Green Party: We Need To Fight NeoLiberalism

Published on May 25, 2014

PoliticsEuropean Elections 2014

Cafébabel: In  other Eu­ro­pean coun­tries, say Ger­many and France, the green par­ties are re­ally strong; they have a much larger pres­ence than in the UK. The Eu­ro­pean Greens are the fourth largest Eu­ro­pean al­liance. Do you think that see­ing the Greens so strong in Eu­rope as a whole will start to make peo­ple in the UK take the UK Green Party more se­ri­ously and see the Green Party as a real po­lit­i­cal force?

Ru­pert Read: It’s a good ques­tion and the an­swer is yes. I’ve found that dur­ing this cam­paign, when peo­ple come to un­der­stand that our group in the Eu­ro­pean Par­lia­ment is larger than the group which con­tains the Con­ser­v­a­tive Party they re­alise that we are re­ally se­ri­ous play­ers in Eu­rope and in these elec­tions. And also it’s help­ful when you put that to­gether with pro­por­tional rep­re­sen­ta­tion as a sys­tem, which we don’t have in our gen­eral elec­tions, but which we do have in the Eu­ro­pean elec­tions. I think this is why the opin­ion polls show us mov­ing into fourth place ahead of the Lib Dems with the po­ten­tial for sig­nif­i­cantly in­creas­ing our num­ber of seats at the elec­tion.

CB: What you think of the lead­er­ship of Ska Keller and José Bové?

RR: It’s added some­thing to the cam­paign. I think it’s dif­fi­cult be­cause we still don’t have a real Eu­ro­pean pub­lic. We’re try­ing to cre­ate one. But I think it’s im­por­tant we don’t drift too far to­wards fed­er­al­ism. In Britain the Greens are strongly be­hind the agenda of lo­cal­i­sa­tion and de­cen­tral­i­sa­tion and sub­sidiar­ity.

CB: In an in­ter­view Na­talie Ben­nett said the other par­ties in the UK are try­ing to out-UKIP UKIP. What kind of im­pact on the wider de­bate about im­mi­gra­tion have UKIP had?

RR: It has had a very neg­a­tive ef­fect. I was on tele­vi­sion yes­ter­day de­bat­ing with Nigel Farage’s spin doc­tor, Patrick O’Flynn. I put it to him that when Farage says peo­ple have a right to be con­cerned when Ro­ma­ni­ans move in next door, things have reached a very dan­ger­ous point in this coun­try. Imag­ine if Farage said peo­ple have a right to be con­cerned if Irish peo­ple move in next door, or if blacks move in next door or if Jews move in next door. UKIP is a xeno­pho­bic party. It often bor­ders on racism. So we have to con­front them very di­rectly.

CB: I’ve read some of your ar­ti­cles on growth fetishism and a post growth econ­omy. Could you briefly out­line what you mean by a post growth econ­omy?

RR: It’s sim­ple re­ally; a post growth econ­omy is an econ­omy in which there is not growth any more. A post-growth so­ci­ety is one in which peo­ple say, “Ac­tu­ally why do we need to keep pur­su­ing growth? What is growth for? What do we ac­tu­ally need?” And what we ac­tu­ally need is good qual­ity of life, se­cu­rity, all of our basic needs ful­filled, fair­ness, a more equal so­ci­ety.

CB: Do you think that using GDP growth as the pri­mary mea­sure of suc­cess and of wealth al­lows gov­ern­ments to ig­nore in­equal­ity and re­dis­tri­b­u­tion of wealth?

RR: Yes that’s pre­cisely what I think. And I think that’s why it’s an es­pe­cially bad idea for any party that con­sid­ers them­selves to be on the left to pur­sue a growthist agenda and of course it’s an es­sen­tial flaw in so­cial­ism and so­cial democ­racy over the last gen­er­a­tion or so. We should pur­sue other mea­sures aside from GDP to re­flect what so­ci­ety re­ally needs.

