Polanski taking his eyes off the green ball is a gift for the Tories
- 9 hours ago
- 3 min read
Like an episode of 1970’s Doctor Who, the innocuous old Green Party has mutated into a dangerous monster, lurching about in lurid makeup and knocking over the scenery, no longer the harmless minor character it used to be. This has opened up a green space in the political landscape. The Conservatives are in many ways well-placed to move in, but need to move fast.
Some background. I was employed by the Green Party as a membership admin for around eighteen months in 2000-2001. I then paid the party no attention until 2015-16 when, in a fit of citizenly duty I felt it important to support the party of the environment, joined up, argued a bit on the members forum and attended a couple of conferences. So I’m not an activist, though perhaps I do pay more attention to politics than the average voter.
I have a few other brownie points as an environmentalist: I’m old enough to remember the first wave of eco-concern in the 70 s. I’ve interned for several small-g organisations and contributed in 2006 to Painting the Town Green, a discussion paper about why environmental communication is so bad. I was employed by the Soil Association for seven years and tutored a Sustainable Energy module for the Open University for five.
The Greens are no longer ‘the party of the environment’. Their offer to me at the last general election was that they were more indignant than Labour about Gaza. What the ...?! After Gorton and Denton I understood that I was not their target voter. I now have a Green MP (Bristol central) whom I strategically voted against and with whom I disagree on almost every important issue. At the last council elections my Green councillor, whom I knew slightly and had formed a very positive opinion of, was absent from the ballot paper. It turned out she was suspended from the party – effectively sacked from her job – for wrongthink. (She is not alone, as can be seen from the greensinexile website).
The reality of democracy is that news about this tack to the self-righteous left will not have reached everyone who voted Green and there might be an afterglow left by the impressive Caroline Lucas. The Green party took two seats from the Conservatives in 2024. This was prior to the accession of the shameless Zack Polanski, so you have no excuse for not taking them right back.
But there is much more than this because there has always been a strand of green thinking which overlaps with an important strand of conservative motivation – a pro-small-business, pro-allotments, localistic, self-reliant, mildly-libertarian stance. Roger Scruton, in Green Philosophy, argued that the only basis for environmental action, the only thing strong and stable enough to be a starting point for eco-action, is the natural love we all have for the local, the bit of the natural world that we belong to. Yes. I do not find the ‘left-right’ terminology useful and I prefer to say that my politics are primarily localist.
It is urgent that the Conservative party gets its environmental act together. This is from the Brightblue website, referring to the environmental communications thinker George Marshall:
“[he] delivered a stark warning for green conservatives. Some issues in the political lexicon, over time, become identity markers because of their prolonged association with one particular side of the spectrum. Should climate change become such an issue, conservatives will become automatically deaf to this major global challenge”
That was written ten years ago and the deafness is there in some quarters. We cannot allow the environment to become the property of the left because, as we have seen, it will abandon it at the drop of a keffiyeh. Even showing a public awareness that there are real issues here (and not just climate change) would be a plus for the Conservatives – when David Cameron made a show of greenery he almost convinced George Monbiot!
Right now, there's no party I feel I could vote for at the next election. That makes me persuadable – and I’ve chosen to write this on a Conservative website, not an insignificant choice. Come on – if I'm up for grabs, there will be others.
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