Time for a Leader -- the _Guardian_ says vote yes

Time for a leader

Leader article

Monday November 12, 2007

The Guardian

The tension between ideals and pragmatism is familiar to everyone with any experience of radical politics. The struggle to reconcile members' aspirations with the harsh demands of flawed reality has dominated the past of Labour and Liberal Democrats, and countless others around the world. Now, after nearly 10 years brewing, the Green party is finally to decide whether to abandon its brave experiment with a less hierarchical internal structure and bow to the conventional form of one party, one leader.

The supporters of the latter, led by the MEP Caroline Lucas, and Prince Charles's favourite Green, Jonathan Porritt, succinctly argued in a letter to this paper on Tuesday that a single identifiable leader who people recognise and trust is the best way of engaging the voters. The hierarchy-lite tendency, who responded in the letters page on Thursday, believe equally passionately in the empowerment of the party membership and of wider society in a joint effort to make change happen - because neither conventional politics nor conventional parties have the answers to looming global disaster. The party's 7,500 members have until the end of the month to decide which it should be.

Both sides can claim support from previous experience. Those who believe that only a single leader can lift the party's electoral standing cite Green support in opinion polls, which is hovering just above the statistically negligible. At the last election, they garnered 283,000 votes, just 3.4% for each candidate fielded. That it was their best-ever result in a general election indicates how far there is still to travel before the party can hope to be in a position to implement any policies at all. The other side can argue that under its novel dual leadership of two principal speakers, the party has won 92 local council seats, and has high-profile London Assembly members and MEPs. Most powerfully of all, they can point to the greening of the three main parties.

The Greens have a unique advantage. If few know quite how challenging their policies are in detail, their core message is brilliantly clear. Every vote is unarguably a vote for environmental sustainability. But it is an asset only for as long they are genuinely seeking power. That means conforming rather than conducting interesting field trials of new forms of organisation; those look dangerously like a way of avoiding the hard realities of daily politics.

If they want to contest elections within the existing system, if there is going to be a Green party, as opposed to a green pressure group, they have to act like players. And in a context of minimal voter attention and celebrity politics, that means the party's enviably simple message has to be put across by a single leader.