Day 101 (Yesterday): The Day The Green Surge Stopped Being Sustainable?

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The last few weeks have perhaps been the most joyful in the Green Party’s history – the ‘Green surge’, initially a minor uptick in the polls made more significant by the subterranean popularity of the Liberal Democrats, has become something more substantial. Natalie Bennett even got something previous minor party leaders could scarcely have dreamed of – inclusion in the TV election debates, but perhaps most importantly – the publicity that came from the argument around whether they should be included. 

However all that ended yesterday, as their leader Natalie Bennett was forensically taken apart by Andrew Neill on what should’ve been one of her first forays into the big time. Pressed by Neill on Green Party policy, it’s fair to say that Bennett went to pieces faster than a falafel atop a wind turbine.

Natalie Bennett's interview with Andrew Neill is a must watch

The Green surge has been a bit of a strange deal. Moribund for much of the past four years (they’ve contested 12 out of 19 by-elections since May 2010, losing their deposit in each), they seemed to have gained traction in recent months from a number of events and trends unrelated to their policies. 

Unlike UKIP who found their wider voice amid the Eurozone crisis, there’s been no equivalent event which has made The Green’s signature policy seem to some like a sagacious panacea. Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal haven't had a major climate event with which to improve their father son relationship. They’re currently making hay on the anti-austerity left – but such sentiments have been strong since late 2011, and there was no Green surge even as Occupy, UK Uncut and what was initially seen as an austerity induced recession dominated the headlines.

Instead it’s been a number of trends - firstly those dire polling figures of the Lib Dems. Normally the fight for fourth and fifth in the polls leading up to a general election would be of interest only to the most dedicated gamblers, but Nick Clegg as the leader of the fifth party is a story. 

The second reason has been the rise of UKIP and the SNP. Since Nigel Farage’s poll numbers started to increase in 2012, the Conservatives of have longed for a similar phenomenon to eat into Labour’s core vote from the left. UKIP and the SNP (who have hitherto only dominated Holyrood elections) proved it was possible for minor parties to escape the electoral lower leagues, so that small uptick in Green fortunes became ‘the surge’ that could make them ‘the UKIP of the left’. David Cameron clearly hopes as much – which was part of the reason he embraced greenery for the first time since he brushed the husky hair off his North Face jacket and said if the Greens weren’t there, he wouldn’t be playing with the other boys. 

Of course both of these factors relate to the weakness of the three main parties – with austerity and austerity-lite not being an attractive message, populists have come to the fore. This has happened across Europe. Syriza, Greece’s radical left populists have just won the Greek elections, while on the right the Front National are stronger than ever in France. With Labour having to bomb-proof itself against the charge that it’s spendthrift, there’s clear space to win the votes of those who reject the idea that any cuts are necessary and want socialism red in tooth and claw.

During Bennett’s car-crash interview we saw exactly why the Greens might not be the best receptacle for those protest votes, and why their ‘surge’ may wither as more scrutiny is placed on them. The interview started badly and went downhill from there – Neill started with the Greens’ signature welfare policy, the ‘citizen’s income’, or the effective extension the Jobseeker’s Allowance to everyone regardless of whether they’re in work or not. As was pointed out, the Greens have costed this at £280 billion – a gargantuan figure compared to the JSA’s current £3bn. Asked how she’d pay for this, Bennett could only point to minor savings and told Neill she’d come back to him in March. She then pointed to tax avoidance and a lower corporation tax take as a way to make the figures add up.

On the evidence of yesterday, not you...

It’s a fair point – and Neill agreed with the principle, but even the most optimistic estimates as to the ‘tax-gap’ the rich should be paying (the activist accountant and Green sympathiser Richard Murphy places it at £120bn – and he states that his is a theoretical estimate to spur action rather than a concrete figure) coming up well short of funding the citizens income. That’s an astonishing amount of unaccounted for money going not to the poorest – but to the middle-class, who would receive the £71 as an unconditional benefit. Even generous assumptions on savings on the administration of what it would and could replace - working tax credits for example, leave a policy that's an astonishing gambit with the public purse at a time when the Greens also want to protect and increase spending on other public services and infrastructure.

