Category Archives: Opinion

A Green win in Gorton & Denton would be the Reset Britain Needs

Voters go to the polls today in the Gorton & Denton by-election to choose a new member of Parliament.

The election appears to be a close three-horse raise between Labour (defending the seat), Reform UK and the Green Party.

Whoever wins, the maths in Parliament won’t change very much. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party will still have a massive majority and another 3 years or so to cling onto power until the next general election.

However, the result of this election is bound to determine the future of political discourse in the UK For years to come.

If Labour win, Starmer’s position as leader and Prime Minister will be safe and his team will claim it as proof that the country backs his vision.

If Reform UK win, we will no doubt see a further lurch to the far-right. Those of us in the know understand that this wouldn’t represent a change in a direction, but the acceleration of British decline.

Only if the Greens win will there be a great reset in British politics. The Greens will have won this election fighting from the left, and a win here would force Labour bigwigs to reconsider their strategy under Starmer.

Labour, the Conservatives and Reform UK have become a homogenous blob of parties that manage the decline of our public services while blaming immigrants and minorities for the problems caused by politicians.

The Greens are the only party standing up and saying: Tax the rich, put public assets back in the public’s hands, stop demonising migrants and start rebuilding a Britain that works for everyone.

Voters in Gorton & Denton have a chance to choose the direction taken by the whole country going forward. If you have that power in your hands today, make sure you get out there and use it wisely.

Operation Disinfect Facebook

Many of us Millennials and Zoomers helped older, less tech-savvy members of our family and friends get on Facebook. In the early days it seemed like a good idea. Our parents, grandparents and extended relatives could check out our holiday pics and hot takes at their own leisure, even when we were far apart.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t have foreseen that a platform once designed for simply staying in touch could be turned into a hotbed of extremism which is very quickly poisoning our communities. Hop on your local area’s Facebook group, and you’ll see a stream of disturbing content. It usually starts on fake news pages, run by political actors, and disseminates through the accounts of regular people until eventually it reaches the eyeballs of the people you hold dearest.

So what’s the plan?

Action 1: Cleanse your family’s timelines

If you meet the two following conditions, you really have a duty to act: 1, you’ve noticed a problem with your relatives sharing or talking about extremist content they saw on Facebook; and 2, you set up their account / you usually help them with tech issues.

What you need to do is cleanse your family’s timeline to prevent extremist, far-right content from showing to them in the first place. With their permission, use their phone or PC to scroll down the Facebook timeline while logged into their account. Any time you come across a post with extreme, far-right themes, click the name of the page that shared it and block it:

Sometimes if you click the dots (…) in the top-right of a post, there will be an option to tell Facebook you are not interested in a post. This will be very effective in training the Facebook algorithm not to show similar content to your relatives. You can do this before you block each page, if you like.

If you do this enough times, even over the course of just 10-15 minutes, you should be able to block enough far-right content that Facebook’s algorithm will start showing less of it to your relative.

Action 2: Engage with your local community on Facebook

Ideally none of us would be beholden to owning and using a Facebook account to generate income for Mark Zuckerberg, but the reality is it exists, billions of people use it, and if progressives don’t then right-wing extremists will have free reign over its content.

You can help by logging into your Facebook, joining your local residents group, and posting positive, progressive content there. You can find a local group pretty easily by typing the name of where you live into the Facebook search box, for example “Bristol Residents Group“.

This is potentially not for the faint-hearted. The trick is not to read and engage with far-right content which may also be posted in those groups. Adding reactions and replies to far-right content just makes it appear in more people’s timelines. Instead, what you want to do is post and amplify positive, progressive content. Ignoring any negative feedback you get, and posting positive reactions.

Share news stories about what local progressive political parties, community groups and charities are doing in your area. Share positive messaging about how migrants and LGBT people have contributed to your local community. Take the fear that extremists are pushing of the “other” and turn it on its head. Educate your peers.

Action 3: Rebrand political pages to increase visibility

One thing progressives love to do is create very political brands for their social media accounts. “Socialists for Corbyn!” or “Lefty and Proud!” or similar, you’ve probably seen them yourself and you get the picture.

The vast majority of people, however, are not politically engaged in this way. They won’t follow a page named after a political party or philosophy. What they will do is follow community pages, or pages about issues that speak to people’s hearts. The far-right are fully aware of this and have been creating pages for years with names like “I love Doncaster” or “Animal-loving Brits“… then they simply use them to post their normal political content that they would post anywhere else.

