[Mb-civic] UK elections - The Greens - Robert Shrimsley - FT

[Alexander Harper]

The evil genius of the Greens 
>By Robert Shrimsley
>Published: April 12 2005 14:41 | Last updated: April 12 2005 18:48
>>
The first thing one has to acknowledge about the Greens is that they are nice people; really nice people; the kind of people you would want living next door to you as long as you could cope with the smell of pigs and the sound of chickens. So er, perhaps make that the kind of people you would want living a couple of roads down. But definitely nearby.

Well quite nearby, after all you wouldn't want them dropping in whenever they felt like it with fresh produce from their cabbage patch, completely free of pesticides and savaged by aphids. So perhaps a five minute drive away - although obviously that would be a 15 minute walk. If you are asking a green to babysit your kids for an hour they prefer you not to bring them round in the back of your Hummer. But that is fine because you would not want to upset them as they are so nice. A tad earnest, but that's okay, because fundamentally they are so nice.

Not only are they nice but they care. Boy do they care. They care about the planet and the people. They care about animals and food. They just care.

It is, in other words, very hard to dislike the Greens; very hard, but still worth a try. It is worth rising to this challenge not merely out of sheer cussedness - although that quality is grossly undervalued in our materialist society - but because when one peels back the layers of niceness the Greens are fundamentally - evil. They are so cunning that for years they have been conning us into thinking that they are merely mad, a bunch of loveable harmless cranks. But we know that cannot be true because if they were they would have joined the Liberal Democrats.

The truth is far more sinister. Oh, they may look harmless in their bicycle clips and man-made fibres, quietly munching their alfalfa bars. They may seem well-intentioned as they talk soothingly about saving the planet for future generations, but these people are standing between you and a second home in the Cotswolds. They are blocking your path to the airport and those two weeks on Grand Cayman. They are in eternal revolt against your right to eat imported fruit or drive a 4x4. They believe in nothing less than the complete destruction of western capitalism - though in the nicest possible way and with a minimum of confrontation.

On Tuesday they launched their general election manifesto at a Westminster press conference. Typically, they chose the Institution of Civil Engineers for the launch. They could have gone next door to the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, but oh no, they opted for the civil engineers - so much more polite.

There, in a room so heavily wood-panelled that several Amazonian rain forests must have been desecrated just to upholster the walls, the Greens set out their dream of a cleaner better Britain.

As one would expect there was a lot of environmental stuff; you know, carbon taxes, air fuel duties, greater energy efficiency, more fresh local produce in our shops and schools, slashing the road-building budget, more solar power, a ban on GM food. Pretty good stuff; save the planet and outlaw the turkey twizzler in one fell swoop. And it gets better. An extra £14bn spent on the NHS, child benefit up 35 per cent, a massive increase in overseas aid , university tuition fees scrapped; the national identity card scheme abandoned.

How good is that? And all we have to agree to in return is zero economic growth a doubling of corporation tax for large companies, income tax up to 50 per cent for those earning £50,000 and 60 per cent for those on £100,000, a tax on the rental value of land and a new raft of eco-taxes.

Actually Darren Johnson, leader of the Greens on the London Assembly, stresses that zero economic growth is frankly a bit of a blunt instrument. In some sectors of the economy negative growth would be better. But if you want to stop running through the earth's resources there is no other way.

The corporation tax plans are also revealing. On the day that Tesco announced profits in excess of £2bn many people might quite like the idea of large companies paying 40 per cent tax on their profits. Of course it depends where you set the bar. But the Greens have thought of that; they are targeting only those blood-sucking multinationals and global conglomerates making profits in excess of £1.5m a year. So that's alright then.

On planet Green big is bad. £1.5m is “a vast amount of profit” - and of course it is if what you actually believe in is not a national economy but lots of little self-sufficient local economies. Indeed the Greens even think we should be looking at a myriad of local currencies in those small, local economies across the country.

Presumably across Britain people will be trading in Porrits and Oddies as they cycle to the local farm for that night's dinner on their way home from a hard day's work at the blacksmiths.

Not that everything will be different. Since we won't be flying abroad on holiday any more we will naturally need a chain of Travelexes to convert our Porrits into Monbiots for the trip up north. Don't go wandering into Yorkshire and think you can buy a kilo of apples with your filthy southern coins. They use the Bellamy up there.

Lest one imagine that the Greens are going too far in what one might begin to suspect was a somewhat Maoist approach to economic policy, it should be stated that they do not want some great cultural revolution with all of us living in shanties and mud huts. For one thing they would never countenance such a huge programme of construction with the earth's scare resources.

In fairness to the Greens, they do not expect to implement the policies in their manifestos. Their principal speakers - did I mention they don't actually have leaders (too elitist) - admit that even winning one seat in this election would be a breakthrough. So this is more of a wish list of ideas.

But there's plenty more where that came from. Jenny Jones, another candidate, feels we should all have our own personal allowance of environmentally unfriendly actions. So look, if you want to eat a mango, well that's fine, but that's your limit for the day. If you want another one, well you will have to trade for a bit of someone else's allowance.

Of course this will all be voluntary. We are not talking about having squads of green police bursting into people's homes and carting them away for excessive mango consumption or loitering with intent to import bananas. That would not be nice. And as we know the greens are terribly, terribly nice.
 
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