My review of the Autumn 2017 Green Party conference

Hello everyone. I came back from the Autumn 2017 Green Party conference in Harrogate, one of the most contentious and therefore genuinely democratic conferences in my five years as a Green Party member. It was not the most-well attended conference I have seen so far, but it was very engaging nevertheless. It was also the first Green Party conference I have experienced so far to extend into Tuesday.

The five things I enjoyed about the Autumn 2017 Green Party conference were:

1. The acceptance of the crucial precautionary principle as policy; it is a vital tool in our technologically advanced world when protecting our environment and therefore ourselves.

2. The Green Party also made inspiring calls for the elimination of plastic waste and for gender-based hate crime to be recorded alongside other types of hate crime.

3. A holistic governance review was easily adopted, which is excellently in line with green politics and core green pillars.

4. Members' determination to fight the dirty, greedy disgrace that is fracking all across England, from Lancashire to Balcombe. Fracking is banned in Scotland and Wales (and of course many other countries and several US states); why not England?

5. I had the lovely and supportive company of Emma (who was our parliamentary candidate for Stockton North earlier this year) during the weekend, especially during the difficult moments I faced this conference. I also thank other Green Party members for their understanding and support likewise.

The things I did not like so much about the Autumn 2017 Green Party conference were:

1. Narrow failures to fully turn the tide against "Progressive Alliances" which have let the Green Party down severely and held back the cause of green politics. (The tide is turning but rather slowly.) 

2. A lot of committee slots were left unfilled, even though all Green Party committees are very important to the Green Party in their own way.

3. There was no live-streaming of this conference available, when there has been at several previous conferences.

I give my thanks to everyone who came along and took part.



Comments

  1. Chris Padley13 October 2017 at 11:01

    I wasn't at conference this time, but if I find Alan's experience very encouraging

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My analysis of the Swedish general election of 2022

The Swedish general election of 2022 generated some surprising results, despite also averting pollsters' predictions significantly. The last three years in particular proved to be a rough ride for the Social Democrat led governments of Stefan Lofven and Magdalena Andersson respectively. Although Sweden's laxer approach to the COVID-19 pandemic (compared to most countries in Europe, which imposed lockdowns during much of 2020 and 2021, an approach that arguably caused more problems than it solved) proved effective, Mr Lofven's desire to lift the austerity tax (which only affected a wealthy minority, similar in nature to the wealth tax initiative of former French President Francois Hollande) and to join NATO proved contentious, with two of the Social Democrats' former coalition partners (the Swedish Greens and Swedish Left Party, who had both pulled out of confidence and supply) unsurprisingly voting against Swedish accession to NATO membership (all other parties in the R
Read more

On the 2020 Serbian election: Why a boycott will only worsen things there

First of all, I apologise for the recent hiatus; however elections are still postponed or on hold in many countries, including the UK. Serbia, however, was able to proceed with its 2020 general election amidst this crisis. Its overall result proved reminiscent of Hungarian elections under Viktor Orban's tenure (2010-present), since the leading national-conservative coalition, the SNS (Progressive Party of Serbia) coalition led by Serbian President Aleksander Vucic (Ana Brnabic is the Serbian Prime Minister, and the first woman and openly homosexual person to hold that position), polled 61.6% of the vote, giving them as many as 191 seats out of 250 and a majority of as high as 132, almost unheard of in any country with proportional representation. Press freedom has endured significant curbs since President Vucic first came into power as Serbian PM in 2012 (he became President of Serbia in 2017), as have civil liberties of Serbs in general. Nepotism and corruption in the Serbian
Read more

On the Spanish regional elections of 2023-a warning for progressives

The Spanish regional elections of 2023, especially those in the "Empty Spain" regions far west of the federal capital of Madrid and prosperous yet famously rebellious Catalonia, resulted in a sharp shift towards conservatism and conservative populism. Both Partido Popular (PP, Spain's equivalent of the Conservatives) and Vox (the Spanish equivalent of Reform UK/UKIP) made sweeping gains in all regions, notably taking overall control in Madrid (normally an impossible feat under Spain's PR system), more than doubling their seat total in Valencia to top the poll there, and wresting control of Asturias, La Rioja, and Cantabria from the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE, Spain's equivalent of Labour) and the Cantabrian Regionalist Party respectively. Under the tenure of Pedro Sanchez, the current PSOE-Podemos coalition is floundering and has not done much to ensure Spain's recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic since the last restrictions ended in 2021, and P
Read more