At midnight tonight, we should learn that Boris Johnson is the new mayor of London, and for me the process of watching election results come in will end 25 hours after it begun. This is the closest someone like me gets to listening to the football. Anyway I was there in Manchester town hall last night running around in a baggy pink Unite Against Fascism t-shirt (my plan had been to embarrass the BNP, but we were kept apart. In hindsight, it’s probably a good thing that I didn’t provoke the Nazis) and generally needling the more uptight representatives of the Mancunian political class (loudly referring to Labour and Lib Dem cadres as “Red Tory, Yellow Tory, Red Tory, Yellow Tory…” was fun), and ostensibly making sure no-one cheated (to justify my presence in this role, I sidled up to the nearest Lib-Dem-with-clipboard, saying “I sure hope yis are not planning on cheating ‘cos, y’know, we’re here watching”. He didn’t find it as funny as I did, pretty much exploding in my face to the bemusement of the vote-counters). A fun night was had by all, after which the intense campaigning of the last few weeks caught up with your humble narrator and his exhausted comrades.
Anyway, enough anecdote, and on to the analysis.
As you may have gathered, Labour have taken quite the beating - down to third place in terms of the total vote, behind even the Lib Dems whose performance was hardly inspiring - and the Tories look set to take the London mayor’s office and, most likely, to win at the next general election. Meanwhile the Left List have shown that we’ve survived the split of Respect and remain a force to be reckoned with, although there’s no denying that we’re still a very small party. At the other end of the spectrum, the Nazis aren’t getting quite the breakthrough they’d hoped for (update: now the London results are in, I take that back. They’ve not broken through in Manchester, but in London they’ve made a scary amount of progress) but any progress on their part is very alarming indeed.
The results of course, are only part of the story, but they point at a major realignment of British politics.
Let’s start with London. While Johnston’s clownish Have I Got News For You persona no doubt helped him, yesterday was less a case of him winning than of Livingstone losing. While campaigning to keep his job, Livingstone seemed to have completely forgotten how he got it in the first place. He saw a challenge from the hard right, and swung rightwards to compete for the right-of-centre votes, assuming the left-leaning types would have no choice but to back him. Eight years ago, he was the one undermining New Labour’s employment of that exact same logic, providing Londoners with a real choice. This time he has deprived them of this choice, reassimilitating himself into New Labour and sounding increasingly Toryish on crime, trade unions and privatisation.
Despite his attempt to be Boris-lite, Ken remains a lot better than Boris - particularly on race relations and the environment - but even that ended up meaning very little. Even if Livingstone scraped through on second-preference votes, he would have presided over a Tory-dominated GLA and, believe it or not, had even promised to include Boris in his next cabinet. Thus, there was no way to convincingly vote against Boris; those who wanted a Tory voted actual Tory over Tory-lite and those who didn’t had little choice but to stay home. If Livingstone-2000 had stood this year, he would have wiped the floor with Johnson, Paddick and Livingstone-2008 put together.
The reasons for Labour’s decline nationally was very much the same story. Labour voters moved to the Tories and the Liberals not because they no longer wanted the party of the working class in office, but because they no longer saw Labour as the party of the working class. We never left the Labour party; the Labour party left us. Likewise, the ascent of the Liberals that seemed inevitable under the cuddly, left-leaning, antiwar (or at least “not yet entirely convinced of the case for war”) Charles Kennedy has been halted since the coup of the hard-neoliberal Orange Book crowd. The Liberals have quickly gone from siding with the solution to siding with the problem.
And so, voting Tory is not voting for the Tories, it’s the protest vote of the desperate. Even the BBC paused from its ongoing rightward journey to remark that:
we should be cautious about drawing direct parallels between Gordon Brown’s current miseries and those of the John Major in 1995. There could well be a “tipping point” for the Conservatives as there was for Labour in the mid 1990s but it hasn’t happened yet according to the opinion polls.
