Reflections on Jeanette Fitzsimmons in Camden May 31, 2010
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : New Zealand,Politics , 1 comment so farIt was quite a treat yesterday to go to a small meeting of the NZ Greens here in Camden, with the former leader of the NZ Greens, Jeanette Fitzsimmons, and her husband Harry Parke. Jeanette recently left the New Zealand Parliament, after 14 years as an MP. She first gained a seat when New Zealand switched to a proportional representation system in 1996 and has the distinction of being the only Green MP to have won a constituency seat under NZs ‘Mixed Member Proportional’ electoral system. In MMP, the country elects half its MPs to individual constituencies and the other half from party lists, thus ensuring that politics retains a local element while the parliament reflects the overall voting choice of electors. It’s so different, and so much fairer, than the antiquated first past the post system we use for Westminster and local Councils here.
Having observed our recent elections, she told us that people back in NZ thought it quite funny that everyone here was getting worked up about a ‘hung’ parliament and a coalition – coalitions are the norm in New Zealand, as indeed they are in most democracies.
Her advice to Greens in the UK is to work for electoral reform above everything else.
Its a simple message, and one I believe the Green Party here should take to heart. Our one Green MP is a fantastic achievement, but could so easily be reversed at the next election. We gained less than 2% of the vote, and our 285000 voters are represented by our one MP. In European and London elections, we regularly get 10-15% of the vote, suggesting that we have a strong appeal, but people are reluctant to vote for us for Westminster because we’re very unlikely to win. Locally, we have about 10% of the council vote in Camden, and only one councillor elected this time.
If politics is the best way to achieve change then the first change must be a fair way of electing politicians.
Jeanette went on to talk about some of her thoughts on the way that New Zealand was tackling climate change, or not tackling climate change, with the new National (Tory) government being unusually sceptical and reluctant to implement carbon reduction measures. And then she said something which was very obvious, made complete sense, and which had never occured to me before. She said that we could have all the renewables in the world, all the efficiency measures, but it didn’t matter a jot unless the coal stays in the ground.
New Zealand has about 8.6 billion tonnes of economic reserves of low quality coal, and the state-owned coal company seems hell-bent on mining it and using it in whatever way they can. This means open-cast mining in Otago and Southland, selling it to China, plants to make urea from coal and syngas plants – all very very environmentally damaging, and suicidal on the carbon emissions front.
A somewhat uncertain statistic from UK Coal suggests that here we have a mere 400 million tonnes, but the reserves in Europe and worldwide are large.
As we build our renewables, putting up those thousands of turbines in the North Sea, investing millions, or billions, in wave and tidal systems, and subsidising the rooftop-owning half of the country to install solar photovoltaics, are we really replacing CO2 emitting fuels, or are we just adding more generating capacity which will get absorbed by the future growth that’s so very important to our politicians?
It goes to the very heart of what Green politics are about, and where Green ideas differ from Socialist ones and the rest of the progressive left – growth is the problem, not the solution.
For me, those two messages – work for proportional representation, and remember that growth is not good – stood out. And hearing a pragmatic, inspirational politician who has a wealth of experience talk is a welcome tonic to all the political doom and gloom about. Now that she’s left parliament, I’m not sure what Jeanette will do next, but I am sure it will be at least as illustrious as what has gone before.
Reading Green May 27, 2010
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Green in the City,Miscellany,Politics,Reviews , 3 commentsMy friend Jim over at The Daily (Maybe) is a long-time committed socialist, and came to the Green Party that way. Now he’s asking for some suggestions for reading on Green politics and philosophy. I’ve given a few, but the comment box on Blogger is very annoying, so lets do this properly.
To me, Green philosophy starts with the fundamental ‘ecological’ idea that we humans are an intrinsic part of the eco-system, no more, or less, important than any other species. We do have a unique ability to modify it, which we need to be very careful about. Gilbert White’s detailed day to day observations of the environment around his parish of Selbourne at the end of the eighteenth century, were probably the first in English to start to see ecological systems as a whole, and the interdependence of organisms within them. He talks about trees, soils, births and deaths, rainfall, worms and all the minutiae of life.
The influence of EF Schumacher on Green thinking and the institutions he left us with can’t be underestimated. Small is Beautiful, and his ideas of appropriate technology and keeping economys to a scale that ordinary people can deal with underpins a lot of Green Party policy. In some ways, its problematic in an age of globalisation – the internet does a lot to promote localism but is a massive technology – but still very relevant. The charity he founded, Practical Action probably does more to promote sustainable societies than any green political movement ever has.
When I first came to the UK, it was the Schumacher Society which rekindled my interest in Green politics. The challenge Schumacher poses us in Britain today is how to apply his ideas at urban scales, and this is where many of the Briefings published by the Schumacher Society become useful. These are well-considered policy documents, looking at a range of issues – sustainable cities, democracy, carbon economics, health. They should be compulsory reading for anyone involved in forumulating Green Party policy.
And then there’s the deep ecology end of the spectrum, for which you should read Arne Naess’ Ecology, Community and Lifestyle. I’ve always been a bit uncertain about this – as a philosophy its attractive, but as a guide for living life in London today, or for political parties, its more difficult. Naess believes that a fundamental change in the way we think and act is needed to allow us to live within our environment, and that political parties are not the way to achieve that except in fairly singular circumstances as campaigning organisations (eg a party to campaign against nuclear power) and doesn’t think its useful in bipartisan systems like the US or, probably, the UK.
Jonathan Porritt’s Seeing Green is a British classic, and Caroline Lucas cites it as an early influence. On specific points its perhaps a little dated – I don’t know that many Greens would advocate coal as a transition fuel from oil and gas to renewables now – but worth a read.
I also mentioned Dryzek’s The Politics of the Earth, which I reviewed on here a few years ago. It looks at different ways of discussing environmental politics including descriptions of most of the major strands of Green (and not-so-green) though. Its real value is in showing ways of engaging with various constituencies on Green issues.
Jim – my copy of Small is Beautiful seems to have been recycled somewhere, but you’re welcome to borrow any of the others.
