1 of Ways to Save the Planet which fertilised the top layer of ocean with deep water nutrients, causing a previously empty bit of ocean to fill with life.  Remember that much of the Pacific is desert-like already in its lack of biodiversity. These wave-powered pumps, if they work in earnest, are a means to greatly increase biodiversity. It deserves better than knee-jerk opposition. There's more...

Climate geo-engineering by increasing the earth’s albedo poses a major and unknown new threat to the climate system, to biodiversity and to people.

Er, how do you know the threat is major, if it is also unknown? We have a major and known threat of global warming, and that means - why do I feel like I am talking to a 4 year old here - it would be good to have a controllable system for global cooling.

Sure, the future is unpredictable if we control the amount of cloud cover or its reflectivity to manage the global temperature. But here is the thing. The future is unpredicable full stop. And it is rather more predicatable if we deal with global warming than if we don't.

So, as I was saying, two new episodes. The first was about a design for a tethered high altitude helium balloon wind turbine. Strictly this is renewable energy rather than geo-engineering, but the ends are much the same. They built a scaled down prototype which worked after a fashion. It would take a full size prototype to test whether such a turbine would have the output predicted. If so, 9.5 million of them could generate all the world's electricity. They would need 2500 times the global annual production of helium, which might be an issue. 

In the same niche, there's a video on TED, suggesting kites can be used to generate power.

The second new episode was on increasing the reflectivity of clouds - stratocumulus over oceans - by spraying micron-size droplets of sea water at them. As usual there were some problems. First they insisted on unmanned radio-controlled low carbon boats to deploy the equipment, and so went for the somewhat oddball Flettner rotor propulsion system. Plenty to build and test there, and it worked surprisingly well. It's not clear how much power the rotors would need, or where it would come from. There were solar panels on the CGI ships, which wouldn't be much good under cloud - but then if it is cloudy, the ship is already in the right place, right?

There was less success actually making the droplets small enough, but you can't have everything.

But what I thought was most telling about this episode was the objections. At the end of each episode a handful of experts - presumably - in lab coats are asked why the proposal is a bad idea or wouldn't work. Usually, they have given sound objections. 16 trillion lenses in space, are you kidding? But this time, they were stuck. All they had was vague objections to the principle of geo-engineering, much like the stuff from the Greens. But unlike blankets on icecaps, robot ships could be turned off at the first sign of trouble.

Unlike, indeed, a massive tree-planting operation, if that is done for geo-engineering purposes. Come on people, show some sense of perspective. I know you can hug a tree more easily than a robot ship, but that is no guide to how best to save the planet.

Greenpartywatch: GP candidate faces axe for trying to save the planet

A storm is brewing in the Green Party over an article by Chris Goodall, their PPC in Oxford West and Abingdon, arguing that nuclear power will be necessary as part of the solution to climate change.

He goes where Mark Lynas and Stephen Tindale have gone before. Many leading environmentalists now take the view that nuclear is just too useful a source of low-carbon energy to do without; that concerns over nuclear waste, while valid environmental concerns, pale into insignificance compared to climate change.

Opponents frame the debate as "nuclear v renewables", but this is just framing. Let's take as read support for renewables and efficiency. Then what? Where is the rest of our energy coming from?

Realistically, what nuclear is up against is Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). A good idea, but not yet, and perhaps not ever, a technology ready to be deployed. If you are convinced that CCS will work, then you can probably afford to be anti-nuclear. But why would you be so convinced?

Here is a question I put to Steve Webb MP, in a Lib Dem Voice webchat way back.

Do you agree that we should be looking to make progress on carbon emissions, primarily with techonlogies that exist, such as wind, nuclear, CSP, CHP, rail, and smart meters rather than gambling on technologies that might never exist, such as CCS, much better PV, and particular road transport solutions? Where technologies look promising, but don't yet work, rather than buy inferior versions of them, supporting that inferiority, why don't we offer prizes to companies that bring them to viability?

And he responded

We should certainly use readily available technologies such as CHP and smart meters as far as possible. But Carbon Capture is essential to the planet. China and India are rolling out new unabated coal-fired power stations at an alarming rate. Unless those emissions get captured we are all in trouble. So investing in CCS research has got to be a priority. In terms of prizes for companies that bring forward new ideas, in a world of carbon rationing and carbon markets, there ought to be strong economic 'prizes' for green technology - the key is to remove the barriers which prevent them getting to the commercial viability stage.

The position on nuclear - too little too late - had been given previously.

