A Noob’s Guide to Green Party Conference

So you’re a Young Green, wondering what to expect from your first time at conference.  It can be quite a confusing experience, but a great one if you can make sense of it all.  Here’s a list of things to expect that I wish I’d known about before my first one-

The jargon-

Conference has its own indecipherable language.  I remember voting wrongly at my first conference because I had absolutely no idea what ‘suspension of standing orders’ meant.  It can make participating very daunting, especially when everyone else around you seems to be fluent in conference.  However, anyone on the conference floor will be happy to help if you ask and once you get your head around the terminology, you’ll be chatting about minor textual amendments and points of order like a pro.

The people-

Conference provides the perfect opportunity for some Green Party caricature bingo!  How many socks and sandals can you spot?  Double points for a hessian shirt!

Attunement-

What to say about attunement.  It certainly took me by surprise at my first conference!  It’s a moment of silent reflection at the start of plenary sessions so that members can make decisions with a clear head.  Yeah. 

The crash space-

You might be a bit nervous about crash space, but it sounds more daunting than it is.  In reality, everyone is mostly very respectful of each other, and there are different rooms allocated for different purposes.  So if you don’t fancy staying up until 3am arguing the toss about what Lenin really meant the role of the vanguard party to be (I’ve heard similar!), then you can retreat to one of the spaces designated for sleep.

The plenary sessions-

This is where the main decisions get voted on.  It can be quite hard to keep up at first, but if you team up with a more experienced Young Green, they’ll be happy to keep you abreast of what’s going on.  Reading the agenda in advance can be helpful, making a few notes about your ideas and thoughts as you go along.  That way, you can get a good idea of the motions and seek any clarification before you go into the plenary, and you’ll be more likely to keep up with the debate.

If you want to speak during plenary sessions, then raise your hand and wait to be chosen.  If you are, start by saying your name and party branch before going into the point you want to make.

The workshops-

These are different to fringe events in that they focus on a particular motion in the agenda.  They’re open to everyone and the attendees debate the motion and identify any possible issues or minor textual amendments.  A straw poll is also taken.  This all gets reported back during the plenary session, to feed and inform the larger debate.

The ‘celebrities’-

Don’t be surprised if Caroline Lucas walks past or Natalie Bennett sits down next you in the conference hall.  They really are just ordinary members when it comes to conference, they get one vote the same as everybody else.  In fact, don’t be afraid to have a chat with them.  They’re very approachable and responsive.

If your first experience of conference is anything like mine, I can promise that you will come away feeling invigorated and excited.  The most important thing to remember is to not be afraid of asking for help.  The Young Greens will have a stall somewhere prominent in the conference building, so if you need anything at all, head straight there and you’ll soon be set in the right direction.

As a party of the left, the Greens must do better to engage ordinary citizens

Sebastian Power, ex-Young Green committee member and candidate for GPEx International Coordinator, blog for us.

 

There is a growing distinction now between the centrist and right wing parties who condone austerity, privatisation and the entrenchment of neoliberalism and those on the left who are standing with ordinary citizens. The left are rightly refusing to sell off our public services to pay for an economic crisis caused by the very class of people now wanting to make a profit from these services. Now is the time to clearly show that we stand with ordinary citizens in Europe – those who are losing their jobs, their social security and their public services all at once.

 

Strategically, we must also engage with the increasingly dispossessed mainstream if we are to grow beyond our largely environmentally concerned core voters. If we do not demonstrate our understanding of the economic crisis and the pain which it is causing, few will consider us on their side. It is no longer good enough just to talk within our comfort zone of ecology as important as this is. We must engage with people on their terms and talk about what concerns them. This doesn’t mean we lose sight of our long term goals, rather frame present concerns in a way which is conducive to our long term goals of equality, social justice and ecological sustainability. Practically, this means showing we care about our public services, we care about people’s need for decent jobs and decent wages. So we must say this loud and clear at every opportunity and show we have the answers to these problems.

 

But we must also go a step further. We cannot simply react to the current economic circumstances in order to protect what we have. We must start a debate and begin to popularise the idea of economic democracy – worker cooperatives. This isn’t simply a social imperative, but also an environmental one. If we consider the major obstacles to ecological sustainability, they are not, as some people suggest, public opposition to wind farms or solar pv subsidies. The major obstacles are the control multinational corporations wield over our increasingly weak democracies. These corporations have vested short term interests in maintaining investments in lucrative fossil fuels (as well as our literally bankrupt economic system, consumerism etc) and they won’t give up protecting their interests without a fight. In addressing this inequality of power, we must not just argue for abolishing poverty, creating decent jobs and investing in public services. We must also argue for economic democracy so ordinary citizens can decide our future, not a tiny, unaccountable sociopathic elite.