CB: In one of your ar­ti­cles you make the dis­tinc­tion be­tween stan­dard of liv­ing and qual­ity of life. Can you ex­plain what the dis­tinc­tion is and why it’s im­por­tant?

RR: Stan­dard of liv­ing ba­si­cally means phys­i­cal things that can be mea­sured. How many cars do you have? How much dis­pos­able in­come do you have? Whereas qual­ity-of-life is ac­tu­ally about peo­ple’s lev­els of hap­pi­ness, men­tal and phys­i­cal health, things like that. The ques­tion is, which is more im­por­tant? At the mo­ment we pri­mar­ily mea­sure stan­dard of liv­ing. My sug­ges­tion is we ought to seek to mea­sure qual­ity-of-life. What ac­tu­ally mat­ters is not how much money one has or how many cars one has. What mat­ters is whether one is well, whether one is se­cure, happy, peace­ful and at ease. These should be the ob­jec­tives of politi­cians.

CB: Do you think that ne­olib­er­al­ism as an ide­ol­ogy is en­trenched in the global econ­omy and per­pet­u­ated by in­sti­tu­tions like the IMF, the World Bank and the Eu­ro­pean Cen­tral bank? Do you think it’s a hege­mony that can be over­come?

RR: Yes al­though it’s going to be very dif­fi­cult. It’s going to take a big move­ment. The hege­mony of ne­olib­er­al­ism is very wide­spread. It’s there in the EU. It is en­trenched in the Lis­bon Treaty. I think as Greens we have to be ready to be rad­i­cal, and be ready to re­ally chal­lenge the foun­da­tional in­sti­tu­tions of our time in­clud­ing the EU it­self. We need to be chal­leng­ing growth and growthism. We need to take se­ri­ously that what peo­ple need is not more stuff, or a trickle-down econ­omy. We need to pur­sue a dif­fer­ent ide­ol­ogy to ne­olib­er­al­ism and that’s ecol­o­gism. We need to fight ne­olib­er­al­ism ex­plic­itly. We need to name it and fight it.

CB: What are the Green Party’s pol­icy pri­or­i­ties?

RR: We’ve been talk­ing a lot about a green en­ergy rev­o­lu­tion, and a green trans­port rev­o­lu­tion, tak­ing re­new­ables se­ri­ously and tak­ing re­duc­tion of en­ergy waste se­ri­ously, a mas­sive in­su­la­tion pro­gram rolled out by local au­thor­i­ties and by the state, which would pay for it­self be­cause you’d be re­duc­ing waste. A pub­lic trans­port rev­o­lu­tion; tak­ing the rail­ways back into pub­lic hands, tak­ing the buses back into pub­lic hands, safer streets, bet­ter fa­cil­i­ties for cy­cling, and all of this in­stead of the cur­rent focus at West­min­ster and in Brus­sels on in­ter­na­tional and na­tional mega pro­jects, by road, rail and air. So hav­ing a lo­cal­is­ing ef­fect as well as the ef­fect of re­duc­ing car­bon emis­sions- those are the two things I’ve been fo­cus­ing on most.

CB: Why are the Greens op­posed to the Transat­lantic Trade and In­vest­ment Part­ner­ship?

RR: Be­cause the TTIP is a way of strip­ping out democ­racy and re­plac­ing it with cor­po­rate rule. It’s a race to the bot­tom in terms of in­ter­na­tional stan­dards. The TTIP is a major threat to democ­racy and all the stan­dards that we fought for for gen­er­a­tions and that’s why the Greens op­pose it.

CB: Do you think that the main par­ties, rather than try­ing to op­pose UKIP, have al­most as­sim­i­lated some of their rhetoric and ideas?

RR: Yes. UKIP is mov­ing the agenda to the right. UKIP is a hard-right, xeno­pho­bic, pop­ulist party. That’s why the Front Na­tional in France have reached out to them.

CB: Who’s your favourite Eu­ro­pean writer or philoso­pher?

RR: Wittgen­stein from Aus­tria, who is my main man re­ally.