Green party leader Natalie Bennett came unstuck by trying to be honest
|
Version 0 of 1. While it is great that the Green party is getting the profile and political engagement it has deserved for so long, I know from when I was a principal speaker (no leaders in those days!) that Natalie Bennett has a tougher job (‘I’m sorry,’ says Green leader Bennett. ‘It was brain fade’, 25 February). For starters, today’s media fashion for not taking seriously anything without a price tag reduces interviews and debates to squabbles about numbers – which the public hates. Polls show that now, as in my day, it is the values which shape the policies that matter to voters. And the Greens’ values are spot-on. Commentators are wrong to say that Greens get into difficulties when they stray off environmental policy areas. It is not the environment that needs to change but us. How do we live our lives in a way that is satisfying and fair while also contributing to a healthy environment? No other party has the first idea about how to address the difficult people-planet relationships – except the Greens. Concern for the quality of life for the environment and people has always been the purpose of the Green party, and I remember long nights at conference working out policies ranging from agriculture to defence – a very therapeutic activity at a time when we had zero chance of an electoral look-in. Certainly, newly founded sister parties in Europe and beyond were grateful we did. Petra Kelly, who helped start the German Green party, took away a copy of our policy manual to inform the Die Grünen election manifesto that took 27 Greens into the Bundestag in 1983. The Economist magazine even wrote of the robust internal logic of the UK Green 1989 European election manifesto. Because Bennett attempts to think outside the box … she is vilified as a potentially dangerous dimwit And, goodness, do we need a new logic that removes the current contradictions between economic, social and environmental policy. Get that right, and the money will be there. After all, if we can manufacture trillions of pounds to put into the vaults of banks, we can manufacture a few billion for renewable energy and for (well-insulated) social housing.Sara Parkin London • It is very apposite of Zoe Williams (Opinion, 25 February) to quote Roberto Unger with regard to the supposed “unmasking” of the Green party leader as some kind of political fraud; namely, she tried to answer a question directly and got into a bit of a muddle. In our free-market-dominated culture, which, according to Unger, reduces the world to false antinomies, Bennett would have, presumably, been better advised to prevaricate, rather than try to give an honest response to a typically narrow and loaded question. As Tony Benn once said, they build the elephant trap, lead you to it and then condemn you if you exhibit typical human frailties and fall in. On the question of housing, there is, in fact, no absolute “cost” of building a house. The cost in London, at this time and in this social, economic and political culture, is different from the cost, say, in Hanoi. If society chose to organise itself in a particular way, houses could be built for nothing; indeed, it could organise itself in any way it wanted. Saying we can’t afford to build new homes while allocating vast sums to private landlords via housing benefit is nothing more than a reflection of political preference. Because Bennett attempts to think outside the box, to cut away the assumed “realities” of social organisation, she is vilified as a potentially dangerous dimwit. The way the establishment has rallied to vilify her is typically the behaviour, as Unger would suggest, of an elite unprepared to accept any change to its preferred social order.Brian WilsonGlossop, Derbyshire • ‘I’m sorry,’ says Green leader Bennett. ‘It was brain fade’. If only that were the sole reason for her poor performance on LBC. In fact, the real reason for Bennett’s poor performance on LBC is the ill-thought-out policies of the Green party that do not stand up to scrutiny. Uncosted wish-lists are no way to propose how to run a country, and she was unable to explain the financing of her proposal to build 500,000 homes, however desirable and necessary that may be. Ed Miliband has proposed 200,000 homes a year and, despite intense media scrutiny, this stands as a credible and costed policy.Tim DanielSherborne, Somerset |