To support this policy it seems necessary to believe that CCS will actually work, and to be willing to gamble the planet's future on it working. Carbon capture is essential to the planet? Nuclear is too little too late. One could just as well say the opposite. Nuclear is essential to the planet, and CCS is too little too late. The second position has the advantage that nuclear is known to work, and building CCS-ready plant actually means building dirty coal plant.

So we face the same questions the Greens do, and we will continue to debate them, just as the Greens, er, oh...

Mr Goodall’s remarks had left many party members “seriously concerned”, the Green Party leader, Caroline Lucas, MEP, said last night. “It is of great concern to me that a candidate should be promoting a policy which is at odds with the party manifesto, and I shall be taking that forward,” she said. ...  Asked if this would include disciplinary action and possibly even de-selection as a candidate, Ms Lucas would only say: “We will be taking appropriate measures.”

What really bothers me about this - because of course parties should be able to remove candidates who reject their values - is that Goodall's position is being seen by the Green party not as a contribution to the debate on how to save the planet, but as a rejection of the idea that we should be saving the planet - as a rejection of the party's values.

And this way madness lies. If you happen to believe that technology A will do a job better than technology B, for empirical practical reasons, this says nothing about your political values. If, when you explain your reasons, people invoke disciplinary procedures, that does suggest a deliberate attempt to keep heads in the sand and protect sacred cows from any kind of criticism.

But as I have said in the past, it is only by debating these questions openly, by taking evidence on the chin when it hurts, that we stand any chance in the long run of getting the right answers.

Chris Goodall, if you're listening, have a look as well at some of the benefits of trade, enterprise, and science.

Greenpartywatch: Anarcho-communists ... wooo

Nicholas Blincoe turns up again with a fairly bizarre article on the Greens. The Tories, it seems are quite green because they are mates with some of the right people and some of the Green Party's founders were of a barking right wing bent.

I agree of course that the Lib Dems are greener than the Greens, when we consider what might actually work. Blincoe is even lighter on the detail here, and this is not really why I bring this up.

Réponse de resistance goes to Green blog the Daily Maybe. He quotes Blincoe on the new Green Left faction

"Their anti-capitalist, anarcho-communist ideas, found in their founding manifesto, the Headcorn Statement, make them the Wombles of green politics."

And here's the rebuttal:

Sounds alright doesn't it?

More greens queue up in the comments to endorse the sentiment.

I'm not going to rehash the arguments again - they are in this blog's history. But there is something tragic about what should have been the pre-eminent environmentalist political party being side-tracked into flawed and failed political ideology. Mind you Marx would never have stomached their irrationalism.

Blincoe meanwhile seems to attach some significance to the formation of the Green Left faction in 2006, as if this was anything new. "The Way Ahead" was formed in the early '90s, (the 1890s?) with much the same agenda. These groups are not born out of a change in the party's ideology, but out of a frustration the vanguardists have with the rest of the party not being able to articulate a non-communist position without sounding pro-capitalist. That sounding remotely pro-capitalist is such a no-no indicates where the party as a whole is at, and has been at for a decade.

As for being entryists... no, to be an entryist you must have an agenda that the organisation you are joining does not already share.

Greens would condemn billions to poverty

I posted on a liberal view of Sheffield a letter I sent to the Sheffield Telegraph in which I suggested that Green Party hostility to business and trade threatened to condemn millions to poverty - billions worldwide. The Greens have replied to a similar letter to the Sheffield Star, and this is what they say:

As for Lib Dem Joe Otten's claim that our policies would be bad for business, we
are the only party to recognise fully the damage often done to the local economy
by inappropriate developments. This is why we vigorously opposed Sheffield's
Supercasino bid, and the current proposals for the New Retail Quarter and a new
market near the Moor.

The theme here is that according to the greens, there are two kinds of business. Local/small business which is good, and global/big business which is bad. The local economy must be protected from the global economy. So far so familiar.

Of course real life is not so simple. I am a one man business, which is good, but I sell all over the world, which, presumably, is bad. Although my product is transmitted electronically rather than by air freight, which is good. But it is software, so perhaps charging for it at all is bad.

Is the problem with the supercasino that it will damage all our small local casinos? I wonder.

Does this rebuttal deal with my unqualified claim that greens are hostile to business? Well no it doesn't. Big and small businesses each have their different strengths and weaknesses. Big business can pour resources into a problem. Small business can adapt rapidly, and know its customers. Each is successful where its relative strengths are decisive. Hostility to business in this case might mean refusing to recognise the benefits of this diversity and trying to impose a single model.

