The Point

Last updated: 27 June 2022.

Vanishing Illusions

Green Party General Election candidate, radical blogger, and regular Point contributor Adrian Cruden discusses radical choices -  for Dewsbury, and beyond

 

The trainee journalist looked at me as his colleagues filmed us sitting on a bench high up in Crows’ Nest Park, part of their project on the upcoming General Election.

“Some of the other parties say that the Greens don’t play the game in politics, especially when it comes to negotiating with big business,” he said, adding “But if you don’t play the game, you won’t win.”

A lovely analogy to play with.

“Well,” I said, my mind racing perhaps unsuccessfully for an un-cheesy response, “we don’t want to win the game. We want to change it.”

The last few weeks have been a maelstrom as along with Green Party comrades I have readied for the combined General and local elections. With six council candidates, I am standing for Dewsbury Parliamentary constituency. It is a large area, stretching south from the old mill town of Dewsbury itself down through the separate, smaller town of Mirfield out in the rolling countryside of Kirkburton and Denby Dale. While the north is part of the Heavy Woollen District - the home of shoddy and mungo, perhaps the oldest form of industrial recycling - the south boasts rolling rural landscapes and the origins of thick crust pies. Small farmers and commuters to the nearby cities of Sheffield, Wakefield and Leeds as well as nearby Huddersfield, live in the country areas. While in town you find the built up terraces of the mainly Asian population of Savile Town and the more recent estates in Thornhill and Dewsbury Moor, with predominantly white communities. Both include areas with the worst poverty indices in the EU, while nearby Mirfield offers a more mixed economic profile.

Our town sits with its commercial heart sucked out of it. Once proud arcades are populated by pound shops and empty shells. WH Smith’s needed a special arrangement brokered by Kirklees Council with its landlord to stay in the town, while other buildings, sold to a fantastical developer who emptied them and then ran out of money several years ago, still largely sit vacant or underused - even McDonalds is gone, a mark of dire economics rather than anything more nutritionally positive. Meanwhile, in the country areas, access to services is squeezed under spending cuts and the problem of being “in between” larger cities.

Similarly, the local hospital is under pressure, downgrading the A&E department as part of its measures to meet the PFI debt incurred under Labour; hamstrung by ongoing private tendering of services to the likes of Boots, Virgin and even Sainsburys. The Law Centre has merged with the CAB, which has faced savage cuts at the very time of maximised demand. And of course, we are promised more to come by all three of the established parties.

Yet dotted around, often hidden away, wealthy mansions mark out the rather more affluent citizens whose votes helped return the sitting Conservative MP, Simon Reevell, in 2010 with a small majority of 1,526 over the Cabinet Minister Shahid Malik.

So now we face a contest for the political future: a key marginal in the General Election, one Labour must win and the Tories mustn’t lose (although there is some sense that the sitting MP, who earns more from his legal practice than his parliamentary work, may perhaps see the writing on the wall). With UKIP jumping up from nowhere in the last few weeks, candidates include a rather desperate Lib Dem whose main line is that his Dad was once a councillor in the locale, and the leader of Yorkshire Forward calling for a regional assembly. A Christian alliance candidate (not to be confused with the Christian Party, I think). And me, for the Greens.

Last time round, I polled 1.6% as the Green candidate, a total of 849 votes – an improvement of over 200 on the time before, but behind everyone apart from a lonely English Democrat. So, as my trainee journalist questioner asked, why stand again? Apparently, there is a possibility I might not win.

I told him it was about beliefs, about promoting a point of view that matters to me, building for the future. And besides, we are competitive now, far more than before. Over the years, our vote has been rising – long before the Green surge of the last six months, we overtook the Lib Dems in local elections. Over the constituency as a whole there are 9 Labour councillors, 7 Conservatives and 2 Greens, no others, and we also hold an absolute majority on Kirkburton parish council. At the local elections last year, we came third overall with just under 13% of the total votes cast. So we are far from irrelevant.

So where do we go from here? In the last few weeks, with the poll date known far in advance, there has certainly been much more interest than last time. Hustings meetings have taken place and local community radio has had long sessions with each candidate – my own lasting over two and quarter hours of questioning by studio interviewers and listeners tweeting and texting in. Next month, we have a 90 minute candidates’ debate on local TV, while the local press have been following the campaign in somewhat more depth than before.

But for the people who matter, the voters, the refrain continues – aren’t politicians all the same? Who is listening to us? Disillusion with politics as usual is rife. A challenge and an opportunity for anyone with a radical message.

