Natalie Bennett's interview today raises several questions, not least about what the hell the Greens were thinking when they decided to replace Caroline Lucas with her, a decision I likened on Facebook to having Napoleon march in the front rank of the infantry at Austerlitz because it would be Only Fair. I have long suspected the Greens of being a not-terribly-serious party, and this seems to further confirm it.
Many of my good friends support the party, though, because it provides a genuine leftwing alternative to the mainstream, and fair enough. Except that it is not a long-term solution to support an environmentalist party, since the new recruits of the 2015 intake will almost certainly suspect the old guard of being tie-dyed vegetarians with their heads full of soft organic cotton wool. Out of such divisions come immobilising party rifts built on mutual suspicion. Checking out the online comments of left-wingers who wanted to support the Greens, as they tear their hair out at the unpreparedness of the party for the big time, you see a vision of the future wherein the Greens become a permanent fixture of UK politics. The socialists will always blame the tree-huggers for being softies, and the party will either collapse or drift into infighting. One side will suspect that the others would let the working class drown if it meant they could keep their pious certainties, the other that the first would let the world drown if they could keep the working class in carbon-heavy jobs.
No-one really thought the future of the Left would seriously be rooted in environmentalism anyway. The labour movement has often made sympathetic noises to it, but the roots of the two are as fundamentally different as that with Liberalism and Toryism, and no longterm fusion can be made. Die Linke remain apart from Die Grünen in Germany, and they will here too. Even the workaday canvasser in UK politics is trained to separate the two parties within the Greens out: Socialist Greens and Environmentalist Greens, and you can usually tell them apart just by asking about previous votes. Everyone knows the Left has fled to the Greens because they are a port in a storm, even if the lighthouse is solar-powered and the proposed wind farms to harness the power of the storm have gone massively over-budget.
So a question: in an era of multi-party politics, what would a good party for those Socialist Greens look like? Even by Leftwing standards a three-way split would be a bit much. That said, there is definitely a space for a British Syriza or Podemos, and it needn't have anything to do with the Greens. It needn't even be especially radical - imagine a party with Joe Stiglitz or Paul Krugman (hell, even Martin Wolf) as its policy chief, and you'd have something that rejected austerity in a way that Labour has definitely not, and wanted land value taxes and graduate taxes and the sort of thing Labour has simply stopped caring about. Free from the Green and labour traditions you might also have chance to resynthesise the left.
By which I mean that perhaps like the CIA, proper procedure with every leftwing party should be to disband and reform every couple of decades. The fact that the labour movement has deep roots makes it no more useful for uniting today's more disparate Left, proud as those roots are. The working class that powered it no longer exists, but there is still and will always be a strong radical tradition. The Tories will always be Tories because they have the same constituency they always did: the powerful. But why should the left pretend to be the same? Occupiers and UK Uncutters should be able to find a party where they are welcome, and the milquetoast Labour Party is not it. Nor are the Greens.
The key to uniting the left has never really been about policy, but about vitality. Socialists will accept anti-austerian Keynesian capitalists as their leaders if they think they're pushing the country in the right direction and are going to win. Which is why Blair was right to create New Labour, although he could have called it anything - it didn't need a tradition. It was only what he did with his victory that was a failure - a decent new leftwing party would have genuinely fought establishment interests until it became inevitably bogged down and corrupt, at which point it would disband and reform to try again. That is the job of radicalism. It is the opposite of revolution because it weakens revolutionary forces by giving them just enough progress. It is probably essential to a long-term democracy, and I fear we are losing sight of it.
Yet quite what policies a New English Radical Party (or a New Chartist Party, or New Levellers or whatever you like) could agree on I don't know. It's a question I mean to ask more over the coming months, but there's a lot of space for it, and little of it is covered with Greenery.
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