What Caroline Lucas can do about the Green vote collapse
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Hi Clive
given your “a recession can be fun” theme, I thought you might appeciate this quote from Vaclav Smil.Also, a question. You say:
the (effective) ‘Target to Win’ strategy shifted the focus from global to local, so the ‘de-growth’ nettle was left ungrasped. Crucially, it still is.But, do you not think the installation of green councillors could be valuable from the resilience point of view? The green localisation agenda goes back a long way does it not?-
Even now that so many Green councillors have a formidable record, wild horses won’t persuade them tostart the de-growth debate, but to get them in in the first place it would have frightened too many horses.
Thanks for the link. I don’t suppose you have read ‘The political Brain’ by Drew Westen. His main theme is that emotion is always dominant, never rational arguments. But another key point is that humans are hard wired against loss, however slight. What Vaclav Smil says is eminently rational, but hasn’t ahope inHell of getting anywhere – unless we can a) ttellpeople that something worse might happen, and b) guarantee their security when it does (see my blog again for how that might happen).
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Hello, Clive. The UBI did survive in the 2017 Manifesto, EC661 did not survive.
UBI works best in Countries with a Sovereign Currency and therefore potential of Using the mythical “Magic Money Tree” creating money as a distributive and not re-distributive policy.The Anti-Democratic and “Deplorables2 Like stance of Caroline on Brexit will explain a lot of the problem in the Green Vote collapse. The other is the Social Democracy resurgent Labour Party.
Mike Shone did an excellent analysis of how ineffectual the “Progressive Alliance” was, due to the resurrected Labour vote.
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2017/06/an-interesting-discussion-on-analysis.html
” Greens “standing down”: the effect on the Tory total in Parliament
Labour made 28 gains and Lib. Dems 5 from Tories on election day in England and Wales (they also had a few losses).
In these 33 gains from Tories , Greens fielded candidates in twenty-two constituencies. We stood aside in eleven. It appears that in only one seat : Oxford and Abingdon was the absence of a Green candidate extremely likely to have been decisive for a Tory loss. (There in 2015 the Green vote total was 2,497 and the Lib Dem majority in 2017 was 816. So it seems pretty clear that the presence of a Green in 2017 would have led to Tory retention ).
Looking at Labour’s thirty-three most vulnerable seats with majorities of less than 3,000, Greens stood in 17 of them. Only in Newcastle under Lyme and Bishop Auckland did the absence of a Green candidate prevent a Tory taking a Labour seat. And the absence of Green in Tim Farron’s seat saved him from being defeated by a Tory.
So overall it looks as if standing aside only contributed decisively to one Tory loss , but also to two Labour retentions and one Lib Dem. retention.
In general, Greens standing aside had the effect of making the majorities against Tories bigger than would have otherwise been the case, but had limited impact on the Tory total.”Subsidiarity is a Keystone of the EU´s Constitution and of the Green Party Ethos, Both Leadership of the Eu and The Green Party have forgotten what Subsidiarity is and That Devolution of implementation of Policy and Initiation of Policy at a more centralised level should flow from the Smallest Units of Organisation.This goes for All policy and Distributed Networks or any system must be governed by sensitive feedback communication. The Current Leadership in pursuing a Pound Shop Liberal Democratic stance, has I think devalued the Green Parties strengths which lie in Radical solutions to the problems which are clearly not being solved in the top down elitist model pursued under Neo-Liberalism.
David Malone will be challenging for the Leadership of the Green Party in 2018, the present Regime is, in my opinion, a failing experiment in a Presidential style that frankly has annoyed rather a lot of people. -
Reblogged this on MUSO MUSINGS ON FATHERHOOD THEORY AND STUFF and commented:
An interesting critique of the Presidential Style of the Lucas Bartley Regime at the Green Party. -
Hi, Clive, I see my comment remains unmoderated. This comment regarding your exchange with Martin on which you are both missing the point. Growth is usually expressed in GDP terms, this is a monetary metric whichever way you look at it.
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2017/05/finacial-illiteracy-blind-leading-blind.html“discussions — of ‘value,’ of fluctuating prices, of the gold standard, of changing interest rates, of items of pecuniary wealth which are at the same time items of debt — are
merely discussions looking toward a readjustment of the factors which prevent them
The problem of analysing political choices against the metric of a Monetary measure is the Money as a Thing is most certainly a Variable, and like any good technologist, scientist or metrologist will tell you a unit of measurement has to be clearly defined and fixed.”
https://renegadeinc.com/george-osborne/
– Name one measure we might implement immediately to improve the situation.Stop lying to the public about the Magic Money Tree. It’s about the allocation of resources, not money. Money is just a tool to move stuff
around. Nobody has ever had ‘inflation’ written down as their cause of death. Malnutrition and Exposure: yes, Inflation: no.De-Growth is a poisoned well of a definition of sustainable post-Capitalist Economics. Re-defining assumptions and new metrics for the New Paradigm is where the cutting edge of Green Policy should focus.
Shoe Horning concepts like Distributed local grid renewable energy systems or Permaculture cooperatives into the capitalist mode of production simply does not work as they can not work under the scarcity and debt based allocation systems which define how Capital is constituted and measured.
Hi Clive, I think you have solved the unmoderated comment, it comes up with no additional awaiting moderation script in any case.