The bizarre thing about this belief in the moral superiority of small and local business is that it has very little to do with environmental sustainability - or - for that matter other social goods like wages and employment conditions. Why is it that greens are fascinated by what size a business is even more, seemingly, than how much pollution it generates?

Of course there are examples of good small business, contributing to civil society over and above what might be strictly necessary. And there are examples of bad big business. But the reverse examples can be found too. These examples mean very little - if you have a policy to deal with problem behaviour, shouldn't it apply equally to businesses of all sizes?

Now we do have some excellent local shops in Sheffield. One of the things that makes them excellent is that they must compete for trade. If everybody went only to their nearest shops, we wouldn't be rewarding competitiveness, we would be rewarding price gougers. Maybe you think your local shopkeeper is just too decent to gouge, and maybe they are. If so, that would be because gougers don't tend to run that sort of shop. If we rewarded them to, they would.

Wronger than the idea of protecting local business, however, is this idea of the local economy as the antithesis of the global economy. Almost all high value innovations demand a great deal of specialisation. Medicine, technology, art, you name it, to justify doing one particular thing very well indeed we need to be able to sell it worldwide. Cut off from trade it would be quite impossible to have much medicine, quality goods, never mind good renewable energy and so on. The way to build your local economy, then, is to provide goods and services in high demand and sell them as widely as possible. And with your earnings buy from elsewhere rather than trying to make do, or you will forego all the benefits of your earnings.

These are practical considerations which must trump a baseless prejudice for the small and local. Where this lesson has been learned - in much of Asia-Pacific for example - prosperity has followed. Yes, there is an environmental footprint to this - but imagine the alternative - of making do with cobbled together home grown versions of everything. If it were possible, wouldn't the environmental footprint be even higher? But it isn't possible, without specialisation and trade, to achieve anything like the standard of living people worldwide rightly demand. To try would condemn billions to poverty for no environmental benefit.

Greenpartywatch: Derek Wall elected Principal Speaker

I remember Derek from my Green Party days. He always seemed to keep out of the way of the rest of the party, you would find him in the bar, or at his own fringe meetings, plugging books, grumbling that the party wasn't Marxist enough.

Derek is articulate and intelligent. He wrote a history of the Green Party, part 1 of which I referred to earlier. Part 2, part 3, part 4. All quite frank and interesting.

But the thing is that Derek's politics are way out there. They always were a bit extreme even for the Green Party! Probably the party has now moved a little to meet him, all the more reason to expose it for what it is.

In his own words (from here):

Marxism is a sophisticated, subtle, philosophical system with inexhaustible insights. As an eco-Marxist I believe that only a socialist society will meet human needs and sustain ecological diversity, politics is based on class struggle, it isn't a matter of changing a few laws we live in a social totality that is utterly destructive and must be replaced.

I used to think this sort of revolutionary talk was benign but misguided. I no longer think it remotely benign. Revolutions in democratic societies make things worse. There are problems intrinsic to Marxism that make something like Stalinism fairly inevitable. An awful lot of what we enjoy in modern western societies is extremely good: human rights, prosperity, freedom, public services and so on. This is not a totality that is utterly destructive, and anybody who suggests it is clearly hasn't the slightest idea of what they should be fighting for.

Tags: Greenpartywatch, Green Party, Derek Wall

Veritas in 2040

What will the veritas party be like in 2040, if it still exists? Or UKIP for that matter. For a history lesson, we need only look at an embryonic political party, in the early 1970s, initially called PEOPLE, whose colours were red, white and blue.

Inspired by an article in Playboy, featuring Teddy Goldsmith, can you guess what it is yet?

I will post the link to the full article at the end of this post, but first here are some gems:

Right-wing zoo owner John Aspinall supported the campaign, supplying dozens of canvassers drawn from his London casino. Goldsmith disguised his mainly longhaired student supporters as Arabs and borrowed a camel from Aspinall to launch a highly visual assault on the soil erosion, which to this day is turning Sudbury into a region of the Sahara.

The first thing that Goldsmith’s handout stressed was that his father, Major Goldsmith OBE, had been Conservative MP for Stowmarket”, noting that there was “nothing to be proud of there”. The leaflet contained ... very Conservative statements amongst the prophecies of doom”, including attacks on women who worked and thus neglected “essential maternal duties” and the “all pervasive welfare state” that “mollycoddles the population”, as well as support for the family unity as a means of discouraging crime and dissent.

Derek Wall, the author of this excellent history, is most agreeable in person, but as a Marxist, quite wrong, even by the standards of the Green Party.

Tags: Green Party, Greenpartywatch