The Climate Crisis – What do I tell my Grandchildren?

 

Written by Allan Todd 

“Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.”

Euripides

For several decades - through the years of Cold War, the start of neoliberalism, the collapse of the degenerated and deformed workers’ states of the Eastern bloc into rampant capitalism, and the growing signs of environmental and ecological degredation - I’ve always tried to follow Antonio Gramsci’s maxim: “Pessimism of the intellect, but optimism of the will.”  

Farewell Gramsci 

But, right now, I have to confess: that increasingly-fragile ‘optimism of the will’ has just about gone. What has prompted this collapse in optimism is news about recent developments in the Green Party’s Climate Campaign Committee. 

In 2017, whilst still a member of the Green Party, I was co-opted onto the Green Party’s national Climate Campaign Committee. The aim of those of us on it was to prepare the launch of a national Green Party campaign on the Climate Crisis. However, after several months of growing awareness that the leadership were not that keen on a radical national campaign on the climate, I gradually stepped back, and instead put all my efforts into continuing the organisation of the anti-fracking Green Mondays at Preston New Road in Lancashire. 

In the meantime, whilst the Green Party remained largely inactive on the Climate, Extinction Rebellion came along the following year - and really brought the Climate Crisis to the media’s attention, thus pushing it up the political agenda. Something the Green Party could have done, almost a year earlier. 

Nonetheless, as one always to have doubts about whether I’m doing the right thing, I occasionally wondered if I should have remained active on that Climate Campaign Committee. But, just recently, I learnt that one of the main co-leaders of that Committee has decided to step down, because of…growing frustration at the way in which radical suggestions for climate campaigns were regularly blocked or watered down by the leadership and the executive. 

This, of course, chimes with recent posts on London Green Left’s Blog about developments within the Green Party of England and Wales (GPEW). In particular, the news reminded me of a post by Dee Searle in July, in which she commented on how the leadership had prioritised: 

“…electoral success over radical environmental campaigning… At an internal review of the 2019 snap General Election manifesto, it was revealed that genuinely radical climate mitigation policies developed by the party’s Climate Change Policy Working Group had been removed by a small group around the leadership team and Caroline Lucas’s office because they weren’t vote winners. Yet the election was being held against a background of almost daily revelations about the gathering pace of climate-related environmental calamity. A squandered opportunity to step up campaigning pressure if ever there was one.”  

However, what for me has pushed sadness into despair are the group discussions amongst members of the Climate Campaign Committee that have taken place around the decision by that leading Committee member to step down. 

Trimming to the right 

The most depressing contribution was one that seemed to suggest that, given that most voters are currently voting Tory, any radical left-sounding parties or policies have “no chance of influencing or getting momentum” from voters. To argue that nothing radical can be elected now - or can manage to push changes through by pressure from social movements from below - is defeatist. But even to hint that we should tail-end any Tory/rightwing political trend in order to be more 'successful’ with voters is far worse than defeatist - it is downright dangerous. 

Given that Boris Johnson successfully pushed for Brexit, does that mean parties such as the Greens should have abandoned Remain and backed Brexit instead, in order to get ‘momentum'? And, given the current level of xenophobia and out-right racism over refugees, which seems to resonate with so many Tory voters, should the Greens now join the calls for ‘taking back control of our borders’? There was even a dismissive suggestion that issues such as feminism (and presumably racism?) were “big turnoffs” as regards voters.  Words failed me.

This idea of ‘trimming’ to fit in more with a temporary Tory majority reminds me of why I left the Green Party. It wasn’t just over the ‘Unite to Remain’ pact with the LibDems - a party so clearly on the other side of the barricades - but much more to do with the growing rightward drift within the Green Party: which is, it seems, precisely why Climate policies have been watered down or vetoed. 

Arguments that radical policies for social and economic justice should be ditched were very much to the fore on the GPEW Members’ on-line discussion site before and after GE2017 - often, from the right, put forward in a personally-abusive way. In case it has been forgotten, the early origins of what eventually became the Green Party - first the People’s Party & then the Ecology Party - were from the centre-right, and it seems that things are returning to that position. 

And, in case this too has been forgotten, that right-of-centre approach did NOT result in a massive growth in membership or in elected representatives. That all came AFTER the Green Party - recognising, with the help of members of Green Left, that environmental destruction and the Climate Crisis AND growing social and economic inequalities were BOTH the results of the same ‘System’ - had made a conscious decision to move to a more leftwing position. 

That drift to the right within the Green Party has led to the stance amongst many members that ‘Labour has to be hurt to make it see sense’ over the issues of making election pacts and supporting Proportional Representation (PR), by standing Greens in every seat - including in those key marginals Labour needed to hold or win in order to defeat the Tories. 

