The Guardian view on the Green manifesto: the radical v the possible
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Version 0 of 1. In the straitjacket of Britain’s first-past-the-post politics it is notoriously tough to get a hearing for new ideas, let alone for new parties to move out of the fringes into the mainstream. The Liberals took two generations to recover from their postwar low, when their MPs could be counted on the fingers of one hand. It has taken the SNP a generation, as well as a devolved Scottish parliament, to rise to its current dominance. The Green party, in an earlier incarnation, came third in the 1989 European election campaign with well over 2m votes, nearly three times as many as the Social and Liberal Democrats. Now it is benefiting again from discontent and disillusion with the old politics and frustration at what some of its ex-Labour supporters think is too narrow a focus on conventional answers to political challenges that demand radical thinking. Its fresh faces and its passion have it snapping at the heels of the Liberal Democrats in some polls and it even briefly overtook them after the party was excluded from inital plans for the leaders’ debates. In January, it was recruiting 2,000 new members a day. There is a real hunger for something different. So its manifesto launch today was a big moment. The Greens have long moved on from being a purely environmental party. They rightly see that the great political imperative of tackling climate change means reimagining the whole political economy. And they certainly do that. Their headline idea is to replace GDP as a measure of economic wellbeing over time with adjusted national product, measuring goods like unpaid work and the depletion of natural resources. This is an idea not so distant from conventional thinking. The Office for National Statistics has already introduced a measure of national wellbeing; and finding an acceptable way of rethinking how we quantify what we value will be a necessary part of keeping global warming below 2C. But the Greens are also proposing an enormous punt on the economy. They plan an increase in borrowing over the lifetime of the parliament from £115bn to £338bn, a wealth tax on the richest 1% of the population that would, they claim, raise £25bn a year, and an increase in corporation tax to 30%. This would pay for boosting spending on the NHS by £12bn a year, the abolition of tuition fees, building 500,000 new homes, a 10% cut on rail fares and free universal childcare. This is the point at which the Greens move from making a real contribution to the debate about priorities – the section on environmental measures is full of ideas that ought to be mainstream within the next decade – to the politics of la-la land. A greener economy and ways of promoting green growth are exactly where the debate needs to be, but it is hard to imagine a democratically elected government being able to drive the eco-socialist transformation that the Greens appear to believe could be achieved in a single parliamentary term. The dilemma of all radical reform is building support for new ideas without sacrificing what makes them different. It can only be done from the front in the short term. Sooner or later, idealism and realism have to come to some sort of accommodation. |