There's a yawning gap for the party to fill. While the Greens have traditionally been seen as a radical petit bourgeois party because, in all honesty, they were, its environmental and social justice messaging is resonating far beyond its narrow, traditional support base. There are events like the Palestinian genocide, the racist scapegoating of asylum seekers, the junking of environmental protections, and the experience of being at the sharp end of class inequality that are neglected by the mainstream but are nevertheless shaping politics, and are issues the Greens have ready answers for. And there is the wider shift in class relations as well, where the growing dominance of immaterial labour is reinforcing socially liberal values. The Greens' vibes resonate with ever wider layers of workers while its policy platform is largely consistent with their perception of their interests. For example among the cohorts most thoroughly socialised into the social competencies immaterial labour requires, the latest YouGov poll reports they are on 27% among 18-24 year olds, four points clear of Labour and 12 points ahead of the Tories and Reform combined.
As noted previously, there are a couple of obstacles in the Greens' way. Can Polanski keep hold of the small c conservatives that supported the party in Waveney Valley and North Herefordshire while going for the broadening progressive vote? And what about the new Corbyn/Sultana party? Indicative polling shows it could command up to a fifth of the electorate right out of the gate, and the silly numbers that have signed up to the mailing list casts a shadow that dwarves the aggregate size of the rest of Britain's political parties. The new left party will be fishing in similar waters, and then some. Polanski knows this, and welcomed its formation while holding out the possibility of cooperation. A putative alliance would apparently attract a third of all votes as a starting point.
You'll note that Labour isn't listed as an obstacle. Bullishly, Polanski has declared his ambition to replace it. After a summer of chasing Reform voters and reaping the reward of ever-declining polling, Labour are now congenitally incapable of fielding political arguments against the left. For example, this sponsored(!?) piece on LabourList tries building something out of Keir Starmer's "power, not protest" drivel. With a straight face, Robert Knowles-Leak, a self-styled specialist in combatting the Greens in (*checks notes*) Bristol, shamelessly accuses Polanski of pushing divisive politics and offering false hope. He says the Greens offer easy solutions and have broken promises in his home town by selling off council houses, without noting that Labour have done little to nothing to replace the 22,000 lost in the city since the early 1980s. An oversight, I'm sure. Summing up, he says serious parties listen to the electorate. But the Greens are listening to the electorate, it's Starmer, McSweeney and co. that have decided the people's priorities on the environment, on Gaza, on housing, and on the NHS are not worth bothering with. In other words, a weird little piece that reproduces every accusation-is-really-a-confession trope.
With nothing to offer progressive voters, Labour's defences against Polanski's eco-populism are so many chocolate fireguards. The Greens stand on the threshold of an historic opportunity, and every sign points towards their readiness to capitalise on it.
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19 comments:
Honestly Phil. How many times will a Green Party have to start out with a mish mash of radical policies, the German and Irish ones for starters, and often with some leaders originally with even revolutionary political backgrounds (ie, German Greens), for this to dissolve into utter opportunism at the first whiff of office , and those ministerial limos, for Lefties to grasp that they are inveterate petty bourgeois turncoats and opportunists root and branch ?
Apparently the Left will never learn, if your hype about the new Green leadership, and its typically chaotic current policy bundle is anything to go by. The Green policy bundle will never appeal beyond a small fraction of the privileged, but socially liberal middle classes. Sufficient to create a small electoral success base only used for opportunistic collaborations in dodgy coalitions & usually to facilitate austerity on behalf of Capital. Look at the Irish and German Greens political journey and weep.
Polanski's write ups in the mainstream press seem to have a really striking aura of establishment approval to them.
Why is this guy suddenly the one who is allowed to push this particular political message - which every political realist knows has been the elephant-in-the-room to vested interests since 2008 - without being immediately and constantly misrepresented and pilloried? Or even ignored?
There are all sorts of possible explanations. But as someone (me, in fact) pointed out in comments on this very blog some time ago; if it's really inevitable that the Thunberg generation will deliver the Green Party as a serious future contender for government, then the Machiavellian plutocrats and foreign intelligence agencies need to be getting their entryist plants into it already. And look, now their known friends and drinking buddies in the media have suddenly found a golden child.
Polanski's record has some encouraging notes in it, especially his involvement with XR. But even that is nothing which an ambitious (yet fundamentally untrustworthy) political climber who was the right age at the right time couldn't have seen to be merely a means to the end which he is positioning for now.
