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Nick Griffin, smirking into television cameras and photo lenses while every sinew in his body strained to prevent giving a one-arm salute, may have stolen the headlines for the British National Party this week
But the longer-lasting psephological seismic shock of the elections of the last few days may just have happened on the South Coast, where the tide of public opinion could be about to deliver the Green Party their first Westminster MP - and set the mainstream parties' energy agendas on their heads.
Electoral data from the European elections reveal that throughout the South, one in 10 voters put a cross next to the Green Party.
In London the figure was 10.9% and in the South East 11.6%, and the Greens generally polled at least double that of the BNP.
Of course much of the vote - Green or BNP - is classic protest polling, and in any case these sort of figures do not get you elected in Westminster's arcane first-past-the-post system.
But the up-to-date electoral micro-statistics coming out of the three parliamentary constituencies of Brighton show the Greens have the support of 31% of the voters, leaving the second-placed Tories trailing on 22%. In the Brighton Pavilion seat which is being fought by Green Party leader Caroline Lucas, that Green vote is reckoned to be considerably larger.
If Lucas becomes the first-ever Green Party MP, it will represent not just a political curiosity but could be a catalyst for the rearmament of the alternative energy lobby.
In recent months, the Green Movement appears to have lost some of its traditional fire.
Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, for instance, have been happier to set up a climate camp at the proposed coal-fired power station Kingsnorth rather than take to the streets to block the imminent construction of up to eight new nuclear power stations.
Even the High Priest of the Movement, The Guardian's tree hugger-in-chief George Monbiot, has been on a "conversion-on-the-road-to-Sellafield" by arguing, hey, nuclear is low carbon so it ain't so bad.
Lucas and the Green Party are however stridently anti. The party's constitution states: "The Green Party is fundamentally opposed to nuclear energy, which we consider to be expensive and dangerous. The technology is not carbon neutral, and being reliant on uranium it is not renewable.
"We consider its use, moreover, to be elitist and undemocratic. There is so far no safe way of disposing of nuclear waste.
"To a degree unequalled by even the worst of other dangerous industries, the costs and dangers of nuclear energy and its waste will be passed on to future generations long after any benefits have been exhausted."
Lucas says the main parties can not be trusted to deliver on renewables.
"My experience in the European parliament is that the Tories are no champions of climate change but are blockers of progress," she says. "And the ability of Labour to push through progress has to be questioned."
Instead she believes she will become a magnet at Westminster for the mainly voiceless anti-nuclear movement.
"The votes of one or two Green MPs will not make a difference in parliament but we can become the focal point, the platform on which to challenge and offer that alternative voice."
Reader views (2)
Thats where the CND mob from the 80s went to. All these greenies are water melons though arent they - green on the outside deep red in the middle !
- Stuz Graz, Wimbledon, London, 11/06/2009 13:20
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I cannot trust nor forgive Caroline Lucas after she said, on BBC’s Question Time, following the November 2008 Mumbai terror attack by Pakistani Islamic extremists (in which 170 people were murdered -and some tortured - in cold blood): "If we are to defeat extremism we have to go to the root causes of it – we have to look in particular at countries like Palestine".
Howard Jacobson, writing in the Independent, had the correct response to this. He said that:
“To argue that Palestine fuelled the massacre at Mumbai, that the Hindu waiter shot in the forehead after serving water to a terrorist was paying for the inequities of Gaza, that he wasn't already, in the eyes of that terrorist, expendable enough as an unbeliever and as one who had stolen Kashmir, is not only preposterous, it is irresponsible. Whatever doesn't tell the true story is propaganda – the institution of a falsehood into truth. And propaganda, by Caroline Lucas's own account, kills. Come the next massacre, when she is looking around for someone other than the perpetrators to blame, she might ask how much of their hatred she has stoked. When the world is a tinder box, it is a crime to play with matches.”
If Caroline Lucas’ easy choice of "the Jews" to blame for an incident of mass murder in India isn’t anti-Semitic, then what is it?
- Esther, Brighton, 11/06/2009 13:00
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