Perhaps one reason the Conservatives have not yet been able to marshal the level of support which rallied to Labour more than a decade ago can be found in the depressing answers to a question asked in the BBC’s election night programme opinion poll.
ICM asked respondents which party “can be trusted to keep its promises”? Some 17% said the Conservatives, 17% said Labour and 16% said the Lib Dems. But 58% said “none of them”. It doesn’t seem to be difficult to persuade people that your political opponents aren’t up to the job. But it seems much harder these days to persuade them that you are.
I don’t find that “depressing” actually; I find it heartening that people have sharpened their analysis to that point. But this is what happens when Labour are in power. When Labour are in, the problem is that even when the agents of the capitalist state are elected from the working class by the working class, they inevitably come to attack the working class. When the Tories are in, the problem is that the Tories are in. This is why we must be doubly afraid of the next Tory government; not just because they will be nastier than Labour could ever manage (and they will be), but because we will have to compete with Labour in the battle of ideas.
Anyway, let’s not jump off that bridge until we come to it. Under the Tory government, the contradictions of New Labour will fade into the background, granted, but we still have two more years of a Labour government to deal with in the meantime, and it is in this meantime that those contradictions will become more glaring than ever. The past ten years have been good to the British economy, good to the British working class, and it would have been possible to accomodate a lot of the workers’ demands if they’d been organised enough, post-Thatcher, to really make any, and even then New Labour spent more time pursuing a punitive neoliberal agenda than paying lip-service to its heartlanders (the Tories, remember, would be able to abandon even that lip-service) - so imagine what they’ll do now the joyless boom is giving way to the even less joyful bust.
We’re already seeing it, with the incomes policy - the pay freeze, the benefits squeeze, the 10p tax fraud - that has sent Gordon Brown on the sharpest popularity plummet since Neville Chamberlain failed to Stop The War, and when he promises tough leadership for tough circumstances he is promising more of the same, and harder. That’s partly because there are only so many ways for the party of big business to react to an economic slump, but more than anything because of the political landscape. The logic of triangulation will lead the Labour party leadership and many of their surviving activists to a very dangerous conclusion: that the swing towards Tory votes represents a swing towards Tory attitudes. If you thought they were trying to out-Tory the Tories before, you should see how they react to this.
With a bit of luck, the other half of the Labour party will see things differently. There are those who resigned themselves to the compromises of Old Labour long ago, but never felt quite right about the evil schemes of New Labour. In times like these, they will know exactly why they’re not getting the votes: they’ve become the party they always hated. They may have wished, for a long time, for a leftier kind of Labour, and they will see that now is the time to make it so. The New Labour project hangs together during the good times, but in a real crisis we will see a real polarisation between a leadership swinging right and a support base swinging left.
This happened, to an extent, with the Iraq war. Then, as now, a lot of us swore off ever voting Labour again, and we saw some high-profile dissent: Robin Cook resigned from his position, Clare Short resigned from the party, and George Galloway went right over to what we hoped would become the new left. This rebellion was much too small to amount to anything big, and the Respect party had already fallen short of our wildest hopes long before a significant chunk of it cracked off under the weight of Galloway’s ego. However, we’re already seeing much more discontent and disillusion than we did then, with even the most loyal of Labourites starting to look tentatively leftwards.
The first voter I met at the polling station on election day came straight out with the question: “are you Labour?!” He was very disappointed, it turned out, that no representatives of the Labour Party were present because he’d got up especially to shout at them for privatising his council house. We’d campaigned heavily against the council house privatisation, and in the end we convinced him that a Left List vote would make his point more effectively. Our campaigning struck a chord with a lot of disaffected Labour voters, and even some of those that didn’t quite make the jump confessed to have had a really tough time making the decision, congratulated us and even thanked us for dragging the debate leftwards after decades of it drifting toward the right.
