In May I, seven Green Party O
members were elected to the Scottish Parliament. For the first time in Britain, Green politicians holding seats in a legislative body with real - if limited - powers will be under scrutiny. Although a separate party since 1993, the Green Party of England and Wales will be learning lessons from the experiences of their Scottish colleagues, with whom they have more in common than their European counterparts. They defend the rights of asylum seekers, although they don't oppose immigration controls.
The UK Green Parties are different from, for example, Die Grünen in Germany, whose electoral success was based on their leading role in campaigns against nuclear power and NATO's siting of nuclear cruise missiles in Europe in the early eighties.
The Greens have never led a mass movement in the UK, but despite that, they are now more "left wing" than most of the European parties. 1984-5 miners' strike and the firefighters' dispute and their website approvingly quotes ex-Labour members who've joined them, because of Blair's "abandonment of socialist principles".
They defend the rights of asylum seekers, although they don't oppose immigration controls. They oppose the Euro on the grounds that the project is part of the EU's neo-liberal agenda, an argument very similar to that of many Marxists.
The UK Greens opposed not only the current war against Iraq, but also the invasion of Afghanistan and their website carries an article denouncing the 1999 bombing of Serbia as a campaign to make the "world safer for US business".
In contrast, at a very acrimonious conference where riot police were used to break up a demonstration of anti-war protesters from their own party, Die Grünen voted narrowly to send German troops to the Balkans, much to the delight of their foreign minister Joschka Fischer.
The English Greens put far more effort They supported the into elections than the left: it is likely that almost all of their active membership stood in the council elections on May Ist and they have 53 councillors. and are in coalition with the Liberal Democrats and Labour. They also have two MEPs, who have used their positions to make general propaganda against the neo-liberal agenda of the EU.
Bonn, alone. hey hold the balance of power
with six seats in Brighton, while in
Lancaster they have seven seats
movement. They also have three elected members of the Greater London Assembly, who are now keepng their distance from Ken Livingstone, having recently denounced strategy". some of his policies as "[having] the ring of Thatcherism": particularly his environmentally unsustainable agenda of road and airport building, his "overdependence on the finance sector" and the "making of planning decisions behind closed doors".
A brief look at the Green's representation suggests that their base is often in areas that are both working class and multi-racial
Such areas usually contain a layer of white, anti-racist, left-wing professionals, who are likely to provide the core of their support. In this respect they are directly competing with the Socialist Alliance.
Will the UK Greens evolve in the same direction as Die Grünen? The latter participated in bourgeois coalitions in various powerful regional parliaments for 13 years before adopting wholesale the imperialist and neo-liberal agenda. By 1990, the party tem. had 48 MPs, 1500 local and regional councillors and 250 functionaries in the capital,
This was 10-20% of their active membership, testimony to their giving electoral office more significance than the mass
It was a far cry from the attitude of their main spokesperson of the early 1980s Petra Kelly, herself no socialist, but a fierce opponent of coalitions: "Parliament is like the marketplace for us, or the building site, where we can spread information. Parliament is not our goal, only part of our
The UK Greens are clearly not averse to bourgeois coalitions and have made the mistake of joining the official anti-Euro campaign, which will have state funding, but will be led by xenophobic forces
it is likely that the Greens will continue
to make progress in the less important
elections. This is especially the case as major disputes are looming both on GM food and climate change, where a recent UN report has forecast that carbon dioxide emissions, far from falling by 5.2% by 2010 as envisaged under the Kyoto agreement, will actually rise by 17 per cent!
There will be more local authority coalitions but the Greens are currently protected from the fate of Die Grünen by the UK's undemocratic parliamentary electoral sysUltimately, the future of the Green Party of England and Wales will depend on the activities of socialists.
If socialists are able to develop a concrete programme of action for the improvement of the environment and can show that their methods - based on extra-parliamentary struggle - are more effective than negotiating in the corridors of power, then the left in the Greens will seek a new home.
Such an approach is most likely to be tested first in Scotland
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ance Summer 2003 7
Socialist Alliance