Hustings for Kings School
Thank you for inviting me!
The greatest distinguishing feature of Green Party policy is a genuine concern about environmental issues. Other parties pay lip service to them at best. Climate change is real, and will have real, serious consequences. Believe the knowledgeable scientists who tell us this, not the politicians, or business people with vested interests, who pretend it’s all lies! For the sake of our children and grandchildren, we must do something about it. It’s no use pussyfooting about pretending to do things, or doing trivial things that make almost no difference. It’s vital that thinking on these issues is properly joined up, and not short-term and opportunistic. Unlike most politicians, I have a substantial relevant scientific and technical background.
Politicians think economics is more important than the environment? They should try holding their breath while they count their money...fact is, most of them are pathetically bad at economics, too.
Another distinguishing feature of Green Party policy is that we’re the only party with a significantly different approach to “austerity.” Most of the other parties, UKIP included, believe that austerity is essential to economic recovery.
I’d liken that to the ancient medical practice of bloodletting.
“The patient is sick. We must draw blood.”
The patient deteriorates.
“We must draw more blood.”
The patient deteriorates further.
“We must draw yet more blood.”
Oh dear, time to call the undertaker.
Happily, medicine has progressed since the eighteenth century. Less happily, in the minds of most politicians, economics is still stuck in bloodletting mode.
Cameron claimed that the government has been paying down Britain’s debts. As the BBC pointed out, this was simply untrue: we are still running a deficit, that is, the debt is still increasing. It’s not increasing as fast as it did in the last two years of the Labour government (the years they bailed out the banks), but it’s still increasing faster than in any year before that. The national debt has increased more in five years of coalition rule than it did in 13 years of Labour rule.
Austerity does not work. It’s a self-perpetuating, downward spiral. It’s very much the same policy that was followed so disastrously in the Great Depression in the 1930s, which culminated in WWII.
Do we really need another major war to loosen the purse strings?
The current government talks as if managing a national budget was like managing a household budget. It really isn’t. A household has to abide by the rules; governments MAKE the rules. When the rules are wrong, governments should rewrite them.
The Greens are the only party that still really believes in public ownership of crucial services. The Labour Party used to! But we are the only party left who will fight to reverse the immoral and impractical sell-off of the National Health Service, the railways, the Royal Mail, and the distribution of water, electricity and gas. The government says we can’t afford it; on the contrary, the taxpayer and consumer can’t afford for them to be in private hands.
The Greens are also the only party who haven’t been panicked into a knee-jerk copying of UKIP’s paranoia about immigration. Yes, of course there are real issues associated with immigration – but the solution isn’t to try vainly to close our borders. The solution is to tackle the causes of unbalanced migration, and to deal with the consequences that are already occurring. We’re a rich country, we can afford to deal properly with consequences. In fact, the consequences of excessive tightening of border controls would be economically far worse.
I’m not going to waste your time or patronize you by preaching the many benefits of immigration. Instead, I want to ask you this: who has caused our country most problems: the bankers who plunged us into economic disaster, the expenses-milking politicians who have the cheek to lecture the poor (most of whom are innocent) about benefit fraud, the wealthy tax-dodgers keeping £25 billion a year from the Exchequer; the poverty-wage paying bosses and rip-off-rent-charging landlords – or foreign health workers and farm labourers?
Very few immigrants claim benefits here. Many of the jobs immigrants are doing are so badly paid, a British person gets more on benefits – but the answer to that is not to force them into work by cutting benefits, which anyone who’s depended on them for any length of time knows are not generous, but to increase the minimum wage. That’s Green Party policy. Yes, it will increase the price of vegetables in the shops – but ordinary folk will have more money in their pockets to pay for them if wages are higher, and vegetables are a minuscule part of a wealthy family’s budget.
My wife is British now, but when we married in 1984 she was Indian, and had never been out of India. Our daughter is married to a German, and they live in Italy. My Jewish grandmother was a refugee, twice – once from her native Russia during the Russian revolution, and once from Nazi Germany. As you can imagine, I don’t have any time at all for racist migration policies, in Britain or anywhere else.