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With Caroline Lucas in la-la land

FloruJP Floru is a City of Westminster Councillor and is the author of What the Immigrant Saw and Heavens on Earth: How to Create Mass Prosperity

So what are the “cuddly” Greens up to nowadays?  Caroline Lucas became the only ever Green MP when she was elected for Brighton Pavilion with a 1,252 majority in 2010.  Not so cuddly herself, erhaps – during the campaign she would not even acknowledge über-nice Conservative candidate Charlotte Vere. Two weeks ago Lucas made headlines by virtue of being arrested at an anti-fracking protest in the company of assorted weirdos. Not that the darling of the BBC lacks media interest, of course.  But let us try to look beyond this.

We all like a bit more green and a bit less concrete – I do, too.  In addition, protecting cute puppy animals and the like is an easy political win. But when one studies Lucas’s track record my impression is that of a rather mixed bag of the good, the contradictory, and the outright wacky.  I cannot resist reporting some of it back to you.

I feel a bit guilty for pointing out ecologists’ apparent difficulty with economic subjects.  After all, the Green movement’s roots lie in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 18th century musings of an idyllic pre-industrial paradise where barefooted children played happily in insect-infested swamps while the parents were busy at the spinning wheel (perhaps the latter is the origin of the “locally sourced” movement).  One can’t be blamed for not understanding the economy if one doesn’t want it to be there in the first place.  What does Caroline Lucas think about the economy?

More tax, more state jobs, more state enterprise, and more state decisions instead of free choice: I can only think of one –ism that covers them all.

Meanwhile, the Greens who lead Brighton & Hove Council have split into the moderate left or mangos who tried to tackle the council’s excessive spending, and the hard left or watermelons who opposed this.  Lucas chose the side of…the commies. One Green councillor’s resignation out of disgust at the way in which his Green Party was running the council recently caused a by-election in which the Greens lost 15% and the council seat. Two weeks ago a mediator was called in to bring the two factions back together.  Perhaps moderate left Leader, Cllr. Kitcat, is already trying to patch things up by introducing the hard left policy of even more progressive council tax bands?  Robbing Peter to pay Paul is not just popular in Communist Party circles.  

The Greens’ inept handling of cost-cutting is but the tip of the iceberg.  They seem to have made a complete mess of a lot more, as the picture below illustrates. In August the Council had the bright idea of allowing non-emergency road works on the sea front for three weeks at a time when more than one million visitors were due to visit it.  I guess car drivers are not a top Green priority.

Incidentally, the photo below illustrates something else.  When I posted it on my facebook page a few weeks ago, one “friend” started ranting at me for doing so.  She was apparently Green.  It went from “it’s the seagulls wot did it” (really?  Dragging off large plastic boxes?) to “this [streetscene] is not dirty at all”.  Judge for yourself.  Some Greens have the first characteristic of the true fanatic: not seeing reality anymore.

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