IS THE GREEN PARTY SEEKING TO ‘INVISIBILISE’ TRADE UNIONS?

IS THE GREEN PARTY SEEKING TO ‘INVISIBILISE’ TRADE UNIONS?

Like most political parties the Green Party of England & Wales, (GPEW), has internal left, centre and right wing. The former is quite easily identifiable, there is an organisation of GPEW members called Green Left which identifies itself as ecosocialist but does not include all socialist or left GPEW members.

The ‘Green Right’ is harder to pin down. This is partly because there is a strain of Green political thought which claims Greens are ‘neither left nor right’. Some Greens describe themselves as libertarian, others prefer only to address ‘environmental’ issues without paying much intentional to their socio/economic /political causes, beyond exhortations to change individual behaviour.

GPEW is currently undergoing a re-organisation, known as the Holistic Review, which was endorsed by a vote of members with at 16% turnout earlier in 2019.

This is often defended as ‘purely organisational’ rather than political, and the centralisation of power that it plans might be welcomed by leaderships of any party.

If enacted after endorsement by the GPEW conference in June 2019, it will replace the currently regionally and nationally elected governing committees of GPEW (Green Party Regional Council and the Green Party Executive) with a Political Executive (PEX) from which a Board will be appointed. Four of the eleven PEX members will be elected directly by the party membership .It will not include an elected Trade Union Liaison Officer as the Green Party Executive currently does.

There will also be a 45 member Council (with 10 directly elected members) which will include “Five representatives from formally constituted Affiliated Groups within the GPEW who represent marginalised communities, including the current liberation groups” the Young Greens will additionally have 5 Council seats. The Affiliated Groups will not include the Green Party Trade Union Group but is currently proposed to include ‘Greens of Colour, Green Party Women, Green Seniors, Green Party Disability Group, Jewish Greens, LGBTIQA+ Greens, Deaf Greens, and those marginalised by their income (working poor)’.

The Green Party Trade Union Group has existed for about twenty years and recognises the nature of contemporary employment by having membership open to all GPEW members in order to include workers who aren’t able to join Unions and unemployed workers.

Among other flaws the reorganisation proposals are deficient in that they:

·      exclude unemployed workers and ignore the role of Trade Unions in representing them.

·      marginalise the representation of workers onto an advisory council which will probably meet four times annually.

·      patronise one group of workers and ignore workers’ self-organisation through Unions, Trades councils etc.

·      weaken links with the labour movement just when it is starting to seriously debate the urgent necessity combat climate change.

I have been trying to elicit an explanation for the exclusion of trade unions and workers in general and have been told things along the lines that the groups selected are deliberately groups whose communities are defined as marginalised because hitherto they have been under represented. So, whoever did this defining does not regard the situation of workers under capitalism as one of exploitation and marginalisation. This is, at very best, a huge political blind spot being manifested at precisely the time when worker and trade union involvement is  increasing and is  increasingly important as measures like the Green New Deal are being proposed to create a red-green alliance that might effectively combat  climate  change.

However GPEW has never claimed to be a socialist party and its leaders have consistently side stepped explicitly supporting socialism. It has recognised, that a ‘social agenda’ is as necessary as an environmental ones, especially when its ranks were swelled by refugees from a Blairite Labour Party.

Corbynism has changed that and many Green ideas are gaining traction within Labour so one political strategy GPEW may now be adopting is to move rightwards possibly with a view to taking up an electoral space vacated by the ailing Lib-Dems. The calculation implicit in the reorganisation of GPEW is that it can afford to lose parts of its left agenda and appeal to centrist voters. The fact that one of the new GPEW websites claims that it is now a ‘social liberal’ party supports this.

p.murry 6/4/19