The Green party’s antisemitic ‘Zionism is racism’ motion puts them bizarrely at odds with the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which recognises the state of Israel. And on the economy, their policies are simply delusional, says Eliot Wilson
At its recent conference in Brighton, the Green Party of England and Wales affirmed a set of policies which, in Yes, Minister terms would, be described as “bold”, even “courageous”. It is now the task of party leader Zack Polanski, fresh from his narrow defeat in last week’s Holborn and St Pancras by-election, to forge a coherent, popular and credible policy platform.
Different parties approach their annual conferences differently. The Labour Party conference allows delegates of affiliated organisations (principally trades unions) and of constituency associations to vote on policies but these votes are non-binding.
The Conservatives, by contrast, have never included the annual gathering of members in the decision-making process, regarding it instead as a networking, entertaining and, often, plotting opportunity. AJ Balfour, the patrician, philosophically sceptical Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905, famously said, “I would as soon be guided by the views of my valet as by the Conservative Party Conference”. Good valets are hard to find.
The Green Party allows members to submit and vote on binding policy motions directly. At its recent conference one motion stated that Zionism is racism “based upon European settler-colonial systems of domination and oppression”, declared the Greens an anti-Zionist party and called for “a single democratic Palestinian State between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea with equal rights for all”.
This puts them at odds with the traditional mantra of a “two-state solution” and at odds, bizarrely, with Fatah, the dominant faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which recognises the State of Israel. It is yet further at odds with reality, if Greens think a single state of Palestine “from the river to the sea” would be safe for the region’s 7.5m Jews. But reality and the safety of Jewish populations do not feature high up on the party’s list of priorities.
Statist philosophy
On the economy, trumpeting its desire to “put people and planet ahead of fiscal rules” – perhaps not British history’s most catchy political slogan – the conference affirmed a number of significant policies. They fall under the dim-bulb assertion that we must go “beyond an obsession with GDP and interest rates to focus on what really matters: improving people’s lives”. GDP is a metric, a way of measuring how prosperous a country is. The idea that interest rates have no bearing on “improving people’s lives” is also a peculiar one.
The overall philosophy is profoundly statist. The Greens advocate “greater public control of banking and finance and more public investment to prioritise essential services”, which is another way of saying they want to spend more taxpayers’ money on public services, and “into affordable homes, good jobs and the green transition”. A publicly owned retail bank, “a network of local and regional community banks to fund small and medium businesses” and limits on the size of private banks indicate a party fundamentally opposed to private wealth.
The conference called for more to be spent on “the real National Health Service we deserve”, with all forms of care delivered exclusively by the state and including dentistry, optometry and pharmaceutical products. This amounts to ever-greater spending on healthcare as the population ages and treatments become more widespread, more elaborate and more expensive. This is missing the point on a grand scale: it is hard to look at the NHS over the past 20 years and conclude that the problem has been too little spending on too few services.
Inevitably there has been support for a three-year emergency brake on rental costs. Rents will not rise “above CPI, wage growth or two per cent – whichever is lowest”, following which there would be a national Fair Rent Guarantee. In practical terms, this is rigging the housing market. We know that rent controls in New York, San Francisco and Berlin, at least, discouraged investment and adequate maintenance as well as causing shortages of appropriate provision, while entrenching existing tenants.
Given a shortage of housing in the UK, the effects of discouraging more landlords from entering the market and reducing the margins of renting could be catastrophic. But the long-term real-world effects fade away for the Greens with the dopamine hit of performative virtue in public policy.
To this shopping list must be added a new system of social care, which “should be available to everyone who needs it and free at the point of use, just like the NHS is for healthcare”. The Greens themselves estimate this £20bn.
Where does the money come from for all of this? The Greens want a wealth tax of one per cent on individual assets above £10m and two per cent on assets above £1bn, as well as aligning Capital Gains Tax rates with income tax and applying National Insurance to investment income.
For the Greens, taxation and expenditure are only distantly linked (and only because voters prefer at least a loose association between how much of their money the government is taking and what they are getting in return)
Wealth taxes are extraordinarily difficult to implement: Austria, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Luxembourg and Sweden all introduced wealth taxes in the 1990s and 2000s, and by 2007 all had repealed them. But remember what Zack Polanski told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg about a wealth tax last autumn: “This isn’t about creating public investment, we can do that anyway, we don’t need to tax the wealthy to do that… it’s ultimately about reducing inequality.”
For the Greens, taxation and expenditure are only distantly linked (and only because voters prefer at least a loose association between how much of their money the government is taking and what they are getting in return). Their maxim in l’état, c’est nous: the state is the primary and preferred device for creating a society in their image, and that means much greater use of legislative and fiscal coercion combined with unsustainable financial binges on favoured projects.
Current polling puts the Greens on around 10 per cent, scrapping with the Liberal Democrats for fourth place, and facing the prospect of being reduced to just two MPs. But politics is volatile, and if Polanski embraces the malign prescription of his party’s conference, he has a seductive but always disastrous offer for the electorate: we can give you everything you want, and someone else will pay.
We are all that “someone else” and we would all pay. But history shows us the potency of die große Lüge, the “big lie”. A vast, sweeping untruth is much more likely to be believed. Let’s hope voters do not believe those spun by the Greens in Brighton earlier this month.
Eliot Wilson is a writer and historian