The same process was repeated on the Green policy of wealth taxes to pay for the NHS – which Bennett stated would bring in £35-£40bn. Neill pointed out that France has a more stringent wealth tax than the one Bennett was proposing – it brings in £4bn. 

Perhaps the best example in the interview of the Greens’ great contradictions in a single policy was explored too. The Greens are, they say a pro-EU party. However their trade policy of imposing tariffs on imports and ‘reducing world trade’ (yes that’s actually their policy) is against not just EU law, but the founding principle of the then EEC. Bennett poured scorn on other parties for pandering to UKIP, but her own policy out Kippers Farage.

I’m going to give Bennett a pass on the main news line out of the interview, her policy of allowing people to join Al-Qaeda, as it won’t be Green policy for very long – and is based on what one might call destructive logic – taking a sound principle (not prohibiting belief by law) and taking it to its destructive logical conclusion. This is part of the teething problems of minor parties – what sounds good in a sympathetic Brighton meeting room among your party zealots doesn’t on national TV.

In fact Bennett was so bad that Neill didn’t get to explore the most troubling area of green thinking – that: “The pursuit of economic growth as a force driving over-exploitation of the Earth must cease to be an automaticaim of human societies”, and that we should prepare for possible decreases in GDP (this is part of the rationale for the much touted ‘citizens income’). 

Bennett is on record as saying that we’re in a world “sodden with stuff”, and that we should have less. This fundamentally misunderstands the concept of GDP – which is based on value added rather than the consumption of materials. To point out a fairly obvious example that may be to the Greens’ taste – people paying to visit a nature reserve may contribute to GDP and preserve resources. In fact if you’re an importer of raw materials – like most European countries, the more resources you consume in producing your products, the worse it is for your GDP. An iPhone consumes many of the same materials as the most basic mobile phone - yet its software engineering and branding makes it contribute far more to GDP.

In the same policy document the Greens say they’ll invest “1% of GDP” in science funding– despite wanting to abolish it as an economic measure of the health of our economy.

Worse, if pursued it means permanent austerity at home – you can’t pay for better public services with thin air, and condemns billions to poverty across the world – if there’s already “too much stuff”, how do poor Indians raise their income levels? That's with trade decreasing too. The Greens do address this final point in their policy document (I looked at the website Natalie), but the answer seems to sound suspiciously like aid (albeit said to 'replace' it), which would have to be a stupendous sum to offset the income lost through trade and is inherently problematic. It shouldn't need pointing out that these global aims would also require China, India and the United States to install or elect a government of green sympathisers.

All this is utterly bizarre from a party which is supposedly the standard bearer of the left. After all, even Lenin following Marx wanted to pursue economic growth and increase prosperity – he just thought that a centrally planned economy was a better way of doing it than a capitalist one. If even Lenin would think you’re dangerously anti-materialist, you probably need to go and have a good long think about what you’re proposing as do your newly minted supporters.

All this explains why Bennett came unstuck, and why ultimately the Greens aren’t and don’t deserve to be a British Syriza (despite former leader Caroline Lucas attempting to tie her party to the Greeks). You may think them wrong, but the reason for Syriza’s success is that they have an economic outlook that is at least coherent on its own terms. Their anti-austerity has a concrete aim and rationale – to reduce Greece’s debt repayments by tearing up their stringent loan agreements so that they can pursue looser fiscal policy in order to promote growth. For a country which has been in permanent recession since 2008 it’s easy to see why it’s popular. It's also possible to see a tangible success - if Alexis Tsipras can negotiate a better deal with the ECB and Greece's creditors and improve his country's absurdly terrible record on tax evasion (it's not just for the rich over there), then he might be able to alleviate some of the pain. It's fair to say though that even those are big ifs, and he faces one hell of a task.

Green anti-austerity is different – it’s a nebulous wish list that’s often at odds with itself, and falls apart like a badly constructed yurt once one challenges its basic assumptions. David Cameron may even come to regret his love affair with Natalie Bennett, as the more attention people actually pay to her party and examine its policies beyond the fluffy stuff, the less credible they will be as a home for genuine left-wingers and the lost Lib Dems.

You can, as Natalie kept reminding us, read the Green Party's policy document here and make your own mind up.