Simon T. Kaye

The UK Green Party is a political success story still in motion. They’ve managed to combat the strictures of our First-Past-The-Post electoral system to the point of getting their leader elected to Parliament. Meanwhile, Jenny Jones has just finished coming third in London’s mayoral elections, their campaign has brought them to third in London Assembly votes, and at the same time the party is making council gains in various spots around the country in the face of a resurgent Labour vote.

The most electorally successful hard-left political party in British political history?

People should know that when they vote for friendly, chatty Jenny Jones or nod along with Brighton’s Green MP Caroline Lucas, they are actually (and, I believe, unwittingly) supporting what is rapidly becoming the most electorally successful hard-left political party in British political history.

The Green Party, usually the repository for the votes of people who simply (and very legitimately) want to bring environmental issues firmly on to the agenda in British politics, espouses a set of economic and social policies that put them far to the left of the most radical governments of the UK’s twentieth century, and indeed to the left of the Labour Party even in the midst of Foot’s leadership.

The main issue seems to be that nobody – least of all the people who find themselves voting for them – ever seems to have read the actual body of Green Party manifesto documents, or clicked more than three hyperlinks on the Green Party website. And the party itself seems to be complicit in the two-facedness of their public presentation. Jenny Jones’ website contains nary a hint of the Green Party’s vast hinterland of policy ideas, for example.

So let’s look at those Green policy plans in detail. You’ll see that these are set out in plain prose, with quotation marks – I thought about putting links in, but their policy website (which I link to at the end of this post) is so thick with examples of this sort that I thought it might be even better for people to dig through themselves, as I did.

• Let’s start with a biggy: The Green Party would introduce a universal ‘Citizen’s Income’: “an unconditional, non-withdrawable income payable to each individual as a right of citizenship. It will not be subject to means-testing, and there will be no requirement to be either working or actively seeking work.” This extraordinary policy would effectively destroy any semblance of a market in jobs, and eliminate any connection between state-provided incomes and a commitment to go to work. The sustainability of such a policy is highly questionable. Elsewhere, the Greens claim that “the introduction of a Citizen’s Income would reduce the cost of labour to industry without pushing people into poverty”. This is very bad economics indeed. A citizen’s income would massively reduce incentives to work, creating a shortfall in the working population and increasing demand among industries; necessarily, this would lead to an increase in salaries, not a decrease.
• As an overarching ambition, the Green Party would seek to “Raise taxation from its current very low level of GDP … [as] the fiscal gap is not caused by too much public spending but by taxation dropping to unacceptably low levels.” Well, yeah, they’d have to! This statement is not accompanied by any indication of just how high the tax burden would rise under a Green government, though an allusion is made to an overall level of 40% of GDP in pre-Thatcher years. In fact, paying for the following policies would require tax levels closer to 60% or 70% of GDP.
• They would Change Capital Gains tax from current levels (18%) to “the recipient’s highest income tax rate” – so, a rate of up to 50%. They also aim to increase inheritance tax.
• The Green party would nearly double the current basic pension to £170 a week. The current pensions system is already unsustainable, with a top-heavy, ageing national demographic proving difficult to support at current levels of productivity. The Greens are talking about doubling the pensions black hole, up from £56 billion to £110 billion each year.
• On housing, the Greens promote several extraordinary policies, including “the right to rent” – that is, where homeowners find themselves in difficulty paying their mortgages, the local council will allow them to “rent their existing home as council housing”. The cost of this policy is practically incalculable, and detail on this policy is thin indeed, but at the very least such a commitment would enshrine as a right an individual’s habitation of a given house, irrespective of their ability to afford it, and necessarily transfer all debts of this sort straight to the state.
• The Green Party wants “a national Minimum Wage of 60% of net national average earnings”, which would be something between £8 and £9 per hour. This is, of course, an interim measure until the introduction of the Citizen’s Income.
• They would legislate to reduce the full-time working week from 43.5 hours to 35 hours. This is mainly promoted as a way to reduce carbon output, but would put the British working week alongside France, and far, far south of the week-lengths of the world’s economically competitive nations.
• The Green Party aims to nationalise the railways and the London Underground, both operators and tracks.
• They would replace land ownership – in the current sense of freeholders’ rights – with a kind of land-use planning system, where the state grants usage rights to individuals on the basis of some assessment. This would also be accompanied by a Land Value Tax, an additional tariff on the worth (in terms of productive value) of owned land.
• All mains distribution of gas and electricity will be nationalised by a Green government. Public ownership of energy providers will be increased.

There’s more to see – these are just some of the most striking examples. I strongly advise current or prospective Green voters to properly review their policy platform at their rather dense policy website, http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/.

And there’s more to say here, beyond simply pointing out the version of communism that the Green Party is subtly peddling; perhaps I’ll put some more thoughts about that up here at some later date.

Now if somebody wants to come back and say “yes, I knew of each of the policies listed above, and I voted Green because of them”, then I will do nothing but celebrate your settled political ideology with you and wish you well. But my suspicion is that some of the above will come at least somewhat as a surprise to the earnest middle-class types who usually find themselves ‘going green’.

To finally summarise my main thought, here, then: green politics could be better served – indeed, deserve to be served better – than this country’s Green Party.