 

So where do the Young Greens (YGs) and the Federation of Young European Greens (FYEG) come into all of this?

 

Well, firstly, young people across Europe are being hit hard. Recent Eurostat data shows the devastating affect the economic crisis and austerity are having on young people across Europe with an average youth unemployment rate of 22% rising to above 50% in countries such as Spain and Greece. Think about that for a second – in Spain half of all your mates would be unemployed. The danger of a lost generation is now a reality and the negative social and psychological affects of this will become deeply engrained in our generation.

 

It is also worth highlighting the impact on certain social groups. The crisis is clearly having a disproportionate affect on ethnic minorities and young women. Recently in the UK 48% of black people, 31% of Asians reported they were out of work (compared to 20% of white people). The Institute for Public Policy Research also recently found that young women with no qualifications are also being disproportionally affected with 46% out of work, up by 18% from March 2008.

 

The mainstream parties have all but abandoned young people. The YGs and FYEG must therefore become the primary forum for dispossessed young people in Europe. We must organise events to discuss our strategies, to further educate ourselves and to get to know each other better. Through these events, we can strengthen the Young Greens and become an integral part of the radical left voice in England and Wales and Europe.

 

I have worked with both FYEG, the EGP and the YGs and intend to continue to do so, using my experience to help the YGs to get the funding we need to strengthen our organisation so we become the radical, popular and active organisation which young people want to get involved with. The YGs must also give young people the confidence, the organisational experience and the knowledge to take the Green Party into the future.

 

The Greens, as a left organisation, must become the foundation from which we can challenge the stranglehold of corporate neoliberalism. We must show ordinary people that we understand their concerns and we know how to address them. We must become the forum from which we can collectively build the democracy and society we aspire to live in.

You can’t have a sustainable society and environment without social justice.

Leadership Contender Peter Cranie blogs for us on expanding the appeal of the Green Party

Voters know that the Greens stand for the environment. It’s in the
name. If someone votes principally about “environmental issues” from
CO2 emissions to animal welfare, then they are going to vote Green.
While I want us to continue to be the party they support, the very
issues they care about will only be addressed if the Green Party is
recognised as the party of social justice.

I have been and will remain, someone that campaigns against racism,
and I have been prepared to put myself in the firing line to do so. On
the night of the European Election count in 2009, my wife, then 6
month old son and I moved out of our house to stay with my in-laws. We
did so because BNP activists had posted various things through my
front door during the campaign, letting us know that they knew where I
lived. With the result in the balance, and with the last seat going
down to the wire between us and the BNP, I knew what to expect if we
beat them and kept Griffin out of the European Parliament.

Social justice isn’t just a political add on and it sometimes requires
us to put ourselves in the frontline of the struggle. This has to be
at the very core of what we do as a party. We can’t pick and choose
our issues. We have to be a party that protects our individual
freedoms in Britain and does everything we can to address the abuse of
human beings elsewhere. Social justice to me means we must be a party
that speaks frankly about the need for national, European and global
redistribution from the obscenely rich to the majority of humanity,
and we must show “fire in our belly” on these issues.

There are a great many voters who are very close to what we believe in
and what we stand for. Often the barrier can be loyalty to an old
party or individual. There are other people who have given up on
politics. We can and will attract new support from both these groups
but we must provide a vision of politics that inspires people to join
us. We must be angry about the banking system, widespread inequality
and the fact that the unwritten promise, that each generation improves
things a little for the one that follows, has been broken beyond
repair by the current social, economic and political system in our
country.

We need change. It must be radical and it must be decisive. Green
parties in Britain, Europe and around the world are the last best hope
for all of our futures as CO2 levels in Arctic go above 400ppm and
Arctic Sea Ice volume drops below 4,000km3. We don’t want a capitalist
dystopia, and a future where the strong abuse the weak, so we must
fight for the alternative we offer, and we must do so with everything
we can muster in the next few years.