Though, of course, the only people who are really hurt by a Labour loss/Tory win are those who’ve already been ‘hurting’ since at least 2010: those forced into food banks and/or onto the streets, the growing number of children living in poverty, and those whose life-expectancy has either stalled or even declined. Prof King of Cambridge University, one of those involved in a recent study that concluded there had been at least 120,000 austerity-related deaths, referred to this as “economic murder”.  

This rightwards drift was particularly typified most recently by last year's ‘Unite to Remain’ pact with the LibDems. Just because Labour - wrong-headedly - remains against electoral pacts and PR is no reason to go holding hands in a pact with a party like the LibDems which is still led by unrepentant neoliberals. Amongst other things, that ‘Unite to Remain’ pact - essentially pushed by the leadership - was so unprincipled. 

It was made with a party that had (a) blocked an opposition attempt to get a Vote of No Confidence in Johnson and to have a People’s Vote with ‘Remain’ as an option; (b) abstained on an Opposition amendment to stop further privatisation of NHS services; (c) been the first opposition party to give Johnson and Cummings the pre-Brexit election they’d always wanted; (d) totally abandoned the idea of a People’s Vote; and (e) a leader who even said she’d press the nuclear button. 

That’s where ‘accommodating right-of-centre views’ takes you. What was particularly criminal about this ‘Unite to Remain’ pact was that 10 of its 60 seats actually targeted sitting PRO-REMAIN Labour MPs in key marginals - such as Stroud and Warrington South, both of which saw Tories replace those Labour MPs. 

Radicalism isn’t finished 

In fact, claims that radical politics now have no appeal, so the Greens should go more centre-right, do not stand up to any serious examination. In case it’s been forgotten, in GE2017, Corbyn-led Labour got 12.9m votes and 40% of the votes - almost beating May’s Tories, who got 13.6m votes. And that was after 2 years of open sabotage from rightwing Labour MPs and, as we now know from the leaked Labour internal report, of secret sabotage from rightwing Labour officials as well; never mind the hostile mainstream media reporting.   

To put that GE2017 vote into some historical context, Corbyn’s vote then was BIGGER than that achieved by (a) the more ‘centrist’ Miliband in GE2015 (9.3m and 30% of the vote); (b) the even more ‘centrist’ Brown in GE2010 (8.6m and 29%); & (c) the much more ‘centrist’ Blair in GE2005 (9.5m and 35%) AND in GE2001 (10.7m and 40%). And, as we all know, GE2019 was not a normal general election but basically a one-issue election over Brexit.  

What is most saddening is the existence of what could be called the ‘People’s Front of Judea’ syndrome, as the right of the Greens rule out any co-operation with any radical party or group, in order, instead, to appeal to ‘soft’ Tories. Though, to be fair, this PFJ syndrome is one that is also still very prevalent on our centre-left side of the barricades - whether it’s Labour, or many of the smaller groups to the left of them. The idea that any one group or party has all the answers was always wrong-headed - but, in the midst of an ever-worsening Climate Crisis, it is nothing short of criminal lunacy. 

It reminds me of what the comedian Mark Steel said at the launch of the People’s Assembly in 2013: 

“I don’t know what it is with the left. They say: ‘You know, I agree with 99.9% of what you say - but that f-ing 0.1%? I’m having absolutely nothing to do with you!’"

The main thing right now is for all those who see the Climate Emergency as the number one priority to stop slagging off every other group and, instead, to join hands in a broad Red-Green United Front. 

Yet what we currently have are at least three different schemes to set up new parties to the left of the current Starmer-led Labour Party, and now the suggestion from mostly centre-right Greens to set up a separate Climate Party. This at a time when it looks almost certain that 2020 will be the hottest year since recordings began in the 19thC - with the 5 hottest years ever being since 2015:

Quite frankly, as the risks of catastrophic Climate Breakdown increase, we don’t have time to waste building yet more parties or groups from scratch - instead, we need to be using the next few years building bridges to get a broad movement for immediate climate action. 

So what do I tell my grandchildren?

I have just had my first ‘social bubble’ - with my grandchildren, who I hadn’t seen since 11 March, because of lockdown. They have already experienced at first-hand, 5 years ago, the devastation of Climate Crisis flooding.  

So what do I say to them as their world really starts to burn and drown in worsening ‘Hothouse Earth’ conditions? How can I even begin to explain to them how so many people, parties and groups that claim to ‘get’ the Climate Crisis, and who should have known better, insisted instead on ‘doing their own thing’ and stayed sitting in their separate camps, preferring to ‘hang separately rather than stand together’? 

Other than saying it really was ‘The Age of Stupid’, I haven’t the faintest idea - beyond “I’m so sorry”.

Allan Todd is an ecosocialist/environmental and anti-fascist activist, and author of Revolutions 1789-1917