Of course, the received wisdom is for parties to coalesce around a single agenda of neoliberalism: public services are wasteful and must be tendered out if not totally sold off; the public sector is inefficient; austerity is necessary because of a bloated welfare state; and if you are having a bad time, it’s probably because of the migrants who have taken your jobs. Don’t blame the rich – your only hope of a better tomorrow is if they beneficently deign to trickle their blessings down onto you, so whatever you do, don’t trickle them off.

Oh, and by the way, there is no money left.

Lies, lies and more lies. We live in a country richer overall now than ever before. But also more unequal than it was in the latter days of Queen Victoria. By some indicators, not even Czarist Russia matched the degree of inequality now boasted by Cameron’s Britain – a process much accelerated under Nu-Labour: remember Mandelson’s intense relaxation about people becoming filthy rich? And didn’t Labour relax big time?

In a few weeks’ time, by Oxfam’s estimation, the UK will pass the point where the richest 1% of the population will own more than half the total wealth. Just five families hold more than the poorest 13 million people combined. We are slugging it out with the United States to be the least socially just society on the face of planet Earth – quite a record indeed. And in Dewsbury and its surrounding areas, both extremes are evident.

When there was some degree of social mobility, the capitalist dream was used to sedate public opinion into a calm acceptance of inequality through the ideas that the holders of wealth must have earned it and with just a bit more hard work, everyone else could at least hope to have the same. Now, with seven years of austerity, with the vast majority of people gaining at very most a 1% pay rise since 2010 while bankers and top executives have chalked up yet a further gain of over one third in real earnings, the dream has turned into a nightmare. Yet it is one from which our battered democracy is beginning to awaken from.

“How will you pay for the things you talk about?” is the most frequently asked question I get.

“Tax the rich.”

Again and again, people smile and agree – especially when you set out the figures to be gained from a wealth tax (£35 billion over 5 years), increasing tax for earners over £100,000 pa (£2 billion per annum), a Robin Hood Tax (£25 billion p.a.) and, the most agreed after years of stories of rip offs: a real clampdown on tax avoidance to reclaim £70 billion p.a. (by some estimates about 6/10s of what is stolen from British citizens each year by tax dodging corporates and rich individuals). I have yet to come across a single objector, bar a neighbouring Tory MP.

But other ideas are welcomed too – our policy to increase the national minimum wage to £10 per hour is seen as common sense by most people. Yet, unlike in the past, there is little objection and a lot of agreement to our policy for a maximum wage as well – legislation to limit the wage of the highest earner in any company to 10 times that of the lowest earner.

So our agenda is simply equality – the need for it, the benefits of it – from social cohesion and personal happiness to tackling global warming and resource scarcity. And the fact that it is just right in itself.

With the national liberal press reporting on the constituency to keep the illusion of choice alive for maybe one last heave, we face the tired old “wasted vote” argument. Except it truly is exhausted now as all the old parties can offer is a sort of “bank manager” style of politics. “We’ll privatise your school a little bit more gently than the others”. “Sell off the hospital? Of course not, well maybe not quite as much of it...”

Perhaps in the old days when there was some sort of choice between them, the tactic would have worked, but not now. Sick of the cynicism, there is a real, widespread sense of wanting something new and no longer caring about a “wasted vote” – but rather being offended by the very idea that such a thing should exist at all. Among younger people, this is most evident of all, with one recent national poll putting the Greens first equal with Labour on 29% of the vote among 18 to 25 year olds. Little wonder then that the Coalition has done so much to effectively disenfranchise millions of them – barely a half of those eligible are registered to vote.

“I’m thinking again. The Greens are a really radical party,” one of the listeners to last week’s radio show tweeted (no, it wasn’t my wife).

Our area has great potential and people. But its decline shows the inability of free market economics to provide even an adequate way of life for most people. We need a new way forward – a sharing economy rather than acquisitive one; a local focus rather than investing hope that distant boardrooms will provide an answer. Real democracy, one that puts ordinary people in control of their communities, services and workplaces, needs to replace the hollow ritual of five year trips to ballot boxes with two big parties engaged in a false debate to coerce people into negative voting that leaves the Establishment unchecked.

The next five weeks will by turns be enjoyable, frustrating, challenging, tiring and (hopefully) exhilarating – but whatever the outcome, never wasted. Sparked by the catalyst of the Scottish referendum, change is coming, even if its form is often only dimly perceptible as yet. By taking the radical case to the streets, doorsteps and hustings here and across all the nations of the British Isles, Greens, SSP, SNP, Plaid and other progressives begin to bring a better, more equal tomorrow into focus. If we want it enough, and vote for what we believe in, another world is possible.