November 27, 2019 - 3:25pm
With less than three weeks to go until the General Election, polling for the Green Party doesn’t look pretty. The latest YouGov has them down at 2%, which is roughly where they were at the last election. Any hope that it would follow in the footsteps of its sister party in Germany, the second most popular party, is long gone.
It may sound counter-intuitive, but did the Greens miss a trick by not backing Brexit in the 2016 referendum?
Instead of resorting to limp arguments about ‘remain and reform’ in the EU — a slogan that even the most ardent Remainers don’t really believe in — the Greens could have presented a bold, exciting vision of a Green Brexit and drawn on support from across the political spectrum.
With party loyalty at its lowest point in decades, the Greens might have united liberals and small c conservatives under the banner of environmentalism — the Extinction Rebellion Left and the anti-corporatist Right. Representing global trade and the dogma of economic growth, the EU could have provided the perfect foil for drawing these two factions together.
Historically, Greens and Nigel Farage’s UKIP joined in opposition to free trade deals like TTIP, which they see as both an environmental scourge and a sell-out to corporations. Similarly, George Monbiot calls the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy ‘among the most powerful drivers of environmental destruction’ — and as he said on our podcast this week, it’s unreformable.
If the Greens were savvy enough, this dormant coalition of Leavers and Greens could have been awakened well before 2016. One glance at the Green 2015 party manifesto shows as much, promising to ‘prioritise local self-reliance rather than the EU’s unsustainable economics of free trade and growth’.
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SubscribeSo . . . in “cultivating roots and pruning branches”, perhaps we identify an indicator of the new way forward, which also happens to be the oldest way forward for civilization–agriculture.
Rather than striving for some ideally sculpted structure or profound art work, we ought to assure the future of human civilization by returning–literally– to its roots:
Plants. . . gardens tended and cultivated for the sake of feeding people while at the same time re-directing our creative sensibilities toward a new strain of art that is literally life-giving, pleasing to the eye as well as the body and the mind.
No one has the right to a child but all children have rights, we have responsibilities towards those children. Assisted fertility should be restricted to helping those conceive who have problems rather than those who could conceive with a partner, but for various reasons choose not to do so.