It must be frustrating to be a dedicated member of any political party and feel like your colleagues and your policies are not getting the attention that they deserve.
For the Green Party, however, it must be particularly perplexing.
The world is going to hell in a Ryanair-powered, McDonalds-wrapped, north pole melting handbasket and yet the Green party can't get a single MP into Westminster.
I feel for them. I feel for them so much that I was a radish leaf's breadth away from voting for them in May, a dilemma I fear may return with a vengeance in the not so distant future.
So what is to be done? Well, George Osborne shouldn't be allowed to break up British banks until David Cameron has broken up Westminster with some form of PR. Lloyds Banking Group owns 30% of the mortgage market and people are aghast at the lack of choice. The Competition Commission should have been brought into London a long time ago to break up the Labour and Tory hegemony that has ensured barriers to entry for decades now.
Looking to the immediate future, how should the Green party approach the 2010 General Election?
Well, given the party achieved it's highest ever UK result in 2005, I guess it will be expecting to build on that and on the success of the European elections when it finished first in Norwich, Oxford and Brighton.
The big guns are standing where success is most likely to happen, most notably Caroline Lucas in Brighton where the Greens narrowly missed out on 2nd last time. No doubt activists will coalesce in constituency hotspots to maximise their chances.
So what about Scotland? Will Green party members megabus it down south to Norwich or Nationalised Express it all the way to Brighton or is there a fight to be fought up here in May 2010?
Well, I was surprised to hear that the Scottish Green party contested 19 seats in 2005 with Glasgow North seeing its top result of 7.7%, only 306 votes away from pipping the Tories, not that beating the Tories in Glasgow is necessarily a breakthrough in itself.
But there must be challenging decisions to be made in the not-so-distant future for Patrick Harvie and Team Green. Should the party branch out and contest more than 19 seats in May or should they set up roots and only contest several of them to try to force a shock win or a second place somewhere?
I would suggest the latter myself. Indeed, I know in my own constituency of Edinburgh North & Leith that the European election tussle was a genuine five-way contest so there's no reason why the Westminster election couldn't go the same way with a united Edinburgh front. (The results were: SNP - 4,965, Lab - 4,324, LD - 4,201, Tory - 4,199, Greens 4,014)
And for Westminster, with the blokey charm covered by the SNP and Tory candidates Calum Cashley and Iain McGill, the nerdy male politician adopted by the Lib Dem candidate Kevin Lang and the older, religious chap persona taken by the Labour incumbent Mark Lazarowicz, it would be interesting to see how a Green female candidate would fare in this seat, particularly with the hugely successful Greener Leith campaign group presumably on her side.
Maggie Chapman is the local Green councillor, could she put her hat in the ring and help even out the gender balance of candidates on offer?
Anyway, it's all speculation but as I get excited about the SNP's prospects at the next General Election I just can't help but shake off the bittersweet feelings that more passionate politicos than I must be feeling in the Green camp as they fight a First Past the Post process that will always work against them.
6 comments:
It's a good shout! I generally vote green as my 2nd preference, just to be able to let the big boys know that (some) green issues do matter, although I can be a bit sceptical about some of their claims.
I do consider the Greens more of a pressure group but I was a bit miffed that their home insulation scheme didn't get better consideration than it did at the last budget. Patrick Harvie played it very badly though - I have the benefit of hindsight of course, but it should have been bloody obvious that a budget was going to be passed if not 1st time, then 2nd time around. When it failed the 1st time, then the big boys (Labour and Lib dems) were always going to be able to trample all over the Green considerations.
The Home insulation scheme was a good idea and Harvie should have been focused on showing just how good it could be with the £30million he was promised rather than hanging out for £100million and getting nothing. I suppose he has to at least pretend that he has aspirations to be a main player to keep elements of his party interested, but I reckon they shot themselves in the foot and should be using this minority administration to better advantage than they have done thus far.
The biggest problem I see for the Greens though is that as soon as they start getting more popular, the mainstream parties simply have to adopt some of the more reasonable green stances and the Green's drop out of the running again, as Joe Public isn't actually as committed to the environment as the Greens might like to believe.
I'd suggest they might prefer to go for Edinburgh South myself, which is incidentally demographically the seat in Scotland with the largest proportion of students, as well as hosting two of their three Edinburgh councillors. Even that probably wouldn't bear much fruit for them though, since they'd get caught in a crossfire between Labour and the Lib Dems, who will be tussling over that seat like a pair of titans waving around five-figure campaign budgets and probably high-profile visits. North and Leith isn't going to get quite as much attention from the big two, but it is also going to be getting business from a very well-resourced local SNP. In the context of a Westminster election, the odds of them being able to get more than a fourth place and double digits aren't good - and that would take a lot of effort.
They could pull a double digit third in South if they were lucky, although that might come more at the expense of the Lib Dems and give Labour an easier hold than they deserve.
West is affluent enough for the Green message but perhaps doesn't have that indefinable metropolitan quality that also seems to be needed for their campaigns take root. South West likewise. East certainly has pockets of potential Greenity - it includes a chunk of the Old Town - but I can't see much of a prospect anywhere else.
Similarly they're not going to get anywhere in Glasgow. Glasgow North is their likeliest, but again there's a three-way fight that'll keep them squeezed down to fourth at best. Anywhere else is a save-the-deposit job.
I think a buses to Brighton approach is best.
"I feel for them. I feel for them so much that I was a radish leaf's breadth away from voting for them in May, a dilemma I fear may return with a vengeance in the not so distant future."
Given earlier comments about the local residency of a candidate, for an SNP member you seem very much like a swing voter.
Anon - Jeff is a middle class guy with a conscience.
Convention dictates that he must CONSIDER voting green...he's never going to do it though!
Thanks for the valuable thoughts Aswas, i'd struggle to disagree with any of it. And I don't know how anyone couldn't be a floating. You're not always going to think the same way four years to the next. As for the middle class question Sean, the only car I've seen in the past year and secretly coveted is a Volvo so make of that what you will ;)
Jim, i think we're on the same page. The insulation scheme was an interesting strand to follow and, yeah, probably a botched job but I reckon the Greens will play their hand better next time and maybe even get the full welly at 100m. Depends on other parties positions of course but if the Greens can campaign on that insulation scheme so close to 2011 (and 2010), it won't be a bad result all in all.
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