Then there’s the trade unions, the crucial link between Labour and the working class vote. So far, the unions to really stand up to the pay freeze have been those that weren’t linked to Labour in the first place, and the joint action we’ve seen recently gives me hope that they could be at the heart of a new alignment; Mark Serwotka, the general secretary of the PCS union, has already given the Left List a hearty endorsement. Such unions remain the exception, rather than the rule. My stepmum’s union just endorsed the pay freeze, while mine didn’t stop at telling me to vote Labour, it even invited me to a social where Hazel Blears, the bane of Salford, will teach us how the party and the union can work together more effectively. Bleurgh.
But then, my stepmum left her union in disgust, and I’m seriously thinking of doing the same. This is one half of the unions’ state of flux; the other is, as industrial action and class action become more of an issue, that workers are joining unions with precisely these things on their mind. Given a significant victory for the fighting unions and their political allies, and I think the bureaucrats who insist on backing Labour through thick and thin (who, let’s face it, would vote Labour even if Gordon Brown bombed their houses and shot their kids because, after all, it’s better than having a Tory bomb your house and shoot your kids) will find themselves very isolated indeed. That victory is what we’re waiting for. We point at our campaign to save council houses, and the council houses weren’t saved; we point at the united strikes against the pay freeze, and the pay freeze wasn’t broken. This hurts our argument, but just wait until we can show that is it an option to fight the power, it is an option to win!
As revolutionaries, we like elections but we don’t love them. This has been a chance for us to engage with the class, and a chance for them to guage the standing of the different parties. The important part begins now, now that Labour have been fully discredited, now that we can build an alternative - so that when the Tory government does come in, we’ll be ready to take them on. This has happened in France already - we were terrified of what the Sarkozy government would do, but they’ve barely been able to get away with anything - and there’s no reason we can’t make it happen here too.
Update:
The London results were worse than even I had feared. Not only is Boris in, but the BNP have got a seat on the assembly and even the National Front are coming out of the woodwork with tens of thousands of votes. The Left List, meanwhile, got creamed - only in two constituencies did we break through the 3% barrier, and in many we failed to get even 1% - but in the one constituency where the faction that got to keep the Respect name was standing they actually did rather well.
I think the message to take home is this: in Manchester, Birmingham and Sheffield, where we could effectively canvass and reach out to people, Left List did very well. In London, no-one had heard of the new name, and still looked for Respect; where they saw the Respect name, that candidate did very well.
Politically, this shows that a Left-of-Labour challenge can still be very credible. Practically, it means that it will be more difficult for the Left List to claim that credibility in the eyes of the class, the unions, and those who Labour has abandoned, especially as more of those eyes will be on London than on Preston or Bolton. The kind of left realignment I talked about will be much harder than it would have been without the split.
But what can you do? All this means is that the we’ll have to be even more serious about building a movement when the elections aren’t on - especially during the strike wave that is surely coming and, looking at the London votes, by building antifascist demos - and really that’s where we should be focusing our energies anyway. Still…
All that said, now that the London results are coming in we can see that the Left List have taken a real hammering there.
I think a lot of this is down to the complicated structure of the London elections, which makes the issues surrounding the split a lot more severe. Also a lot of our old voters may not have got the point that you can block Boris while still voting Lindsey; they may have voted Ken 1 instead of Lindsey 1 Ken 2.
Still, it’s happened, and it will make it a lot harder for all the above to come to fruition.
And then there’s the fascists to think about. It’s not just the left that picks up disaffected Labour voters, not by any means, and there’s a reason that the ruling parties and mainstream media like to pander to racism even as they censor the left by omission.
In fact, if the mayoral contest is any clue to how the GLA elections we go, it’s significantly worse than i’d have predicted - both in terms of high BNP vote and low left vote. Of course, for us this was always going to be about damage control; we had to launch a new brand with only a couple of months notice (as late as Feb, we were hoping to keep control of the “Respect” name), and it’s becoming clear that barely anyone has heard of us. Still. Fuck.
click here to see the results as they come in.
“who, let’s face it, would vote Labour even if Gordon Brown bombed their houses and shot their kids because, after all, it’s better than having a Tory bomb your house and shoot your kids”
Expect to be hired any minute by NuLab’s election marketing team.