If you are the social media officer for a local progressive party or group – I would highly recommend naming your Facebook page something which will be universally appealing (We love Walsall! etc.) and then post your regular progressive messaging there. People will trust it far more coming from a pillar of the local community than they will from a political party or group they distrust already, and we can hopefully start to shift the Overton window on issues such as migration, LGBT rights and wealth redistribution.

Conclusion / TL;DR

Facebook is still popular with a huge chunk of voters, who are currently being served a worrying amount of far-right content. Those of us who want to resist and overcome should take action:

With your family’s permission, clear out their Facebook timeline of far-right content.
Post progressive content on local Facebook community groups – but don’t get drawn into arguments.
Rebrand your political pages to be more universally appealing, and continue to post progressive content there.

Blame the rich: Greens must hammer home this message

The cost of living crisis hasn’t gone away. If you read the newspapers or watch the TV, you might think that the biggest problem Britain faces is a few small boats landing on shores. The truth is, families in the UK are still struggling. Utility bills are sky high. Weekly shops are still vastly more expensive than they should be. Benefits are being reduced, withheld, even scrapped by the Labour government.

Who is to blame for the problems facing our country, then? The poor people on boats who just this second turned up? Obviously not, and yet, nobody is pointing fingers at the real culprits. Labour, Reform and the Conservative Party are all on an anti-immigrant, anti-trans, anti-poor, anti-disabled rampage. Blaming as many minorities and vulnerable groups as they possibly can. To protect these people, to direct the blame to where it is truly deserved, and to win over the public, the Green Party must adopt a radical narrative of The People vs. The Profiteers.

The Cost of Profit Crisis

The cost of living crisis – rumbling on now for at least five years – has always been framed as an unavoidable consequence of external factors. First Covid, then the war in Ukraine, now Gaza and of course, if you’re Reform UK, “Net Zero”. Of course the truth is, the cost of living crisis is caused purely by private profits. An upward redistribution of wealth from the People to the Profiteers. Private companies and their shareholders are draining money out of the pockets of ordinary people, out of the British economy, and into their already-bloated bank accounts.

Take supermarkets, for example. I’m personally still struggling with shopping bills significantly higher than they used to be, I’m sure you are too. If this was caused by external factors we might expect to see a dent in the supermarkets profits, but do we? No. Last year, 2024, Tesco made £2.8 billion in profit, Waitrose £1.1 billion, Sainsbury’s £1 billion, ASDA upwards of £1 billion (2023) and M&S £620 million. This is profit – money earned after expenses. After paying staff. Pure profit.

These supermarkets could be paying their staff more, or charging their customers less, and they choose not to.

What about utility bills? Surely gas & electricity companies have been badly hit by instability in Ukraine and the middle east? Of course not. Last year, Centrica (the owners of British Gas) made £1.5 billion in profit. In 2023, EDF Energy’s French Parent Company made €39.9 billion in profit. In 2022, E.ON SE made €2.2 billion in profit.

Again this is all pure profit, after expenses. These companies can absolutely afford to lower our bills or pay their staff more and they don’t. If we nationalised gas & electricity in the UK, those profits could indeed be used to lower rates, invest in infrastructure, or pay for day to day government spending.

The list of companies and individuals earning extreme profits at the public expense goes on and on.

An Opportunity for The Greens

The Green Party already knows all of this. We already have the policies that would correct the problem. Renationalisation of key industries, wealth taxes on the super rich, a universal basic income. So why not start shouting from the rooftops about it?

The Green Party has professionalised its image over the last few years, which has helped us to win more council seats and four members of parliament. But we now need radical action to tackle the real problems Britain faces, and to protect the vulnerable communities being used as scapegoats by the far-right.

We know Labour, the Conservatives and Reform UK won’t stand up to the Profiteers. The Liberal Democrats and the SNP, while commendable for their relative civility, are ultimately parties of capital, with donors who expect them to toe the line. Only The Green Party is in a position to go to bat for The People against The Profiteers. It’s time we accepted that role and got far more radical with our messaging.

That’s why I’m standing the Green Party’s elections to become External Communications Co-ordinator. It’s time for the Greens to adopt a bolder narrative, on social media, on TV, in newspapers and on the doorstep. Only by filling the vacuum of ideas on the left can we grow as a movement and fix Britain’s problems at the same time.

(Promoted and produced by Daniel Johnston as part of his campaign for election to the post of External Communications Co-ordinator. This is not an official communication from the Green Party of England and Wales.)

