Green Leadership – Questions for candidates
Green House Think Tank is asking those standing in the internal leadership elections in UK-based Green Parties this year a series of questions. These elections include:
- Green Party of England and Wales elections for:
- Leader or co-leaders
- Deputy leader or deputy co-leaders
- Scottish Greens Leadership Election
The Questions
The following questions are intended to gain insights into how candidates perceive the predicament our society now finds itself in, and to tease out their views on how Green Parties should respond.
1. Where are we now?
Do you think the UK is currently a democracy? Would you agree that our society’s economic and governance systems are broken beyond repair? If so, what is the Green alternative pitch? How much does economics need to change to deal with the climate emergency?
2. How best can Green Parties help to transform our culture, politics and economy?
How should Greens deal with the gap between aspirations, expectations, and living within planetary boundaries?
3. Role of Green leadership?
How do you see your role as a leader within a democratic party? On what issues should Green Parties be a broad coalition that embraces diverse opinions, and on what issues do you feel a unified position is needed?
4. Electoral strategy?
How should Green Parties balance gaining more nationally elected representatives as soon as possible with building a movement and consensus to transform our culture, economy and politics across the party and wider society?
Does it pay to be provocative with messaging or does this risk recent electoral success? On which issues are you prepared to be provocative?
5. Anything else you would like to add?
This is an opportunity to add any points that the preceding questions have not covered and that you consider to be important for Green House readers and Green Party members to hear.
Rationale for these questions
The candidates have laid out their platforms and many commentators will be quizzing them on a range of topics. These commentators will be motivated by perceived political priorities (local and national), by what will differentiate candidates from each other and, perhaps most significantly, by what it is thought the party membership is looking for in a leadership candidate. These are all important points of discussion but Green House Think Tank is taking a different approach for a different reason.
In May 2024, just before the General Election, Green House published a framing paper scoping out the nature of our ecological and social predicament. This work highlighted some difficult realities that our society struggles to acknowledge:
“There is a resource crunch and Green growth and technofixes are an illusion”
It took this a step further which gets to the heart of what politics is about:
“Once the need to place such [ecological] limits is accepted, the question arises of how the limited resources are distributed – between countries and between individuals within countries. How this should be decided and by whom leads to questions around governance, democracy and power.“
This, along with work looking at Rethinking Energy Demand, and the recent briefing paper on Managing our Economy for the Climate Emergency aims to focus minds on some of the difficult realities of realising Green political visions. What mechanism will govern the activities in our economy to ensure that it doesn’t exceed an equitable share of space within global planetary boundaries? By what process will our society’s ‘equitable share’ be decided? It is relatively easy to do better at decarbonisation and restoring biodiversity than the UK is currently doing. It is easy to criticise the current Labour government’s lack of ambition and misaligned priorities. That is, however, very different from having a viable, and sufficiently ambitious, plan for what Greens would do with the levers of power.
‘What Greens want more of’ is the easy part: investment in renewables and investment in local economies! But focusing only on that avoids discussing the challenge of constraining overall investment and resource demand, alongside creating new jobs and strengthening welfare provision. Returning to within planetary boundaries - and avoiding transgressing those not yet breached - implies placing physical limits on what humans can use and consume. As resources become constrained, there is a need to avoid further exacerbating the injustices and inequalities created by colonialism by placing limits on the UK’s total use and focusing on redistribution rather than levelling up. This means addressing both domestic inequality within the UK and global inequality. What does this mean for reducing global trade and current hyper-mobility? How can redistributive economies be forged?
The mainstream belief is that the path to a sustainable future can largely be built through technological solutions and leaving decarbonisation to experts in the field. Greens understand that this amounts to climate tunnel vision because other planetary boundaries, including biodiversity loss and pollution, are equally important. However, Dougald Hine talks of how humanity cannot just plan and manage its way out of the climate crisis as a technical challenge. He argues that we should humbly accept that we are living in the ruins of a fossil-fuel powered, endless growth-focussed economy which must be allowed to fail so that people’s livelihoods, skills, buildings and land can be repurposed for a new economy. This creates difficult questions around whether Greens should promise a smooth ‘transition’ and whether this implies an acceptance that society will only change at a limited pace (regardless of the implications for future generations). The alternative may be to argue for supporting people through significant ‘disruption’, even ‘rupture’.
This all leads to questions around messaging, strategy and theories of change. If the purpose of Green Parties is to change our society such that it is sustainable (whatever that takes), not just to obtain power and put Greens in decision-making roles (where they are limited by existing structures), how are Greens going to change the structure of our politics? How do we look beyond ‘getting a Green in the room’?
So Green House Think Tank is asking four questions of the Green leadership candidates, in part because we recognise that Green Parties have a number of potential routes forwards, particularly given the changing nature of the UK’s electoral politics and the worsening of ecological overshoot. However, more significantly, it is felt that there are some important questions that candidates may not be asked. By asking these questions publicly, Greens can weigh the candidates’ responses in their decision about who to vote for in the internal elections.
Where are we now? – This question tries to focus the debate about democracy on the big rethinking of governance not being discussed in the mainstream, rather than on the usual debates about electoral reform, written constitutions and devolution. There are open questions about what a sufficient governance system would look like that allows our society to respond swiftly and equitably to our predicament. There are also communication questions about the use of the word ‘democracy’ and what Greens should mean by it. Where there isn’t consensus within the Green movement, the role of Green leadership is even more critical.
How best can Green Parties help to transform our culture, politics and economy? – This question aims to bring to the fore the difficult politics around what living within planetary boundaries might entail. Greens are clear on the need to reduce inequality but how far does this need to go? How much space is there between the ecological ceiling and the social foundation? Limits to Growth published in 1972 recognised the need for redistribution over 50 years ago yet Greens are still trying to wrestle this into the political debate:
“As soon as a society recognises that it cannot maximise everything for everyone, it must begin making difficult choices … society will have to weigh the trade-offs engendered by a finite earth not only with consideration of present human values, but also consideration of future generations.”
Role of Green leadership? – Green parties have not always embraced the idea of having leaders. For a long time, the Green Party of England and Wales had ‘Principal Spokespeople’ rather than leaders. In a political landscape of centralised parties and strongman leaders, in which the media may assume Green Leaders have authority over the parties they lead, what do the candidates themselves see as the focus and limits to the leadership role? How does this fit with the bottom-up internal democracy that Green Parties embrace? What is the leadership role in bridging between the very different strands of Green Party membership and the voter base - e.g. rural and very urban, young voters and long-standing environmental campaigners?
Electoral strategy? - Electoral strategy is about internal resource allocation. However, it is also inextricably linked to communication and messaging. Where can a party tailor its message to be all things to all people, and where do decisive choices need to be made regarding the issues, framing and policies to prioritise?