On the question of doing away with money, my argument does not rest with doing away with money but doing away with usury, It is the Interest upon money and especially compound interest which drives our debt-based money system to require infinite growth to avoid inevitable implosion where the supply of money does not grow.
Money creation without Interest leads to a different emphasis from monetary growth to resource allocation. It removes the destructive imperative of Exponential growth in money supply to sustain the money supply regardless of the economies potentials and limitations. I made a very long post in one of our previous discussions quoting Margrit Kennedy, Joseph Proudhon and Helmuth Kreutz and also the great currency expert and Writer Berard Leitaer. Someone I don´+t think I mentioned in that discussion was Henry Georg and his Progress and Poverty. George is as relevant today as ever esåecially in the large Urban Conurbations His Single Land Value Tax addresses so much of the misallocation of resources that we see under the present Standardised Taxation regimes in the Washington consensus. Taxation at its heart is a form of Rationing, by the control of aggregate demand, its conflation with Balancing the books and housekeeping economy as opposed to a full expression of the realities of Political Economy leaves us in something of a pickle.
Caroline had a tangle with Jacob Rees-Mogg on the issue on Question Time last week, pointing out to Mr Rees Mogg that there seemed something of a contradiction that individual Student Debt was good whilst Government debt was bad by his analysis. Now by my understanding of events and of the 2015 Green Manifesto Policy EC661 , Caroline is absolutely right to point our Mr Rees Mogg´s mistaken reasoning which is 180 degrees at variance with the Facts of how money Is done in the modern economy of the UK, Student Debt or the National Debt are both straightforward political decisions based upon an ideological position. The Green Party Policy on UBI has my full support but I must tell you it will not work with the current delegation of money creation to Private commercial banks from who the government chooses to borrow to get its own money. This position was first reversed under the Bank Charter Act of 1844, and the process was taken back in House with the Nationalisation of the Bank of England in 1945. Gordon Brown made the setting of interest rates Independent of Government is 1997 when The Blair Government came to power. This was a missed opportunity. UBI can only work with Sovereign money distributed as newly created money, doing it through Taxation would be unpopular but further, without changing the money creation process it will breach the Fiscal Rules Governments in the Washington Consensus accept from the IBS/WTO and World Bank and IMF.
Policy EC661 and UBI are necessary for the future all economic indicators show this to be the case. Renewable energy is already washing its face with the ridiculous monetary metrics imposed by Money at interest. Kreutz shows the interest element of social housing g to be 77%
”The capital share in garbage collection
amounts to 12 % because here the share of capital costs
is relatively low and the share of physical labour is
particularly high. This changes in the provision of drinking water,
where capital costs amount to 38 %, and even more so in
social housing, where they add up to 77 %. On an
average we pay about 50% capital costs in the prices of our
goods and services.”
from http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~roehrigw/kennedy/english/chap1.htm
That’s again old ground we went over in our previous discussion.
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2016/08/neo-liberalism-billy-no-mates-or-just.html
The fact remains Carolines Question Time discussion with Mr Rees Mogg would have been game set and match with Policy EC661 still in place as it would have been with Amber Rudd in the Leaders Debate on ITV before the Election.
I interviewed David Malone at length two weeks ago and we touched on The GP vote collapse, in some depth Heres a link in case you and your readers are interested.
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2017/06/not-leadership-coups.html ( Link to Livestreaming event page in Blog)
https://notthegrubstreetjournal.com/2017/06/24/not-the-leadership-coups-nottheleadershipcoups-malone-lays-out-stall-for-gp-leadership-challenge/
https://www.reverbnation.com/artist/video/15199395
UBI works best in Countries with a Sovereign Currency and therefore potential of Using the mythical “Magic Money Tree” creating money as a distributive and not re-distributive policy.
Mike Shone did an excellent analysis of how ineffectual the “Progressive Alliance” was, due to the resurrected Labour vote.
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2017/06/an-interesting-discussion-on-analysis.html
” Greens “standing down”: the effect on the Tory total in Parliament
Labour made 28 gains and Lib. Dems 5 from Tories on election day in England and Wales (they also had a few losses).
In these 33 gains from Tories, Greens fielded candidates in twenty-two constituencies. We stood aside in eleven. It appears that in only one seat: Oxford and Abingdon was the absence of a Green candidate extremely likely to have been decisive for a Tory loss. (Therein 2015 the Green vote total was 2,497 and the Lib Dem majority in 2017 was 816. So it seems pretty clear that the presence of a Green in 2017 would have led to Tory retention ).
Looking at Labour’s thirty-three most vulnerable seats with majorities of less than 3,000, Greens stood in 17 of them. Only in Newcastle under Lyme and Bishop Auckland did the absence of a Green candidate prevent a Tory taking a Labour seat. And the absence of Green in Tim Farron’s seat saved him from being defeated by a Tory.
So overall it looks as if standing aside only contributed decisively to one Tory loss , but also to two Labour retentions and one Lib Dem. retention.
In general, Greens standing aside had the effect of making the majorities against Tories bigger than would have otherwise been the case, but had limited impact on the Tory total.”
David Malone will be challenging for the Leadership of the Green Party in 2018, the present Regime is, in my opinion, a failing experiment in a Presidential style that frankly has annoyed rather a lot of people.
http://davidmalonegreenpartycandidate.weebly.com/
An interesting critique of the Presidential Style of the Lucas Bartley Regime at the Green Party.