Immigration: The Establishment’s Convenient Bogeyman

Immigration featured heavily, again, in tonight’s ITV election debate. In fact, the issue has featured heavily in every election debate and in public discourse for at least the last 15 years (if not, forever). The Conservatives, Labour, Reform UK and even the Liberal Democrats are all signed up to the establishment consensus: make sure the public are shit scared of immigrants to keep them voting for you.

You can see why the establishment parties keep flogging this horse – it works! Politicians can drive attention away from their own failures, and from the fact that they’re robbing the public blind, by blaming the “others”, the “foreigners”. The Conservatives have won four elections in a row by doing exactly this, but thankfully it seems the game is well and truly up.

Still, there aren’t enough public voices speaking out in favour of immigration. For every 1 article like this questioning the establishment narrative, there are 1,000 pushing anti-migrant dogma, shared to the masses via the mainstream media and a network of shady far-right Tweeters and TikTokers.That’s why I’m making it my mission to lay out my positive case for migration here.

Nations and borders are arbitrary & elitist

First of all, the philosophical argument for immigration is incredibly strong (we’ll come to practicalities later). Countries and their borders are entirely arbitrary. We’ve made them up, and they change all the time. In the old days they used to change when Kings and Queens rode armies into neighbouring countries and claimed the land for themselves. These days it might be through armed struggle from separatists, or by government decree. Several entirely new countries have come into existence since the year 2000 alone!

The point is, countries & their borders change all the time. Heck, the concept of countries with borders and passports has existed for a mere fraction of the time that humans have. It is, philosophically speaking, just utterly stupid to accept as fact that we must obey imaginary lines drawn on a map by our politicians, which they can change any time at the flick of a pen.

My firm belief – and I realise this is quite extreme even for most liberals – is that humans should have a right to roam wherever they please regardless of the geographic area in which they were born (and over which they had no choice!). The vast, overwhelming majority of people on this planet are nice, and kind, and deserve to be welcomed wherever they decide to make their home.

Having said that, we live in organised societies with limited housing & access to public services, so obviously I have to dial down my fantasy world of free movement and cover the practical arguments for immigration.

Public services & an ageing population

Let’s talk practicalities then. The UK has an ageing population. We have a birth rate of just 1.6 children per woman. That means we have a declining population of British-born citizens. Think about it as simply as possible: every couple (2 people) is having less than 2 children. So as couples grow old, retire and eventually pass away, they are not being replaced by the same number of British-born children.

Every British child who will come of working age within the next 18 years has already been born, and there aren’t enough of them to replace the people in their 60s, 50s and late 40s who will retire in those 18 years. Even if you listen to Labour & Reform UK who say we should “train up our citizens to fill skill shortages”, you have to ask: what citizens??

If you accept the premise that we need to keep our public services, our economy, running smoothly for the next 18 years, and that we need to replace workers like-for-like, then you come to an obvious conclusion. Even if people suddenly started having more babies right this instant, we would still need net-positive migration for the next 18 years just to keep the economy running. Or else, people will have to retire later (which nobody wants to do either!)

Large numbers of migrants are currently propping up incredibly important British services like the NHS – but they’re also contributing to our economy more generally in other jobs across many sectors. You’d notice them if they were gone, trust me. Now let’s end with an argument about what kind of country we want to be, and how this debate is pushing away some much-needed talent.

Family values, dependents & British brain drain

During this election campaign Nigel Farage has turned his sights on a much more specific subset of migrants: dependents. What does that mean? Who are they? Dependents are husbands, wives, children and other family members who come to the UK on family visas. Some of them are the family members of other migrants who are coming here to work & study, and some of them are the husbands, wives and children of British citizens.

If you believe in family values, in the idea that people should be allowed to marry & live with the person they love in a stable home, then you should accept the idea that British citizens should be allowed to marry foreign spouses and live with them here in the UK. Nigel Farage’s blanket reduction of migration would break up British families or force British citizens to live abroad in their spouses’ home countries. This potentially leads to a phenomenon where we not only exclude migrants from working in our important public services, as discussed before, but we actually force skilled British workers to leave the country too.

Not only should British citizens be allowed to live in a stable home with their families, but so should the migrants who come here to work in our economy. Why should we say to a foreign doctor, nurse or care worker: “Yes you can come and work in our NHS, but you have to leave your family in your home country thousands of miles away”. It’s cruel, it’s not in keeping with any of the family values that conservatives usually espouse, and it’s counter-productive – because those migrants may not come to work in our public services at all. We need them.