(A more hopeful explanation of media-approved Polanski fever is that some of those same plutocratic interests are beginning to rediscover the merits of the class warfare strategic retreat which their forebears adopted in the early post-war era. That they only ever intended Farage to be the bogeyman, and are alarmed at the possibility of his gang of ogres actually winning power.)
As noted previously, Green parties come in two flavours. As radical liberal parties subject to the same headwinds as straightforward bourgeois parties, and with similar effects (Germany, Ireland, etc.), or as green-left formations that operate as alternatives and counterweights to the mainstream centre left. It *seems* our Greens are heading in the latter direction, and should be encouraged to do so. I don't see any point in clinging to analyses that cannot describe the political realities and class dynamics as they exist now - unless one is weirdly invested in a take that might have had purchase 25 years ago.
There has always been a niche for student union populism e.g. there's loads of free money to subsidise economically unproductive ("socially useful") activities we just need to get it from Scrooge McDuck money bins of the rich. The question is can they come up with a pragmatic package of policies, which are properly costed, and which acknowledge all the trade offs required? This has always been the stumbling block for Greens. It's a stumbling block for Labour now, because they won power off the back of Tory collapse without a coherent policy package and have simply staggered on blindly. Labour, unlike the Greens or Reform for that matter, had the weight of the traditional two party paradigm to default them victory this time round.
Parties in Gov't, or who hope to be in Gov't, are constrained in different ways, some constraints are self-imposed; Gov't can change laws, renegotiate international agreements, set 'financial responsibility' rules etc, but some constraints are externally imposed e.g. what can be extracted in taxes before reaching wrong side of Laffer curve? At what level does a tax 'kill' an activity (like growth)? What can be borrowed before costs become unsustainable? What are the undesired second and third order effects of a course of action?
Can the Greens water down their ideological purity to deal with the trade-offs required from a serious party, or will their ideological purity ultimately limit them to being a quasi-virtue/luxury belief signalling party?
“Why is this guy suddenly the one who is allowed to push this particular political message….”
Those plutocrats are not daft. The NuGreens are the perfect antidote to an emerging popular left party led by Corbyn/Sultana. This is not a strategic ruling class retreat but rather a good old-fashioned offensive (colonialist) strategy of ‘divide and rule. By implicitly supporting (ie not aiming both barrels at) a party that is inevitably going to be an Establishment patsy, they hope to strangle at birth any real radical opposition. The UK’s voting system means splitting the ‘progressive’ vote is a simple and effective way to ensure a victory for a neoliberal party. Farage’s mob would be just as welcome to these plutocrats as a Starmer’s authentocrats (see Joe Kennedy) or even the Kamikaze kids.
For the alert socialist, in fact anyone who has seen the rise of blatant opportunists of supposed Left and Right , promising radical policies over the many decades , across many countries, everything about the very recently Lib Dem, ex hypnotherapist, theatre person, claimed "eco populist" (a meaningless term that actually says nothing concrete) , Zack Polanski, positively screams "dodgy opportunist". The middle class Left fooled again.
The managed theatre of UK bourgeois "democracy" is being supplied with a distracting tame radical on the "Left" to neatly bookend that entirely MSM - created pseudo radical of the radical Right, Nigel Farage. Dearie me. I would have thought after the placement of the Deep state and Trilateral Commission's man, ex DPP Starmer, as leader of the Labour Party , and now authoritarian PM, the Left would be a bit more cynical and aware . But nope, hope springs eternal.
I think another big factor in Zack's victory right now is his unwavering commitment to trans rights, as this has become another important criterion for people to receive support from progressive voters under 40, and Adrian Ramsay made a real point of saying he supported the Supreme Court ruling.
The trans rights issue is a big advantage he has over Your Party, too. If the Greens are able to fight as the only socially progressive option on offer, their prospects will correspondingly rise. Of their opponents, only the Lib Dems aren’t actively tainted at this point. OTOH, Your Party is a very new outfit, and the bigots might get defenestrated, so that’s a fairly significant ‘if’.
Werent the Greens anti worker in Brighton, which is one of the places theyve actually had some power ? Not that them having that stance should be a surprise. These are the sorts of people who would of probably, directly or indirectly, welcomed Thatcher closing the pits.
Kamo, the Laffer Curve is sumply nonsense, ie, the claim that MORE tax revenue is secured by a state at lower levels of taxation of the superrich and big corporations than higher tax levels aimed specifically at their wealth and profits, is entirely discredited by a lot of research not derived from the ideological academic handmaidens of the rich.
