Don’t get swept away by the Green Surge
Nick Farmer doesn’t think that there’s any rationale in being Green
The Greens have been all over the news recently, from David Cameron’s insistence that they appear in general election debates earlier this year, to the announcement that their membership has surpassed that of UKIP and is rapidly rising. The Green Party would have us believe that this is the beginning of a new wave of left-wing, ecologically and economically responsibly politics, a ‘Green Surge’ to wash away the ossified major parties and the dangerously populist UKIP.
For all of the talk of fairness and a bright new future, my advice is to steer well clear.
Science policy is a litmus test in politics. American Republicans and our own UKIP are ridiculous in their insistence that anthropogenic climate change is ‘not a thing’, and their science and environment policies read like they were written on the back of a cigarette packet by Alan Partridge. In its own slightly more subtle way the Green Party can be just as bad.
The Greens talk a lot about ending world hunger and tackling poverty. This is why we saw the Green Party, represented by senior party members such as their London mayoral candidate Jenny Jones, tacitly endorse the vandalism and destruction of publicly funded GM crop research at Rothamstead in 2012. This research, which has nothing to do with any agri-business or big bad corporate entity, aimed to reduce the use of harmful pesticides in the production of wheat. This would increase the yield of staple crops and reduce dangerous chemical runoff; it would benefit the environment and chip away at hunger. This was not important to the Greens.
They are very keen to say that we should take action on carbon emissions and energy: I mean, why else would they insist that we turn off all of the nuclear power stations. It’s not like the largest source of low carbon electricity is something that would help towards those aims, or that the European country with the lowest CO2emissions (a clue – baguettes and infidelity) makes extensive use of unfashionable but clean nuclear power. Instead they say that we should get arms manufacturers to make windmills and solar panels, which is code for “import gas from Russia and coal from Australia” and “we don’t understand the need for a mix of different energy sources”.
They are too bogged down in narratives of science and progress ‘flying too close to the sun’ and ‘meddling with nature’ to realise that the solutions to the problems that they identify are to a large extent scientific and technological. A train ride down the Green heartland, Brighton Pavilion, illustrates this very well: Advertisements for palm readers, astrologers, and all kinds of charlatans catering to the credulous abound. This is the scientific and rational universe of the Green Party.
Run for the hills.