Summary

The debate around immigration in this country is deeply dishonest and incredibly unfair. Right wing politicians are using migrants & their families as political footballs. Preying on the insecurities of British voters to win votes, and quite simply lying about the impact that immigration has on this country.

The only political parties coming out of this election campaign with an honest and positive view of migration are the Greens, the SNP and Plaid Cymru. Even their principal spokespeople have little first-hand experience of how it feels to be part of a migrant family. While they may articulate the facts, they aren’t quite capable of conveying the emotions felt by many families across the UK like mine.

Will me and my wife be allowed to live in the UK after July 4th? Do we have the security to start a family of our own? And what about the family we will leave behind if the likes of Nigel Farage force us out? I hope more people will think about these things when marking their ballots on June 4th.

Polls show the Greens have a chance to achieve greatness in 2024

The Green Party are currently averaging around 6% in opinion polls – enough to win 2 seats at the general election this year. It hardly sounds like a breakthrough, but beyond headline voting intention there’s a story developing that gives hope for a Green surge in 2024. Let’s take a look…

Keir Starmer is deeply unpopular

Despite Labour being, on average, 20+ points ahead in the opinion polls, Keir Starmer is a deeply unpopular figure among the general public. Around 44% of people currently intend to vote Labour at the general election this year, but according to Ipsos only 25% of the public approve of the job Keir Starmer is doing as Labour leader. 56% are dissatisfied. For Labour this is quite a worrying starting point to kick off a general election campaign.

Green Party policies, dropped by Labour, are popular with the public

According to surveys by YouGov, the general public consistently and overwhelmingly support policies to tackle climate change and achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050; rent controls; nationalisation of rail, mail, energy, healthcare and water; A higher minimum wage; higher taxes on the rich and peace in the middle east. Keir Starmer has largely abandoned the progressive, left-wing policy platform on which he won the Labour Leadership election in 2020, and has instead positioned the Labour Party as socially conservative, pro-big business and pro-privatisation in order to court favour with the right wing press.

The public really, actually like the Green Party

Opinion polling regularly shows that the Green Party are the most “liked” party in the UK, the Green candidate for the 2024 London Mayoral election is the only one with a net positive favourability rating, in preferential elections voters often give Greens a hefty number of second preference votes, voters regularly believe “good” fictional characters like Father Christmas & Doctor Who would vote Green and a recent Ashcroft poll asking the likelihood that voters will back each party in a general election put the Greens on a whopping 13%. Voters genuinely like the Green Party – the Greens are the “good guys”. When voters know the Greens have a chance of winning – in elections with proportional voting systems – they vote Green in much larger numbers than in first-past-the-post elections.

So What?

According to current headline voting intention, Labour will win in an absolute landslide victory at the next General Election. The Conservatives will be decimated – maybe even wiped out entirely – and the Greens will gain only a handful of seats at best. But that’s not the whole story. Keir Starmer’s deeply unpopular Labour Party is winning by default, so can the Greens capitalise on their popularity with the public and present themselves as a credible alternative to voters?

Many voters would love to vote Green, but don’t think they can win elections. The Green Party’s task over the coming months is not just to make the public like them, it’s to help the public truly believe that voting Green means electing a Green MP. That it’s not a wasted vote. That they can wake up one sunny Friday morning in 2024 to many, many Green voices in Parliament, not just 1 or 2 or 4. This will be the true test of Carla Denyer & Adrian Ramsay’s leadership. Their legacy.

Four our sakes, let’s hope they meet the scale of the challenge.

The unfortunate rise of YIMBYism

Britain currently faces multiple crises in housing, energy, transport, the cost of living and healthcare – as well as the global threat of climate change. The scale of the challenge facing the next government is immense, investment in British infrastructure will need to increase drastically in the coming years to get this country back on its feet again.

Unfortunately the pressing need for action has driven mainstream politicians, especially in the Labour Party, into a dangerous and incurious mindset that can be summed up quite simply as: Build first, ask questions later.

They’ve even created an informal coalition of campaigners proudly wearing a new label: YIMBY. “Yes in my back yard, to anything, no questions asked,” while those who do ask important questions and oppose harmful developments are attacked as busybodies who want the UK to fail, rather than sensible voices ensuring Britain’s progress is safe and fair.

There’s an understandable sense of urgency behind YIMBY thinking. We don’t have much time to fix the UK’s crumbling infrastructure and broken economy – it’s making people miserable right now. So when a new property development, road or power station is proposed it’s only natural that there will be a clamour of supportive voices.