Time isn’t on our side, but I truly believe that I can provide the
vision and the direction our party needs. Caroline Lucas has been a
truly inspiring first leader and no new leader should try to be
another Caroline. I will put my strengths and my ideas to the fore in
this campaign and into the position of leader if you choose to elect
me. If you want to know more, please visit http://www.petercranie.org.uk

Mood for Resistance – Romayne Phoenix

The third leadership candidate blog, this time from Romayne Phoenix

 

50,000 students marching on Parliament 10th November 2010 was an event so dynamic and spontaneous that it served to energise and motivate the mood for resistance throughout the country. The spirit of the student revolt pervaded the founding conference of the Coalition of Resistance 27th November, attended by 1300 people, and addressed by a broad range of speakers including Jean Lambert MEP and, with a welcoming video message, Caroline Lucas MP.

A generation of young people who organised with the NUS, UCU, or without, to show their anger and rejection of the government cuts to EMA and university funding and the price hikes in tuition fees, now face a bleak future. Burdened with debt,  reduced employment opportunities and an erosion of rights in the workplace, there remains a housing crisis and those under twenty five could lose all rights to housing benefits even as others are being forced out of their communities due to decreased housing benefit allowances. Many recipients of such benefits are in full time work that is so poorly paid that they cannot survive at such levels.

As for the future of our health? The threat to our NHS is such that all services could be privatised, and those under the heaviest burden of  botched PFI schemes will the the first at risk. Gone would be the founding principles of our National Health Service, where each contributed according to their means and each received care according to their needs.

Young people growing up today are for the first time in decades to be poorer than their parents, and due to the stresses of an increasingly unequal society there are many who will be less healthy and have the prospect of dying younger. Working longer and contributing more for smaller pensions is another form of attack from this government exercising their austerity measures as an answer to tackling the economic situation caused by the banking crisis and subsequent bail out.

Heading a leadership team my aim is to continue working to place the Green Party at the heart of the battle against austerity, privatisation and ecological vandalism. The capitalist approach to business can only exist with the drive to ever increasing growth, and profit margins that can only be plundered from the earth’s resources or by further burdens on a smaller and lower paid workforce. Unemployment is hard wired into such systems and ecological sustainability is an inconvenience to be refuted, dismissed or  ‘buried’ under a slurry of misinformation.

We need  to re-invigorate the campaigning spirit of the Green Party and to increase our activist base. That means spending time and resources to support the development of our local and regional parties in addition to continuing the work that is increasing our electoral successes. 

The membership of the party has grown, the activist base of the party has grown and along with this the electoral and campaigning successes of the party have grown.  It is important that the party has the strategy and vision to build on this, systematically and effectively, through it’s established democratic channels. Will and I are putting a motion to conference to go forward and develop, and put to the party, a membership strategy to secure the future of the party. 

The movement against austerity has begun, but if we do not take responsibility alongside others for building a mass movement that is broad and inclusive, whilst protecting the vulnerable, we will not be there during the debate to put forward our ideas for alternative solutions and narratives for a better future. Building a mass movement empowered to demand a better future for the majority, for all of us, will put the Green Party, our policies and our philosophical basis at the centre of that better future.

Our vision for the party and the the support which we have received from activists, campaigners and political figures from inside the party and out can be found on our website here

 

:http://www.romayneandwillforgreenleadership.org.uk

Plain Speaking – Pippa Bartolotti

The second in our series of blogs from Green Party leadership contenders, from Pippa Bartolotti.

I am standing for Leader because I think we need to do some plain speaking. I believe time is running out for both the environment and the economic structures attempting to support us. There is little time left to be reasonable. The precious time we have left should not be spent playing political games, so I shall be unreasonable – unreasonable in my expectations of what needs to be done, because being reasonable hasn’t got us to where we need to be.

Damage and destruction to the environment have become normalised, yet we are about to reach a threshold beyond which biodiversity loss will become irreversible. All indications show that we will reach this threshold within 10 years unless we change the way we do things. We have to change the way humans do business, change the outmoded profit model, outlaw speculation, and establish an ethical relationship between humans and nature.

Everything we have done has prepared us for this moment. We must switch ourselves on and communicate on a nationwide basis. We must set up a public information exchange. Find the people who don’t vote for us, who don’t vote for anyone, but whose minds are opening. We have the knowledge, we have the successes, we have the means. But we are not joined up. Change the way we do things, and we can change the paradigm.

Where the Greens have done well, as in Germany and a few (sadly only a few) parts of the UK, there has been an undeniable and massive effort put in. I believe the vast membership of our Greens need to be rattled and inspired right out of their comfort zones because a few leaflets at election time is not the answer to anything.

The political system has not given us the opportunity to make the changes our beleaguered fish stocks and forests require. We have not been able to provide the poor with a more equitable system. 35 years of trying has not bought our messages into the vernacular of the British public. So right now I am less concerned about votes, more concerned about getting Green Policies out there before the nation. Green growth is progressive, sustainable, locally focussed and clean. I want to shout it from the rooftops.