So Boris won, and quite convincingly too. It’s also become clear that the name thing really did hurt us in London, because in a reversal of what’s happened elsewhere Galloway’s lot actually did far far better than us. This is annoying, but at the same time I was reassured by RR’s strong showing in City and East, because where people see a left party they recognise they still vote for it.
Really on fire tonight dave! Love the bit about “at least it wasn’t the Tories bombing our house”. Cheered me up no end!
I’ve got to the point where I’m being really cheered up by the few constituencies where we’re getting 3% or more. There’s a lot where we’re under 1%.
I think the message to take home is this: in Manchester, Preston and Sheffield, where we could effectively canvass and reach out to people, Left List did very well. In London, no-one had heard of the new name, and still looked for Respect; where they saw the Respect name, that candidate did very well.
Politically, this shows that a Left-of-Labour challenge can still be very credible. Practically, it means that it will be difficult for either of the two post-Respect factions (the celebrity faction who kept the name, and the mainstream who had to change it) to claim that credibility, and since everyone’s eyes will be on London, it will be particularly difficult for the “real” Respect. The kind of left realignment I talked about will be much harder now, and the Respect split has to take a lot of the blame for that.
But what can you do? All this means is that the we’ll have to be even more serious about building a movement when the elections aren’t on - especially during the strike wave that is surely coming and, if the London votes, are anything to go by building antifascist demos - and really that’s where we should be focusing our energies anyway. Still. Fuck.
Apparently Paddick cast his second pref vote for us! This is wierd a/ because a 2nd pref vote to a small party is useless, it really is Ken, Boris or no-one, and secondly because, like the Liberals nationally, I’d got the impression that Paddick was running a very rightwing campaign. If I’ve been able to get him wrong on that, it just shows how useless his campaign was - but in present circumstances it’s hardly for us to point fingers.
Anyway, here is the Left List statement on the elections:
It’s good, although I think we should make the comparison with the late 1970s only with qualifications. On the one hand, the working class were much better organised and more militant then, and this helped them fight back; on the other hand, neither they nor their organisations are as tied to the Labour party now, which may help in its own way. In the coming struggles - and especially in making sure we smash Nazism for another thirty years - we have to take into account these changes.
There’s a pretty good interview with Sartre on such matters, usually calms me down after a night like this:
Victor: Today you are against any Machiavellianism in voting matters: you’re going to say this in Les Temps Modernes. But in May ’69 you were Machiavellian?
Sartre: I’m against electoral Machiavellianism (for example, voting for people you hope won’t be elected) not for moral reasons but because I feel that universal suffrage doesn’t lend itself to this. But I’m not against a ruse against Power, something that I feel to be only fitting. What bothered me wasn’t that he used the function — created by Power — of the candidate so that a voice of the extreme left could be heard on state TV, it’s that he persisted in presenting himself so that the Trots be counted. Universal suffrage is a ruse of bourgeois power for substituting legality for the legitimacy of popular movements and direct democracy. I expected Krivine to say the first time he as on TV: “Thanks for listening to me, I didn’t want anything else. Do whatever you want with your votes, but don’t vote for me, since I’m no longer a candidate.”
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/1972/illegalisme.htm
Thanks for that Chris, but I can’t actually agree with what Sartre says, or at least with its application to our situation.
Bourgeois democracy isn’t real democracy, true, but elections still matter. It’s a chance for the far-left to show its relevance, to engage with the class, to embarrass the main parties, to bring out the contradictions in the “democratic” system. At a time with working class organisation at an historic low, it is one of the best spheres in which we can do this, and to do it we have to throw ourselves into the fight.
Despite horrible prevailing circumstances, we did that quite successfully in a lot of places - but clearly, in the most important battlefield, we failed spectacularly, allowing the far-right to steal our thunder as the alternative to the consensus. As you/Sartre say, the electoral battle takes place on the terms set out by the ruling class, and is very limited in scope, so there’s no point slitting our wrists about having lost it - but there’s also no point pretending it wasn’t worth a try. Honestly, if Respect hadn’t split I don’t think we’d be seeing the Nazis on the GLA.
