Eco-Suicide: Deconstructing the Greens' Election Manifesto
From dismantling our armed forces to rejecting nuclear power, the Greens' manifesto is less a document for government and more of what you'd expect drafted by a sixth-form protest group.
In response to the alienation felt by left-wingers following the Labour Party’s rightward pivot, the Greens unveiled an unabashedly progressive, radical manifesto ahead of the party’s election campaign. From promising to end the so-called ‘hostile migration’ environment to pledging an additional £70 billion per year - an astronomical figure - to fund the public sector, the document is unequivocally aimed at courting idyllic left-wing students still addled by the revolutionary fever they felt in their first communist meeting at the back of their university campus.
While one may sneer at the prospect of the Greens becoming a serious party any time soon, the adoration the party commands amongst the younger generation is by no means insignificant and they are fielding candidates in over 600 constituencies. They very much present themselves as a serious political movement, even if that sentiment is not shared by the general public.
As the first part in my series of deconstructing the election manifestos of the leading British political parties, I scoured all 44 pages of their manifesto, focusing not just on environmentalism but also areas where the party has been traditionally weakest to see if it had in any way amended those weaknesses.
National Security
National security is perhaps the bedrock of every functioning modern state. Without it, any country would be at the mercy of foreign aggressors, forced to prostrate in front of them, appeasing them just so the safety of their people could be assured. It may not carry the saliency of the economy or healthcare, but it is just as important, if not more so. While foreign affairs and military logistics have never been the Greens’ strongest suite, the easiest way to measure any political party’s seriousness is to scrutinise what their vision is for its defence. After all, if a party can’t at the very least guarantee the safety of the people they ostensibly serve, then what hope is there that they can properly govern the country?
If elected, Green MPs will: push for the UK to sign the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) and, following this, immediately begin the process of dismantling our nuclear weapons, cancelling the Trident programme and removing all foreign nuclear weapons from UK soil. Additionally, they pledge to work with international partners to enlarge membership of the TPNW and ensure that all states meet their commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Set against the backdrop of a world becoming increasingly more hostile and volatile, the Greens’ approach to Britain’s defence, to put it bluntly, is dependent on every country acting in good faith. Unfortunately, despite how some may delude themselves, such an assumption doesn’t relect reality. By removing our nuclear deterrent (how, the document doesn’t say), the Greens would be effectively making the UK rely even heavier on the US via NATO for protection. National security, conducive for any state, would under these plans be effectively outsourced to a foreign power on the other side of the planet. The Greens retort by arguing that non-nuclear countries are not targets, but one only has to look at the situation in Ukraine to see that is objectively erroneous.
Decommissioning trident would not, as much as the Greens claim, provide the catalyst necessary for global nuclear disarmament. It would, instead, strip this country of its one reliable safety net, forcing it at the mercy of the other world powers. This is without mentioning the loss of prestige that would follow abandoning our defensive forces. As much as it may be difficult for liberal pundits to swallow, nuclear power elevates the UK into the higher cohort of global players, projecting a sense of force that invalidates the country’s smaller population and land area. Suddenly, this small island in the Atlantic is a formiddable geopolitical player rather than just a service economy that caters to American financial bankers.
Immigration
If the Greens’ plan for national security sounds asinine, then their approach to immigration verges on the precipice of insanity.
To combat the so-called ‘hostile environment’ for migrants (for the Greens, hostility is when you import record numbers of people every year), the Greens want to abolish the Home Office and replace it with a new Department of Migration, which they argue would streamline the process for entering the country. According to senior Green party activists, the only function the Home Office provides is the regulation of immigration, seemingly neglecting the fact that the police, fire, passports and counter-terrorism all fall within its jurisdiction. Do each of those functions receive their own new portfolios, or are they merged into a new entity altogther? The Greens seem relatively ambiguious on this particular point, which doesn’t bode well for those of us who value having an effective counter-terrorism force in place managing the streets of the capital.
But this lack of clarity reflects the root of the party’s problems - regardless of the subject area, if the issue is unlikely to appear in the scripture of a sixth-form politics debating class, it will not be considered by the Greens.
For a party which wants to heavily invest in public services, the Greens are intent on not just continuing the open-border orthodoxy of the last 30 years, but exacerbating it further. Under these plans, annual immigration would skyrocket without any mention of how these new arrivals would be assimilated. As any economist can testify, open borders is incompatible with a modern nation with a welfare state. The Greens either want to convert the UK into an economic zone, pooling cheap labour from the third world to further dilute the ethnic and culture demographics of the UK to appease their multicultural orthodoxy, or they want a state that can actually deliver and improve people’s material conditions. It’s a dichotomy that cannot be bridged.
Yet, this manifesto offers no real immigration policy other than open borders. It’s not an adult debate like the Greens often claim. It’s a policy which is inherently destructive. Importing mass numbers of people every year without funding services is fundamentally the main issue that's driving deprivation and the downturn in the UK. It’s the only reason our economy has grown while at the same time making everyone poorer, houses exorbitantly more expensive and public transportation effectively unusable.
Energy
One would expect energy to be one of the manifesto’s strongest points. After all, combatting climate change involves fundamentally overhauling the UK’s energy strategy. However, even that is undermined by archaic attitudes towards nuclear energy and a naive outlook on how quickly the UK’s energy sector can be reformed.
Reading through the document, at times it feels as if the Greens talk more about shutting down nuclear energy than coal or gas. crazy how they have an energy source that fits their goals of actually making the world greener but they’re too blind to realise it. Removing nuclear power plants - the only source of electricity that can feasibly help us reach carbon neutrality any time this century - is a backward approach, showing the party is more committed to pushing for old, reactionary views towards nuclear waste than actually limiting climate change. Germany provides a blueprint for how destructive shutting down nuclear power plants is.
Calls to rely more on renewable energy sources would hold more weight if local Green party chapters didn’t spend time and resources campaigning against new developments any chance they get. Solar, wind or tidal farms have been cancelled or delayed indefinitely because of the party’s flirtation with NIMBYism, a luxury they can afford as they as they have no real power at the national level.
Conclusion
After reading through the document and judging the policies as impartially as possible, it is abundantly clear the Greens are not a serious political movement, instead they exist primarily as a vehicle for increasingly marginalised communists to voice their displeasure at the country and the world, shouting at how everything is broken without offering a programme that can realistically solve anything. The Greens’ manifesto, at times, feels as if it was curated by a 16-year-old with Microsoft Publisher. It’s not an articulation of a feasible economic programme. It’s a recipe for state collapse. Let us count our blessings that the party is unlikely to enter 10 Downing Street anytime soon.