Should Green Writers Boycott Left Foot Forward Over Anti-Semitism Smear Story?

A post on the website Left Foot Forward claiming that Shahrar Ali, one of the current candidates for the leadership of the Green party, and a former deputy leader, is anti-Semitic has caused outrage among grass root members of the party. The post, which has been through several edits from what was originally posted on 3 August, is a fine example of bad journalism and pretty much a textbook case of fake news. The full video of the speech is now displayed.

Highly selective quotations from a speech by Ali were first posted, from a 2009 rally against Israeli military forces attacking the Gaza strip, Operation Cast Lead, where about 1,500 Palestinian civilians were killed, were used. Ali’s speech was aimed at supporters of the Israeli action in western countries, but was twisted by the Left Foot Forward website to imply it was aimed at Jewish people more generally. The story is confected.

Mainstream media in the guise of the London Evening Standard, which has been running anti-Semitic themed attacks on the Labour party, amongst other themes, on an almost daily basis for the past couple of years, has now run the story. The paper is edited by former Tory chancellor George Osborne.

The Left Foot Forward post reports a complaint to the Green party by the Campaign Against Antisemitism, a group that was formed in 2014 to challenge anti-Semitism in the UK, which has frequently complained about Labour party members, including the leader, Jeremy Corbyn. The Green party has said that it is looking into the matter.

Quite why a website like Left Foot Forward is spreading a reheated story and video used by the Alt-Right Breitbart news network is something of a mystery to me. What is so Left about spreading right-wing smears and propaganda? Is this what the trade unions funding Left Foot Forward had in mind when setting up the site? You do have to wonder.

The piece was written by Left Foot Forward editor, Josiah Mortimer, a Labour party member who supports Corbyn’s leadership, and former Green party member, who became editor about twelve months ago. So, again I’m left wondering why should someone with that kind of politics write such a post? What is the motivation?

The story has topical value of course, with voting still open in the Green party elections for leader and other roles until the end of August. The only thing that I can think of is it is a desperate attempt to raise the viewing figures of his website with sensationalist, but inaccurate news stories. Are the numbers down or something?

I know Shahrar, and he is a passionate anti-racism campaigner who champions the cause of the oppressed, often the Palestinians, by questioning the role of the Israeli state in such oppression. He is not anti-Semitic, he is anti the terrible human rights record of the state of Israel and its military forces, quite rightly. The Israeli lobby is quick to call people anti-Semitic when Israel is criticised, as a tactic to silence those who oppose their actions, but I am shocked that a left-wing website would support this kind of bullying.

Genuine anti-Semitism should not be tolerated, and likening the actions of Israel to the Nazi’s is inaccurate, and given historical events, is grossly insensitive and should be avoided. But that is not case with this story anyway, where Ali did no such thing. Although, you would be forgiven for thinking that it was, by reading Mortimer’s post.

Plenty of Green party people have contributed to Left Foot Forward, Caroline Lucas, Jenny Jones, Natalie Bennett and indeed this writer. We should ask ourselves this question though, 'do I want to be associated with a media outlet that peddles fake news like this, and is aimed at smearing the Green party?' Reputation in politics is something that can be tarnished easily and is often judged on who you associate with. It can be difficult to restore.  

London Mayor and Assembly Election – Who to Second Preference for Mayor?

On Thursday 5th of May, millions of London voters will go to the polls to directly elect a Mayor and 25 London Assembly members. The current Mayor is the Tory Boris Johnson who is leaving the post and the 25 seat London Assembly is made up of 12 Labour Members, 9 Tory Members, 2 Lib Dem Members, 2 Green Party Members.

The Assembly is made up of the 14 winning constituency candidates (the ballot paper is coloured yellow), where up to four London boroughs can constitute a constituency. Locally, where I live, the constituency is Enfield and Haringey, won by Labour in 2012, and the Green Party candidate is Ronald Stewart.

The other 11 Assembly members are elected from the London wide Member List (orange coloured ballot paper) on a proportional basis, using what is known as the Modified d’Hondt Formula, similar to that used for European Parliament Elections, and called the ‘additional member’ system. This takes into account the total votes cast in the London-wide ballot together with the number of Constituency London Assembly Member seats that each political party has already won.

A party candidate needs to get 5% of the London wide Member vote to qualify to win one of these seats at least. Parties that win constituency seats (entirely Labour and Tory at the four elections since the first in 2000), have their London Member vote divided by the number of seats already won (plus 1), and each time a party wins a London Member seat, this is added to the number dividing their vote.

To simplify things, for parties who have not won constituency seats, 5% gets you one seat, around 8% gets you two, and around 10% gets you three, but all this depends how the votes actually fall. In 2010 the Green party secured 8.5% of the London Member vote, which yielded two seats.

If you want to see Greens elected to the London Assembly, then make sure you vote Green on the orange coloured ballot paper, as this is where we will win seats, and we can then continue to represent Londoners on green issues.

The Mayoral contest will once again be dominated by the Labour and Tory candidates, Sadiq Khan and Zac Goldsmith. The Green Party candidate is Sian Berry.