Anyway, we have wounds to lick and a strategy to rethink, but whether we won or lost we would have to have thrown ourselves into the strike wave. There’s also the nauseating 60th anniversary of Israel parades to be pissed on, and Stop The War to revive (we’re gonna regroup and get the military off campus here, just you wait :)) - and now antifascist activity to organise. On the latter point, we need to strike while both the elections and LMHR are fresh in Londoners heads - antifascist rally at 6pm on Tuesday in front of City Hall.
“Honestly, if Respect hadn’t split I don’t think we’d be seeing the Nazis on the GLA.”
And you wouldn’t be seeing the BNP with a golden chance to show just how very lacking in ability they actually are on a very public stage. There’s no better way to discredit idiots and thugs than to let the world see them in action.
That Left List statement didn’t seem to worry to much about accuracy. The Green vote in London stayed pretty solid, in fact we increased the number of Green votes cast by a quarter under the higher turnout, held our two London Assembly seats and came a clear 4th in the Mayoral race. Oh and we won a by-election in Highgate ward in Camden, beating the Tories on a 65% turnout. But don’t let that get in the way of a good story, hey? Bit rich to blame Ken Livingstone for your electoral failings, too. I arrived at the count at the Excel Centre just before 2pm, to see very grim-faced Lindsay German and John Rees heading out - clearly they had a press release to write.
@Vasey:
I wish that was how it worked. In fact, they can do quite well by never attending council except occasionally to shout at people, and blaming the darkies when it all goes tits up. Getting them in office doesn’t “expose” them, it just gives them courage, and legitimacy. That’s what we have to undermine, and we can only do that by confronting them directly, and by providing an alternative. Since we’ve just cocked up the second part of that so royally (for now, at least), we’re gonna have to be doing more of the first part.
City hall, 6pm, Tuesday.
Ignoring the Nazis until they just go away is a mistake that’s been made before, and we’d do well not to repeat it.
@Sue: If you want to rub your hands with glee at our misfortune that’s your perogative. We can’t all get the kind of media coverage you enjoyed. Anyway, hope your people on the assembly enjoy the company of fascists.
Dave, you’re mistaking the BNP for a politically competent group. So far they’ve got a fairly uniform record of making themselves look like complete idiots whenever they come within a hundred metres of power.
http://www.stopthebnp.org.uk/index.php?location=councillors_2
It’d be amusing if it wasn’t so appalling.
Dave, my comment wasn’t meant to come across as rubbing my hands with glee (apologies if it did), but questioning the analysis of the results in the statement. I don’t think that the electorate in London were punishing New Labour for ‘10 years of privatisation and warmongering’ - Ken Livingstone got the anti-war vote, be it one 1st or 2nd preferences and his vote in the inner London boroughs was solid, but the Tories ran a hugely effective campaign and mobilised a massive Tory vote in the outer London boroughs such as Bromley and Bexley who dislike certain policies that Ken quite rightly introduced, such as congestion charge. Many people simply decided they wanted a change and that 8 years was enough and unfortunately that change was Boris. Had the Lib Dems got off the fence and recommended a second preference for Ken, rather than allowing their candidate to veer increasingly towards the Tories, the result may have been slightly different, but who knows.
I also wanted to point out the factual inaccuracies in the statement which suggested it was a disastrous night for the Greens - it wasn’t. We just about managed to hold our own on a night when Lib Dems and most other parties were caught in a massive Lab/Tory vote squeeze. We pretty much doubled the size our London campaign this time round - number of leaflets delivered etc and the result was that we managed to keep our 2 assembly members and come 4th in the mayoral race (to the BNP’s anger), but nothing more. It was clearly a bad night for Labour in that they lost the Mayor etc, but their vote share on the assembly went up. Greens also moan about their level of press coverage ;), but with a known ‘brand’ considerably more cllrs, plus sitting AMs and MEPs, we were always going to get more than the Left List. We also benefited this time from being able to talk about Green achievements on the assembly over the past 4 years, something the Lib Dems were unable to do.