But we also know that a rush to support solutions without due care and attention creates the disasters of the future. Developers in the past were allowed, even encouraged, to use dangerous materials like asbestos, porous concrete and flammable cladding in thousands of buildings. People who raised concerns were dismissed then as they are dismissed now.

The Green Party, who launched their manifesto for the local elections last week, are often on the receiving end of criticism for asking inconvenient but important questions.

Their plans to ease the housing crisis by building 150,000 new council homes, bringing unused properties into residential use and introducing rent controls have been attacked by YIMBYs in lockstep with property developers and private landlords. Those who derive their wealth from property are more than happy to build unaffordable, low quality new homes in the wrong places as long as it means they can boost their profits.

Where the Green Party promises to exercise caution and pursue higher standards for future homes, the YIMBYs are desperate to write a blank cheque for the profiteers in the name of solving the housing crisis. Their folly now will simply create more crises in future.

The Greens recognise, rightly, that new homes must be built to tackle the housing crisis. But they must not be new homes at any cost to the environment. New homes whose tenants will be unhappy, unhealthy or charged extortionate rents.

Any credible plan to tackle the housing crisis must involve building new social housing, homes people can actually afford to buy, and the surrounding infrastructure to support new homeowners and tenants. New homes must be built not only with the housing crisis in mind – but also with an eye on climate change and biodiversity loss.

Long may there continue to be sensible voices in the room asking the right questions at the right time. We’ll be thanking them in future for making sure that the solutions to one crisis didn’t create more problems for our children & grandchildren.

Labour leftists looking for a win should embrace the Greens

These days you’d be hard-pressed to find a left-leaning Labour member who’s happy with the direction their party is taking. Keir Starmer’s leadership campaign pitched him as Corbyn-lite, but three years on he’s positioned himself to the right of the Conservatives. Long gone are the pledges of nationalised utilities, freedom of movement and a foreign policy based on peace and justice. Instead, Starmer’s Labour is a party of big business, harsh immigration rules and war in the middle east.

Understandably many left-wing activists have abandoned Labour and cancelled their memberships, while others choose to stay inside the party machine and criticise Starmer from the sidelines. In both camps we see great swathes of disaffected but passionate activists promising to boycott the next election entirely, resigned to five more years of misery.

These people have more power than they think. They’re still following politics, tweeting tweets, writing letters, signing petitions, and attending protests. Under Corbyn they were the whirlwind force of door knockers and leaflet posters who delivered the stunning upset of the 2017 general election.

If all of that energy could be channelled into a focused political movement, a truly left-wing party with progressive policies and grassroots decision-making at its core, Sunak and Starmer could face their own shock at the ballot box next year. This movement, this fantasy political party already exists: The Green Party.

The overlap between Corbyn’s Manifesto – even Starmer’s ten broken pledges – and Green Party policy is immense. Economic justice through higher taxes on the rich, abolishing tuition fees, promoting peace instead of war, public ownership of utilities, defending migrants’ rights, strengthening trade unions and of course bold action on climate change. These are all staples of Green Party policy.

Not only do they exist and share the Labour left’s top priorities, The Green Party are clearly capable of winning enough votes to break the Labour/Tory duopoly. Currently polling at an average of 6%, the Greens peaked at 12% in a national election as recently as 2019, convincing nearly two million voters to back them at the European Parliament elections. All this with a mere fraction of the funding and membership numbers of Labour or the Conservatives.

With the addition of thousands of former Labour members the Greens could see a surge in voting intention similar to the leftward shift we saw in the summer of 2017. What the Greens lack in balanced media coverage, a problem Corbyn’s Labour also faced, can always be overcome with people power.

And it’s not like this new influx of members would be outsiders working for a rival party. They would have agency and ownership within the party. Unlike Labour or the Conservatives, the Green Party’s policies are made by the membership, local parties choose their own MPs and leadership elections happen automatically every two years. If a Keir Starmer-style Thatcherite ever lied their way to the Green leadership, they would not be able to purge the left, overhaul party policy or impose right-wing MPs on local parties.

With a strong Green Party as a left-wing option on the ballot paper, with the right number of passionate activists to make them a viable force in British politics, this country doesn’t have to face five more years of Red or Blue Conservative government. We can have real, meaningful change for the better. Leftists should embrace the Green Party with open arms and set off the political earthquake this country desperately needs.

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