The ballot paper for the Mayoral election which is coloured pink, allows for a first and second preference vote. Second preference votes come into play if no single candidate gets more than 50% of the first preference vote. The top two candidates then go forward into a final round, where all the other candidates are eliminated, and their voters’ second preferences are counted. After this exercise the winning candidate is the one with the most first and second preference votes. This type of voting system is known as the ‘supplementary vote’.

At every London Mayor election the Labour and Tory candidates have been in the final run off, (with the exception of Ken Livingstone standing as an independent in 2000, but really he was 'Labour') by some distance, and it is a certainty that this will be case this year. If you vote second preference for any of the other candidates, it will be wasted, as all the other candidates will be eliminated by the final round.

So, who should Green voters second preference for Mayor, Khan or Goldsmith? The London Green Party has yet to decide on a second preference recommendation, but probably will do so in the next couple months.

There was a suggestion by Jenny Jones, one of the outgoing Green Assembly Members, that Greens might vote to second preference Zac Goldsmith, the Tory candidate, because he has green credentials. Goldsmith is a former editor of The Ecologist magazine and has campaigned on environmental issues, such as against the expansion of Heathrow Airport.

He is also very wealthy with an estimated fortune of over £1 billion and is, well, a very privileged Tory toff. However well-meaning his environmental thinking is, being Green doesn’t stop at giving to good causes like some Victorian philanthropist, it is about challenging the very system that has made Goldsmith so rich. He is one of 1%.

I disagree with Jenny Jones, and there is no way I’ll be voting second preference for Goldsmith, just because he has a bicycle or whatever. I could never vote for a Tory. Somewhat reluctantly, because I’m no big fan of Sadiq Khan either, I will second preference the Labour candidate for London Mayor.    

Green Battle Lines Drawn Over EU Referendum

With news that Green Party peer Jenny Jones has joined the new cross party campaign, to convince the public to vote to leave the European Union at the forthcoming UK referendum on the matter, a division has opened up in the party. The campaign group is named, rather straightforwardly, Vote Leave.

This shouldn’t come as a great surprise to Jenny Jones watchers. As recently as this July she wrote a piece in The Ecologist magazine entitled ‘Something Rotten in the State of Europe’, in which she says:

Just as Syriza's negotiating position has been fatally undermined by its refusal (in my view deeply mistaken) to countenance leaving the Euro, so we - Green and progressive voters - will lack any leverage so long as we tolerate a bad EU, for fear of something even worse.

And make no mistake: a pro-TTIP European Union, eager to impose the imperatives of capital against people, determined to evacuate democracy in Greece and other member states of its meaning, is not an EU we should wish to be part of.

The formal position of the Green Party is to vote to remain in the EU and to try and reform it into a better, people’s Europe, but this seems to be a remote possibility at best. There are quite a few Eurosceptic voices in the Green Party, but Jenny Jones is the most prominent so far to come out for leaving the EU.

Jones comes from the ‘eco-liberal’ wing of the Green Party and this philosophy has a streak of anarchism running through it, which I think is where this anti EU sentiment emanates from. Anti-corporate, anti-big state feelings, as against a small state, eco-friendly localism agenda drives this desire to abandon the supra-national state.

In the other corner are the eco-social democrats, whose most prominent member is the Green Party MP Caroline Lucas, who has many cheerleaders in the party who will no doubt follow suit. An ex Member of the European Parliament (MEP), Lucas wants the UK to remain in the EU, and as aforementioned to change the organisation into a better one (unspecified how exactly), at pretty much whatever the cost. The cost could be high too, as the Prime Minister, David Cameron, negotiates the good bits of the EU away. In this piece for The Guardian newspaper she argues:

The EU is far from perfect, but turning our backs on it is a risky strategy. Profoundly re-imagining what a reformed EU might look like shouldn’t just be left to David Cameron. We should be building a progressive case for Britain’s membership of a radically reformed union that works better for all of us.

The EU has enormous potential to spread peace, freedom and security in and around Europe, as well as further afield. It’s with this vision in mind that I’ll be campaigning to stay in Europe.

Unfortunately, it appears to be just that, ‘a vision’, at this stage. If Cameron ditches the employment and environmental protections afforded by the EU, we may have to take a couple of steps back, before we can move forward to meet Lucas’ idealised EU.

So where does this leave an eco-socialist member of the Green Party like me? Well, there are differences of opinion in Green Left also. Personally, and in line with a recent TUC general council statement on the issue, I’m awaiting the outcome of Cameron’s negotiations before deciding which way to vote. We don’t know at this stage even what we will be voting on.

The issue seems to come down to how you view our chances of getting a better deal by staying in or leaving, and I’m still considering this too. Would it be easier to just take on the right in the UK, or take on the whole of the undemocratic EU? If we build alliances across the EU with our fellow travellers, perhaps this is more desirable, but how likely and achievable is this? For me it will probably come down to a lesser of evils, because in or out of the EU the next few years look bleak for eco-socialism either way.