As for the BNP, they ran a very effective, targeted campaign, putting out over a million leaflets in their key areas. That, plus the collapse of the UKIP vote, withdrawal of English Democrats’ mayoral candidate etc probably got them the seat. Their vote share rose marginally compared to the UKIP drop (most of the UKIP vote seems to have gone to the Tories), but unfortunately by enough to get the seat. They did this on a 45% turnout, which suggests that had turnout been lower, they may have got 2 seats.
@Vasey:
Exactly. If this was going to have an effect, then by now it would have. People who vote BNP generally aren’t looking for competence.
@Sue:
Okay, apology accepted, let’s be friends.
I wrote my analysis before the London results came in, and I’d be a fool not to modify it in function of them. In London, Labour voters didn’t all stay home, but I don’t think it was Ken’s antiwar position that got them out. This was something of a “Basil Fawlty election”: no-one mentioned the war. No, what happened in London was that a lot of people who would have deserted Labour came out because they were (rightly) afraid of the resurgeant Tories. This contributed to squeezing the Left vote out of existence - although I still think that if Respect had survived intact it would have acheived a lot more than the sum of its seperated factions - and meant that only on the right did potential protest voters cast their protest votes.
As for the Greens, well, that’s a subject not as close to my heart as to your own - but neither my statement nor the Left List one accuses you of catastrophe as far as I can make out. What I would say is: at a time when voters are leaving Labour in droves on account of their rightwing policies, the Lib Dems and the Greens should have done very well out of it. In fact, both parties have triangulated with the debate between the two main parties, following them rightwards rather than filling the void, at least in a tokenistic Charles Kennedy way, to the left of them. Thus a Green/Lib Dem vote would be neither the best tactical vote to hurt Labour (voting Tory hurt them so much more) nor the clearest political signal (since your politics have moved so much closer to theirs), and I do think this held both parties back. In particular, the Greens (not unlike Galloway) aligned their campaign completely with Ken’s, but you’re right that your established brand and assembly presence helped you weather the storm better than some others.
Unfavourable media coverage? I don’t think there’s much to be discussed here. Despite us polling better in 2004 than either the Greens or the BNP, this time we were whitewashed out of existence and you were fairly reliably trotted out as the default fourth party. Again, I think the Respect split had a role to play, but if I were feeling more paranoid I might suggest that the Greens are only ceasing to be ignored by the media now that a more radical alternative has come about. The media prefers to stick to the two or three biggest parties, with a bit of BNP to stir things up, but if they’re going to acknowledge anyone else then better you than us.
Most importantly, though, I think it’s abundantly clear that voters nationwide were punishing New Labour, and people don’t just “feel like a change” for no reason. Ken has done a lot of bad things in line with the national government and a lot of good things that go against the trend, and for moving closer inline with the government at a time when they were taking such a thrashing in the opinion polls he has no-one to blame but himself. If he’d stood up to Brown’s incomes policy (ie pay freeze, tax reform etc), for example, he’d have done a hell of a lot better.
“Exactly. If this was going to have an effect, then by now it would have. People who vote BNP generally aren’t looking for competence.”
It does a pretty effective job of keeping them from becoming a genuinely mass movement, though, and I’ll take what I can get. I have enough faith left in people (it hasn’t all been beaten out of me quite yet) to think people’ll see the error of their ways when the BNP inevitably cock things up now that they’ve won something that might actually count for something (local councils simply don’t; they have too little room for manoeuvre, especially these days with control-freak Labour in charge).
@Dave, The Void On Fire
“the Lib Dems and the Greens should have done very well out of it. In fact, both parties have triangulated with the debate between the two main parties, following them rightwards rather than filling the void”
In what way have the Greens moved to the right? To which policies do you refer?
