The recent ‘resurgence’ of the Greens has been giving me the collywobbles.
Twenty four years ago my family fled communism to seek freedom and democracy in Britain. Now the Green Party wants to take us back to the Bolshevik era with their array of so-called economic and social policies for, as their official website writes, “The Common Good”.
The truth is that leading Greens such as Natalie Bennett and Caroline Lucas simply don’t understand the full implications and consequences of their neo-communist ideals. Part in fact because they never lived in, or experienced, a country with truly redistributive economy like the one they are proposing.
Unfortunately, my family has. And this experience obliges me to call out ‘Commie’ nonsense when I hear it.
Here are some examples from the Green creed.
In last week’s edition of BBC’s Sunday Politics, Andrew Neil questioned Green leader Natalie Bennett on the credibility of her party’s policies. The full interview can be seen here – It is so cringeworthy, it’s painful to watch. To ease the agony of having to sit through the entire thing, here are some of Bennett’s gems:
Bennett: We have to make multinational companies stop being parasites on our society and pay their taxes…and we’ve announced also a wealth tax…
Bennett: At the moment we are working on opposing the proposed EU – US free trade deal, which is a great threat to our democracy.
- Neil: It shouldn’t be a crime to be a member of a terrorist organisation like Al-Qaeda or ISIS?
Bennett: Exactly. What we want to do is make sure we’re not punishing people for what they think or believe.
- Neil: On defence. You’d scrap Trident, leave Nato and a large standing army, navy and air force as we have now are all unnecessary, correct?
Bennett: That’s right.
For a leader of a national party whose membership figures have just overtaken the Lib Dems and Ukip, her comments are shocking by any measure.
To make matters worse, the Greens don’t stop at economic or defence policy but extend their absurdity across all areas of the public policy spectrum – even telling us what we can and cannot eat.
The fly in the ointment came when the Greens pledged to abolish the British monarchy and place the Queen in a council flat. “We would evict the Queen from Buckingham Palace and allocate her a council house”, they said to The Independent.
I can’t see that the Queen is ever going to be really poor, but I’m sure we can find a council house for her — we’re going to build lots more. – Ms Bennett, The Times.
Now, I’m not entirely sure whether this is just a publicity stunt or whether she genuinely has a few loose screws – my intuition leads me to think it’s both. I find it saddening that an Australian-born and educated woman who only moved to the UK in 1995 has the cheek to call for the abolishment of the British monarchy and “finding a council house for [the Queen]” (this coming from a non-British citizen myself).
I remember clearly the heated debates I had throughout university with fellow students who were committed socialists and anti-monarchists. The majority had been brainwashed into it by our higher education system, and didn’t quite understand what they were talking about. Their ideal of a perfect society in which everyone is equal and lives in love and harmony simply cannot be achieved. The communist experiment has already tried and failed with disastrous consequences. Unfortunately, too many people only seek out their self-interest and, from my experience, forcing everyone to be ‘equal’ amplifies that tendency tenfold. Of course, neither my socialist friends nor Natalie Bennett & Co. would know this because they’ve never actually lived under a centralised, redistributive economy.
However, the resurgence of a far-left, neo-communist party like the Greens largely stems from the public’s disillusionment with the Cameron-Clegg-Miliband trio. A significant part of the electorate is deeply dissatisfied with the status quo. This does not mean that, as a country, the UK should start flirting with extremism.
If the Greens ever became part of a coalition government they might have the power to pull public policy in certain directions with dire consequences. For the sake of the UK, let’s hope this never happens.
