IT AIN'T EASY BEING GREEN

Is green the new blue?: Rod Liddle says the Conservatives would be more successful if they were keener on conserving (Rod Liddle, 5/03/03, The Spectator)

[T]here's really no ideological reason why the Green party should not be everything that people expect it to be. But the Greens have gone down a strange path. They will point to their considerable successes in central London and tell you they've got it right. Their pitch, in London, is to the comparatively affluent, peacenik and impeccably metropolitan Left who feel estranged by New Labour. But their real success, back in 1989, came from filching Tory votes in semi-rural or rural areas. It was seen then - wrongly, as it happened - as a "conservationist" party. But a conservationist party, without the wacko leftist baggage, is what it should be.

There is quiet fury in the shires at John Prescott?s plan to pave the entire southern half of the country and turn it into a sort of patio, with bits of decking, for London. And yet there seems to be little party-political controversy about it at all. Opposing Prescott with an absolutist determination is a guaranteed vote-winner in the shires. No more new-builds on greenfield sites; no building on green-belt land. No loosening of planning restrictions. That strikes me as a fundamentally "green" policy, and an extremely popular one, too. But it is not at the top of the Green party's agenda.

Greens seem a little sniffy about the notion of conserving our countryside and our heritage; they are also wary of addressing the most pressing environmental problem that faces us, nationally and internationally - over-population. This is purely a result of political correctness; it is impoverished African, Asian and Latin American countries where the population is escalating most rapidly, but the Greens would prefer to continue complaining about debt relief and the iniquities of multinational corporations - the unchallengeable shibboleth being that poverty in the Third World is always "our" fault, not "theirs".

There was a split within the party in the mid-1990s. Green party members of a rightish frame of mind departed, dismayed at the direction the party seemed to be taking. With them went the party's best chance of broader electoral success, I suspect. The Greens win votes now almost exclusively in our cities.

Perhaps the Conservative party could step into the breach. Lord Tebbit was quoted in the Guardian this week asserting that the Tories could do worse than adopt a few green policies. He's right about that, assuming that the lower-case "g" was intentional. It's a very long time since I voted Conservative - but a Conservative party which did what its name implied might suddenly become an attractive proposition. And worth cutting short a holiday to vote for.

The over-population bit is pure nonsense--and notice it's the wogs whom there are too many of--but the rest is not dissimilar to what we were discussing earlier. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 6, 2003 10:04 PM