Green Party

Not alternatives to Labour

Many socialists, trade unionists and campaigners who would usually vote Labour are thinking of supporting Respect, the Green Party or the Lib Dems as an alternative to Labour in the coming general election. We examine the manifestos of these parties to see whether they deserve such hopes being pinned on them. Respect Respect's manifesto, "Peace, Justice, Equality", was launched on 17 April. An alternative title for it might have been "For good stuff, against bad stuff". The booklet cover (green circle on a red background) bears a strange resemblance to the Bangladeshi flag (red circle on a...

The left and the elections: Are the Greens an alternative?

Sacha Ismail and Peter Tatchell debate the issues Sacha Ismail Most of those present at the London AWL forum on 20 January will have agreed with much of speaker Peter Tatchell’s diagnosis of “What’s wrong with the left” (see transcript Solidarity 3/66) — that, increasingly, most self-styled revolutionary socialists substitute an entirely negative, classless “anti-imperialism” for the positive criteria of working-class struggle and consistent democracy. More controversial was Tatchell’s proposed solution for the moral collapse of the left. He advocates that socialists do as he has done and join...

Will profit wreck the Earth?

In January the International Climate Change Taskforce Report concluded that drastic action was necessary to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and stave off immensely damaging and irreversible climate change. On 16 February the Kyoto Protocol on limiting emissions came into operation. We asked environmental campaigners for their evaluations and for their thoughts on alternative energy sources and use. Less spin please Dr Spencer Fitzgibbons, Green Party spokesperson on Climate Change We keep seeing official reports predicting disaster on climate change, but governments simply go on increasing...

Groundswell: the rise of the Greens

by Amanda Lohrey in Quarterly Essay, No. 8 2002 Amanda Lohrey's essay on the history of the Greens proclaims "the political potency of ecology". "This movement and its ecological narrative have the power to subsume the traditional grand narratives of capital and labour and indeed to some degree they already have." "The Green constituency is based on…a new paradigm or grand narrative of what politics is about, i.e. the 'ecological'." She attributes this to the material reality of environmental destruction as an issue of universal impact, though (by the way) with greatest impact on the poorest...

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