Why the Greens aren’t despondent despite the derision

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/08/greens-green-party-conference-delegates-labour

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There is something distinctive about the authentic ovation: the applause that is neither dutiful nor orchestrated, but occurs in the spirit for which it was invented. I don’t know how you can tell, but you can, and that is what greeted Green party leader Natalie Bennett at its spring conference on Friday.

My droll Guardian colleague John Crace suggested that they were giving her a standing ovation at the start in case she messed up and they couldn’t, in conscience, do it at the end. But it was a statement of support, of love, if you like. There is no crisis of confidence in the Green party.

There are no huddles of people, saying “all lost, all lost” with their eyes (well, about the environmental apocalypse, maybe, but not about the party). There is no sense of starting every day with a compromise, nor a great taboo to step around, where the one idea that unites them is the one they can’t say – and on this last point it contrasts instructively with the Ukip conference but it is strikingly unlike any other party’s.

Related: Natalie Bennett comes good amid conference chaos

On that difference between the Greens and Ukip, the Mirror produced some helpful data at the weekend, comparing the two: 1,300 Green conference delegates, to 500 Kippers; 55,000 Green members to 42,000 Ukip; a typical age group of 18-24 among the Greens, and 60-plus in Ukip.

I was on a panel about what the Greens could learn from Syriza’s victory in Greece, and the real lesson only crystallised for me afterwards; in any political landscape which is fracturing, throwing up radicals on the left and the right, the neo-fascists will always be the story. Syriza was never part of Greece’s narrative, as told by their and the international media. They were just some well-meaning lefties, distracting the grown-ups from the task of combating Golden Dawn.

Ukip’s appeal to the British media was once explained by the fact that Nigel Farage was such a clubbable fellow: latterly, as the level of coverage has bestowed a wholly egregious respectability on them and they’ve gathered support in polls, it has been rationalised by the fact that people are considering voting for them, so they must get their hearing.

But the real reason they have all this attention lavished on them is, I think, much simpler: for the mainstream, racists are quite exciting. There is the cat-and-mouse thrill of trying to draw out their most racist possible statement; all their answers are very simple; their vision, being rooted in the past, is solid and recognisable. Nobody has to chew very hard to enjoy this marshmallow.

I don’t see a grand conspiracy in the endless, self-fulfilling discussions of Ukip’s success while the “green surge” goes mostly unremarked. It’s a story you could see played out in any mature, malfunctioning democracy.

Part of the buoyancy of the conference, the disconnect between what is said about the Greens and the mood of its members, is that they all, whether they talk about it or not, understand this. There are Green candidates who are apoplectic at the undemocratic way the party is casually overlooked. There are peripheral almost-Greens who think that, when Bennett is trounced on some costing issue, the nation shakes its head and accepts that this hope for a fairer future has been deemed impossible by the Office for National Statistics.

But by and large, the delegates do not seem perturbed about how they are coming across, the justice or otherwise of the wider world’s perception. They have an internal confidence that doesn’t need attention to aerate it – which is fortunate, because I think attention – positive attention, anyway – is still some way off.

By and large, the delegates do not seem perturbed about the justice or otherwise of the wider world’s perception

To an extent, the derision is a source of the confidence: being outside acceptability has allowed the party to slough off the accepted wisdoms that both shackle and amalgamate the other parties. Tax is the obvious example: today the deputy leader, Amelia Womack, promised to axe all tuition fees, and to pay for it from general taxation: yup, that old chestnut. Not a graduate tax, or a fee-based system that was really a tax, but an actual, progressive tax, asking the people with the most to pay for something that would improve the entire country – not because they benefited from it themselves (though, in likelihood, they did), but because it’s the civilised thing to do.

Every other party is mired in the 1992 consensus that if you say “tax” to a voter, they run away. It’s actually rather difficult to make bold plans from the starting position that everybody’s number one consideration is “cheapest”.

So, they’re liberated by being already beyond the pale, a situation other parties should envy but probably don’t. More important – indeed, decisive – is the fact that they have a vision of what they want, coherent enough that they can openly agree its principles and consistent enough that they don’t have to check with the centre before they say anything.

It’s a vision they’re proud of, which is why they can make international alliances – in a way that parties of the right cannot, because their flaws look so vivid in the mirror. Even mainstream social democratic parties can’t, because their main value proposition is “realism”, and to seek solidarity from other, international “realists” might be to admit that their ideas are a little less commonsensical than they insist.

I don’t think any of this will translate into seats: I don’t even know how many votes it will yield. And I admired the Greens already for many of their values; but what I noticed this time around, when they are, on paper, mired in difficulty, is how much easier it is to be a political party that makes an open account of what it believes. They make it look almost enjoyable.