So what did the Green Party's long march through the EU institutions achieve?

Written by Haroon Saad

Now that the debate regarding Brexit is over perhaps we need to move into a period of reflection and discussion regarding how effective was our 21 year presence in the European Parliament (EP).

The party has always had a very critical position regarding the EU and indeed any objective review of our current policy would conclude that we are essentially a party  that view the EU as a neoliberal club. However, the party also agreed that it would be important to engage and see what reforms could be undertaken from within.

We had MEP’s in the EP since 1999. From 1999-2014 we had two MEP’s, Jean Lambert and Caroline Lucas (who was replaced by Keith Taylor in 2010). From 2014-2019 we had three MEP’s with the addition of Molly Scott Cato.

It seems appropriate to take a review of what actually was achieved during these 20 years. With all respect to the additional MEP’s elected in June 2019, I am not going to include their short sojourn as it’s not really relevant.

In the twenty years we have been present in the EP it seems to me that whatever gains were made have been marginal. Just consider the following events that took place and which our then MEP’s actually supported:

·       The Lisbon treaty was ratified, despite having been voted down by French and Dutch Citizens in referendums, the EP simply ignored the votes of the citizens, cancelled all other planned referendums and simply proceeded to adopt what had been rejected, albeit with some procedural sleight of hand.

·       The Directive on renewable energy was endorsed in 2009, supported by our MEP’s. Sounds just the right kind of thing that we should be supporting but in fact as predicted by several NGO’s it unleashed a land grab which enslaved  and displaced hundreds of thousands of poor people across the globe and also destroyed multi flora sites by converting them into single crop use.

·        We had the Iraq war, which saw the green group in the EP, to which we belong supporting the German Greens in their support for the war.

·        We had the EU Carbon Trading Scheme which again was supported but simply resulted in large windfall profits for the biggest polluters.   

  

·        We had the Fiscal Compact, which again was supported by the Green Group, which brought into law austerity as a guiding principle and resulted in people in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Cyprus, Italy all being subjected to non-democratic dictate.

·        We had the Citizens Initiative which was presented by our MEP’s at conference as creating real citizens power. In fact it has been nothing of the sort, simply window dressing to create the semblance that citizens could actually force legislative change.

I could go on but my aim is to simply generate an honest reflection and discussion. This may be even more necessary if we go down the road of seeking some kind of Progressive Alliance as we need to learn, in my view, from the very marginal impact we were able to exert over 20 years. 

For those of you wanting to see more, then I encourage you to visit the EP website and there you can find what actually our MEP’s did and like me, you may wonder what was the relevance of their actions.

Haroon Saad is a member of Waltham Forest Green Party and a Green Left supporter