I joined the Green Party because I fell in love with the philosophical basis, our uncompromising stance in upholding our values, our great strength in putting principle before politics, and if elected as Leader I would uphold hold those core values with all the vigour I possess. To me the Green Party is about more than politics. It is about facing reality, embracing the future and influencing those in power to wake up and do better. It is about engaging the human being everywhere – be it on the doorstep, in the street or in the corridors of corruption. I absolutely possess the will to do all this and more.

I am an outward facing Green with an urgent message and yes, I will annoy people, but a sincere and mature unreasonableness is just what we need.

Intergenerational Fairness – Natalie Bennett

Intergenerational Fairness: Why we need to retain a broad economic and environmental perspective

Natalie Bennett, Green Party leadership candidate

When I was editor of the Guardian Weekly I’d get regularly applications for work – not for jobs, but for unpaid internships. Well-qualified young people, with a master’s degree, several languages, and a wodge of workplace experience, begging – really begging – to be allowed to work for nothing for as long as I’d have them. It was a depressing illustration of part of the arguments presented in the understandably angry Jilted Generation

Yet these people seeking unpaid work were the lucky ones. Their peers without resources to sustain them through the intern years are left with little alternative but to take dead-end roles in call centres and supermarkets that will permanent weigh on their CVs, and life prospects. And it is graduates from poor and ethnic minority backgrounds – who also face discrimination in recruitment – who are mostly likely to be in that situation.

Even worse off are their younger brothers and sisters who, robbed of the EMA, are not even getting to university or college. Apprenticeships and technical training, are finding opportunities for that drying up – and the low pay is a further barrier.

The Green Party started talking about inter-generational justice long before any other political party – and the issues we were highlighting then, about climate change, about environmental degradation, about the loss of “ecosystem services” that can’t be replaced, remain as pressing as ever.

But added to them is an immediate, British injustice, that there’s a giant individual debt load being placed on young people now, and a real poverty of opportunities. It enrages me when I hear Labour MPs droning on about the need to raise poor communities’ “aspirations”. I know lots of people of all ages, but particularly the young, who have plenty of aspirations, but scarily few chances to realise them.

I spoke to students at Westminister Kingsway College last November, the day before the big student protest march (the invade-Tory-headquarters one), and predicted then that young people would get more politically active and radical, in the light of the trebling of university tuition fees and the loss of the EMA, but even more as a result of the emergence of what Paul Mason calls “a revolt against Hayek and the principles of greed and selfishness that he espoused”.

With the Occupy and UK Uncut movements, initiated chiefly by young people, building on the work of Climate Camp and other related movements, there’s a new understanding of the inter-connectedness of economic and environmental concerns, about the fact that our current economic system is built on treating the planet as a mine and a dumping ground, and the poorest as rubbish – while building up the wealth of the 1%.

In the Green Party we need to make sure that we’re listening and learning from these groups, but we also need to explain why participating in, and winning within, the political system is an essential accompaniment to direct action and grassroots community building.

Many decisions are made at a council, regional and national level. If powers are genuinely to be devolved outwards, consultations made real and decisions democratised, we need elected Greens, and lots of them. We need young people in polling stations, casting their vote for us, campaigning for us and standing as candidates.

Yet we also need to ensure that the pressing needs of our younger generations now don’t crowd out the needs of future generations (and people all around the globe for whom climate change and soaring food prices are life and death threats today). Social and environmental issues are interlinked, but environmental issues risk being buried in the pressing needs of the moment.

In the mainstream political arena only the Green Party is likely raise the need for a one-planet lifestyle, to press it, to fight for truly international, truly intergenerational justice. We need to balance, in the limited air space available to us, many pressing needs. Many who have no other voice are depending on us.

I’d welcome your thoughts on the direction of the Green Party – on Twitter @natalieben, through natalie.bennett@greenparty.org.uk or on 07967-417859, and please check out my website .

Leadership Contest Series

We’re going to be starting a series of blogs on the Green Party leadership contest over the next few weeks. Each leadership candidate has been invited to write us a short piece, and the deputy candidates will also be asked.

After each candidate has blogged, we’ll be looking for Young Greens to write for us on the contest. If you’re interested, drop us an email on younggreensblog@gmail.com. You can either write about which candidate you’re supporting, or alternatively talk about them all. It’d be great to have as many submissions as possible.