Abolishing all the tax havens and carefully constructed loopholes that the consultants employed by the likes of our Inland Revenue to advise on tax policy have deliberately inserted in the regulations would scotch the ability of big corporations and the rich to avoid fair taxation. This simply doesn,t happen because our entire political class is bought and sold to not implement effective tax collection, and HMRC is riddled with revolving door consultants. The Richard Murphy blog is a good place to get the real picture on how to easily tax the rich effectively. Have a gander at that and you might stop citing the Laffer Curve, and other similarly stale neoliberal ideological nonsense.
Anon, I'm guessing that you're new here, based upon your belief that Kamo might ever cease citing stale nonsense (and generally attempting to muddy the waters of serious discussion)!
Ah, that does at least seem to rule Moldemort out from his present set of backers!
Although I'm sure that later, at some point when he's no longer quite so dependent upon the goodwill of young leftists, he might be persuaded to see the merits of the anti-trans position via the waving of a suitably sized cheque in front of him.
Which analyses and takes from 25 years ago did you mean here? I genuinely can't tell.
... Ah, just after pushing "publish" on that previous message, I have noticed the comment which you were obviously replying to. Mea culpa.
Notable in today's headlines is that McSweeney is finally trying to depose Rayner. Perhaps he's feeling nervous about Starmer's near-term viability as leader? Obviously, Sir Keir simply can't be allowed to fall as long as there's any possible available replacement who isn't strictly a continuity candidate.
Phil, Polanski was a Lib Dem in throughout the Tory coalition years, only defected to the Greens in 2017 when he was in his thirties because he couldn’t get selected as a candidate for the Lib Dems in a winnable London Assembly seat, and he previously attacked and smeared Corbyn and his supporters. This manoeuvring to posture as an “eco-populist” is obvious snake oil salesman stuff that will almost certainly end in tears for the left. Doesn't anybody notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!
Look at who is positioned where in the Green Party right now. Who holds the real, permanent positions of power over the apparat? Who administers and counts the votes? How could those people be replaced by someone who might come from a different internal faction?
Suppose hypothetically that Zack is effectively a plant by the usual set of top-tier parasites. If he were to lead the party to serious gains in electoral heft, but then somehow need to be replaced by someone else... how would the parasites make sure that he couldn't be replaced by someone who might genuinely threaten them?
This is the post-2015 era, and the establishment ghouls are freshly recovered from one serious shock to their absolute control of the Overton Window.
If the greens are now being allowed to present a genuinely resonant left wing political message, without the establishment media fighting them tooth and nail every inch of the way, then perhaps the agents of capital feel like they already have the Party sewn up.
The Laffer Curve isn't nonsense, the return from any tax is a curve, at some point it reaches the peak. This varies between taxes; when it comes to aggregate taxation it's difficult to pinpoint exactly where the peak is. So far, so mundane. The concept triggers some people because A) they take it as matter of faith you can always get more from tax or B) they accept the Laffer Curve is real but for political expediency pretend the fiscal regime is always before the peak. Where it gets interesting is people who deny Laffer Curve exists, but support punitive Pigou taxes like tobacco duties, they implicitly accept incentives matter, that taxation changes behaviour, that taxes suppress economic activity, whilst also explicitly denying the mechanism exists.
Fortunately the Treasury employ real economists, they know the Laffer Curve is real and they attempt to steer the Gov't away from the more batshit populist ideas likely to put tax receipts on the wrong side. But what is good politics is not always good economics (and vice versa), in the case of tobacco taxes the UK is well and truly on the wrong side of the Laffer Curve and deliberately so, the costs of treating tobacco related illness is lower than the revenue historically raised from tobacco taxes, but the decision is a public health one not economic. This is the kind of pragmatic stuff that political parties that actually want power have to deal with, this is where ideological purity collides with reality.
Give it a break, Kamo, the Laffer Curve is self serving neoliberal ideological nonsense, as are most of your trolling comments. This is a new golden age of the superrich so inequitable is current wealth and income distribution. The big corporations and superrich can only escape increased taxation because they have made sure the loopholes exist , plus tax havens, to facilitate avoiding paying. This , and your "taxation equals disincentives to enterprise" guff has been repeatedly disproved by economists not in the pay of the very corporations and rich who benefit from its bogus claims. Richard Murphy of tax justice network blog explains in detail how to tax the superrich and multinationals effectively . Your trolling with this regular neoliberal nonsense is tiresome.
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