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May 4, 2010 - Citizens challenge hung parliament 'horror' message

For various reasons, I haven’t been able to watch any of the three TV debates. I saw the endless playback snippets on the news the day after each debate (which quickly got exceptionally tedious) but had no total emersion in any of the live sessions.

It proved impossible to avoid the debates-debate, with endless pre-debate speculation and post-debate analysis. Listening to all the parties and the broadcasters themselves, it’s clear that nobody anticipated the massive media focus on this innovation, for better or for worse (as Scotland’s Alex Salmond has been pointing out more and more petulantly). The TV debates have become the single most influential aspect of this general election campaign.

Yet it was only a few weeks ago that all the pre-election buzz was about the impact of the social media on the election, with a lot of questionably euphoric commentaries that every conceivable kind of web-enabled initiatives and networks would dominate the election debate.

Much of this was ramped up here in the UK after the huge success of Barack Obama’s election team in mobilising vast numbers of people (and donations!) in the 2008 presidential election.

We haven’t seen quite the same thing here in the UK. But there has been an extraordinary foment of activity going on out there, which is quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before – and could prove to be even more important in the event of a hung Parliament than during the election campaign itself.

One initiative that I’ve been a bit involved with is 38degrees, which has recruited an astonishing 127,000 active members in a remarkably short period of time. Between them, they’ve taken nearly 450,000 actions of one kind or another, covering a very wide range of progressive issues and causes.

Right now, its biggest campaign (coordinated jointly with www.Avaaz.org) is to put an end to the scaremongering in the right-wing, pro-Murdoch) press, about ‘the horrors of a hung parliament’. More on that tomorrow, but do please get involved with this campaign today – while there is still a chance! www.38degrees.org.uk

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on May 4, 2010 4:31 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

May 5, 2010 - This election could be democracy's big chance

It’s been amazing to see the vested interests of the right wing media, the City, and the political establishment going into overdrive on the prospective horrors of a hung parliament. One day the world is ticking over on a more or less comfortable basis, with our governance systems bumbling along in their reassuringly inadequate way, and the next (May 7th) the rating agencies have downgraded the status of UK debt to junk bonds, there are riots in the streets, the monarchy is at risk and civilization has collapsed.

There are, of course, some legitimate concerns about the mechanisms of coalition government. We should, of course, be mindful of what happens in countries like Belgium and Italy. There will, of course, be difficulties, frustrations and failures. But in comparison to the deep unfairness inherent in the current utterly dysfunctional system, those problems seem very manageable.

And this just has to be the moment where we make an absolute priority of revitalising our entire democratic system. The idea that this election should be won or lost at the behest of ‘the markets’ just shows how comprehensively our system has imploded.

Labour had such a moment back in 1997 (especially as its manifesto for that election included a crystal-clear commitment to introduce a referendum on electoral reform), but bottled it. Having done devolution for Scotland and Wales (which was brilliant) and part-reform of the House of Lords (which was a good start, but looks pathetically inadequate 13 years on), everything else got dumped.

And it’s all about so much more than electoral reform. One of the most inspiring initiatives running along in the background during the election period has been the Vote for Democracy campaign organised by Unlock Democracy – an organisation I once knew as Charter 88.

Their main report A Vote for Democracy?, analyzes the manifestos of all the major parties (as well as the Greens, Plaid Cymru, SNP, UKIP, Respect and the BNP) and scores them against five principal areas of interest:

- Fair, free and honest elections
- Rights, freedoms and written constitution
- Stronger parliament and accountable government
- Bringing power closer to the people
- A culture of informed political interest and responsibility

The headline scores emerging from that are as follows: Lib Dems 81 out of 100, Greens 80.5, SNP 57, Conservatives 46, and Labour 45.5. The rest are not really in it.

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on May 5, 2010 2:05 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

May 6, 2010 - Greens poised for their biggest ever vote

Today just has to be the day when the Green Party breakthrough the UK’s wretched first-past-the-post electoral system.

There are four possible candidates who might be able to do that: Caroline Lucas in Brighton Pavilion; Adrian Ramsay in Norwich South; Darren Johnson in Lewisham; and (as an extreme outsider!) Tony Juniper in Cambridge. Realistically, however, I think it’s Caroline whose got the best chance of achieving that breakthrough.

The difference between doing really well (coming second, for instance, with a higher vote for the Green Party than in any preceding General Election) and actually winning is massive. Campaigning down in Brighton last weekend I met a reassuring number of voters who are definitely planning to vote Green today. But I was also taken aback to discover two ‘floating voters’ who’d been so impressed by the ‘Nick Clegg phenomenon’ that they were going to vote Lib Dem for the first time in their lives – despite the fact that in Brighton Pavilion the Lib Dems have no chance whatsoever of coming anywhere other than fourth.

Whatever happens, it’s going to be a very close call.

It won’t be the end of the world for the Green Party if Caroline doesn’t win. Its votes will undoubtedly be up across the country as a whole, and since Caroline became leader, there’s been a new sense of confidence and authority. But the convergence of factors in Brighton Pavilion is quite unique: a constituency that is ‘naturally sympathetic’ to progressive politics; the long-term success of the Green Party across Brighton and Hove in the shape of 13 councillors, ensuring that large numbers of people see Green politics as a normal part of the political mix; and a candidate of compelling quality and integrity (having been voted The Observer’s Ethical Politician of the Year in both 2007 and 2009) at a time when people are looking for distinctively different and honest representation in parliament.

Earlier in the campaign, I would have added another factor: high levels of public concern about climate change and other critical sustainability issues. But I fear that these issues have yet again been moved to the backburner. That really doesn’t help.

So this is a moment of high drama for the party. Green Party sympathisers across the country (which includes a very large number of people who will be voting for another party, often for tactical reasons) will be watching intently to see what happens in Caroline’s constituency.

For me, after nearly 35 years in the Green Party, with my own impressive record of electoral failures back in the 70s and 80s, and having been through the usual mix of hope and despair that all members of minority parties so painfully feel, it will be a quite magical moment.

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on May 6, 2010 10:19 AM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

May 10, 2010 - Caroline Lucas makes Green Party history

So it’s happened: the Green Party has its first MP.

The look on Caroline Lucas’s face as her result in Brighton Pavilion was announced pretty much said it all: elation, exhaustion and huge relief all rolled into one. She’d been talking during the count of feeling “sick and nervous with the weight of so many people’s expectation on me”.

For me, it’s just the elation without the exhaustion. Thirty-one years after I first stood as a Green Party (or Ecology Party, as it then was!) candidate, the near-insurmountable barrier of our first past the post electoral system has been shoved aside by a wonderful, utterly dedicated and very inspiring politician.

But I don’t imagine Caroline has any illusions about the electoral implications of this breakthrough for the Green Party. Without a move to proportional representation, Green Party candidates will continue to be the victims of a deep-seated ‘wasted vote’ phenomenon which this general election, like every general election before it, has demonstrated all over again.

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on May 10, 2010 1:06 PM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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