Off the top of my head, on crime. The Greens have defended Ian Blair, and if I’m not very much mistaken called for a heavier police presence in London.
Generally, they’re just as guilty as Ken in terms of pissing away their left credentials in a rapprochement to the establishment party. Sian Berry’s campaign was never that independent of Ken’s campaign: eg launching a joing Green manifesto.
None of this is to deny that the Greens are still to the left of the three main parties - I should very much hope that they are, given that I voted for them in the local elections - but they are a lot less radical than I used to think.
@Dave, The Void On Fire
Could you point me to an article which documents their defending Ian Blair? Obviously on what grounds they defend him is very important to the purposes of our discussion.
If you read the Greens’ Manifesto for a Sustainable Society (http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/) I think you can only conclude that it’s pretty radical. It offers such a refreshingly different approach to politics than the other parties that I don’t see this “pissing away their left credentials” in their words nor their actions. The Greens worked with Ken to successfully push through a lot of their policies for London. I see that as an achievement, and just can’t work out which part of their acheivements represents a move to the right. Political pragmatism, perhaps, but not a move to the right.
Please, educate me!
Is this, as a fear, the sort of criticism that often comes from the left when leftist thinking is put into action? It’s never quite “pure” enough, so the thinking goes, as though it were only pure enough on the written page and never when enacted.
Ok a quick google reveals that the two Greens on the GLA disagreed on Ian Blair, so I’ll half let you off. Jenny Jones apparently thought him “the best man for the job”, at a time when he was under attack for the institutional murder of Jean-Charles de Menezes - something for which the Met and its representatives must take responsibility.
Then there’s the police thing. The Greens make some of the right noises on civil liberties, but they have backed more of a police presence in response to violent crime in London. Without looking into the detail, I’ll happily assume that they haven’t gone to the extremes of the main parties, with their metal detectors and police liasons in every school, but nor have they dared disagree on principle with the idea that crime can be cured with an authoritarian clampdown. At a time when the racist stop and search laws are being brought back, that does mean something.
As for the Green policy statement you pointed me at - if taken to their logical conclusion, then those are very radical statements indeed. Without addressing the power structures that drive the destruction of the environment etc, and the way in which we can challenge those power structures, though, it says very little, or at least, is open to wildly different interpretations. It leaves room for both Red-Greens and Blue-Greens, and I’m very much of the opinion that to be an effective Green you have to be a Red.
Does this mean never working within the confines of the system? Not necessarily - after all, you’re already standing in elections - and if you’re saying London would be an even less environmentally friendly city if you guys had just sulked in the corner then maybe there’s a case for working with the administration, although obviously this will compromise your loyalties and you need to be prepared to combat that. But there’s a difference between working with Ken and campaigning alongside him. Oh, you got Ken’s call for his meaningless transfers to go to you, well done and all, but only at the cost of standing shoulder to shoulder with the rightwing New Labour administration (and don’t give me that crap about Ken being the Labour left; what do you think this is, 2001?) during the only campaign you’ve fought in with national visibility.
It’s that, and not your the manifesto on your website, that I call “pissing away your left credentials”. And this logic will take you to alliances beyond (the) Ken if you do become a big enough force in national politics. Look at the French Greens, who backed the neoliberal EU Constitution; look at the German Greens, who have formed coalitions with the right-of-Tory CDU (the “Black-Green” alliance). I’ve heard it said that “the British Greens are different” (although I’ve also heard that they run at least one council in coalition with the Tories here, perhaps you could enlighten me), but if that’s your level of analysis then you won’t stay that different for that long; you need to look at the reasons why your European cousins have drifted rightwards.
Anyway, given the competition, the Greens are almost invariably good enough for me; when I get a chance to vote it is usually for you guys. In theory and perhaps sometimes in practice it is “refreshingly different”. But don’t line yourselves up with the cops and the neoliberal ruling party and then point at an online manifesto and tell me that’s what makes you radical.