A fresh start
The vote by 73% of Green Party members who participated in the ballot in favour of electing a leader is an historic landmark in the history of The Green Party. It marks the shift of the Party away from being a pressure group of enthusiastic and extremely hard-working amateurs, and gives the Party the opportunity to turn itself into a force to be reckoned with in politics. There is still an awful lot to do to turn the Party into a slick, professional organisation, with adequate funding and a mass membership, but at least the recognition that the Party needs a leader is a big step in the right direction.
One can only speculate what would have happened 15 years ago, if instead of rejecting the attempts of “Green 2000” to make the Party electable, the vote for a leader had not been rejected by Conference. The past 15 years have not been wasted, but the progress of the Party towards political representation at the national level have been painfully slow, and it is increasingly clear that with climate change, time is not on our side. In the process the Party lost the involvement of charismatic figures like Jonathon Porritt and Sara Parkin, who would potentially have made great leaders of the Party. But that is history, and we have to move on. There will be ongoing divisions within the Party to heal, as the “anarchist” wing of the Party who have rejected leaders, will be uncomfortable with the Party’s new direction. But it is essential that we now all work together, make a fresh start and move forward.
Fortunately the Party has within its ranks several individuals who would make good leaders, although arguably not with the same appeal and public profile that Porritt and Parkin had.
There is much to be done still to make the Green Party electable at a national level. Some aspects of Party policy are still open to ridicule among the wider population, such as a ludicrously liberal drugs policy. To put it bluntly, just because a lot of Party members like smoking dope, does not mean that making drugs legal is a sensible policy, and the Party cannot afford to have policies which make it unelectable. Drugs are a corrosive influence on a society, wrecking lives and ruining neighbourhoods. They have no more place in our nation than guns. The Party must also address the issue of immigration. To raise the issue immediately draws the criticism of racism, but in our overcrowded island, already short of three million homes, we do not have the capacity for more people, particularly if we are aiming to move towards being more self-sufficient. To promote a policy of open borders ignores the justified fears and concerns of millions of people. If the Green Party is to be electable it needs to listen to the wider population.
The Green Party also needs to sort out its finances and attract a much wider membership. There are millions of citizens who belong to environmental charities in the UK, yet the Party has only around 7,000 members.
The opportunity to elect a leader gives The Green Party to make a fresh start, at a time when the British public are crying out for real and inspirational leadership to address the urgent threat posed by climate change and the myriad other environmental issues we face.
Google's Hot Trends - most searched words
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Ever wondered which words people search for most on the Internet?
Well below are the words most searched for in 2007:
Top Google Searches, 2007
| Fastest Rising (Global) |
Fastest Rising (U.S.) |
| 1 |
iPhone |
1 |
iPhone |
| 2 |
Badoo |
2 |
Webkinz |
| 3 |
Facebook |
3 |
Tmz |
| 4 |
Dailymotion |
4 |
Transformers |
| 5 |
Webkinz |
5 |
YouTube |
| 6 |
YouTube |
6 |
Club Penguin |
| 7 |
eBuddy |
7 |
Myspace |
| 8 |
Second Life |
8 |
Heroes |
| 9 |
hi5 |
9 |
Facebook |
| 10 |
Club Penguin |
10 |
Anna Nicole Smith |
These sites list popular requests:
- 50.lycos.com - Lycos have a 'Top of the Pops' style lists with keywords moving up and down depending on how popular they are.
- Google's Zeitgeist pages - Google Zeitgeist lists the top 10 gaining and losing search terms online.
- buzz.yahoo.com - Yahoo! gives a buzz score to sites that are being asked for a lot. It also divided the list into categories like sports and movies.
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Free Link Exchange!
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Our link to copy into your site:
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Give me a hero
The decision by Green Party members to elect a leader, gives Britain the opportunity to have something the whole nation should be crying out for in the face of climate change. Real leadership.
As evidence mounts of how we are destroying our planet home, where is the leader with the guts to call for people to give up their flights and foreign holidays? Where is the leader willing to call on people to give up their cars? Where is the leader willing to call on people to cut back on unnecessary luxuries, and make sacrifices for the common good? Where is the leader who can understand the science and the gravity of global warming and call a State of Emergency?
We certainly don’t have such a leader at present. Instead we get leaders who think that changing a few lightbulbs, doing a bit of recycling, and sticking a wind-turbine on their roof will be enough. It is no good hoping that science will have all the solutions, and allow us to carry consuming the world’s resources at an unsustainable rate. We need a leader willing to make unpalatable calls for sacrifice of some of the comforts of modern living that so many of us have grown used to.
Our parents and grand-parents understood about sacrifice. Millions of them gave their lives in two world wars fighting against fascism. Those that survived, lived through years of austerity and rationing, they dug for victory, made sacrifices. They didn’t have central heating, cars and foreign holidays. But they had real leaders. And they had a community spirit that is sadly lacking in much of modern Britain, and a sense of One Nation.
We need a leader who will lead by example, and forgo the trappings of power, the status symbols, the ministerial car, the private jet. George Orwell, in his essay “The Lion and the Unicorn”, and quoted in George Monbiot’s “Heat”, made the point well, that at the time of the Second World War, “The lady in the Rolls Royce car is more damaging to morale that a fleet of Goering’s bombing planes.” When it comes to sacrifice we must all share in the pain.
So where is the leadership in Britain now? How many MPs are giving up their foreign holidays, using public transport or cycling rather than use their car? Given the crisis we face from climate change we need urgent action and the introduction of carbon rationing. The Green Party is full of members willing to make sacrifices, and will soon have a leader who can show by example, what is needed. It is long overdue that The Green Party emerged from obscurity to become a force to be reckoned with in British politics. The election of a courageous leader gives us that opportunity.
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