Positioning the Green Party for the General Election

It is right and good that the Green Party should use the coming General Election to put forward and celebrate the many achievements of our elected representatives. Truly, we punch well above our weight when we manage to overcome the dysfunctional electoral system and fight our way into the corridors of ...er...influence.

However, General Election 2010 demands far more than a quiet recitation at how good our representatives are at doing what they are paid to do. The political territory in 2010 is a No-Man's Land where political reputations hang fluttering on the barbed wire, where credibility of politicians lies blasted into shredded heaps of quivering red jelly. There is no point in sending Green Party Political Candidates out to walk forwards towards the massed machine gun posts of the Hun Media carrying rifles to which are attached a little flag inscribed with the words "We are quite good at doing what politicians do".

Stuff that for a game of soldiers. The Green Party is a radical party, a party that wants to transform economics and politics in a way that leads to sustainability. Sustainability is an cliche' now, but what it means is that the present way of doing things - economically and politically - is doomed. It has no future. It will crash. It will fall off its perch, off the edge of a cliff. It will soon be no more. Orthodox politics and economics is a smoking flax, a bruised reed, a pile of well-rotted manure, fit for only one thing, to be buried in the ground to act as fertiliser for new growth.

I am struggling to make myself clear here, but I hope the basic message is comprehensible. We need to attack the whole rotten system, the ridiculous FPTP electoral system, the Parliamentary old-boys' club, the inside-out, back-to-front economy, the way Brown has pumped money into the swollen pockets of the banksters, the way he has sent our soldiers to be ripped apart with IEDs in a futile effort to provide a pipeline for fossil oil products to reach our markets - and so on.

We have an opportunity in the General Election to position ourselves as a truly radical party, to appeal to the mass of voters who are royally pissed of with the smug set of economists-with-the-truth who are pleased to call themselves our rulers. Our ideology, though non-violent, is more radical than the far left, who seem content that bankers should have a monopoly of the money supply; more radical over immigration than the BNP, who are silent on the subject of how to prevent the desire of millions to migrate to the UK; more radical than UKIP, who rank lowest in the MEP probity department, and whose policies would freed from the yoke of Europe, only to accept the even heavier yoke of subjection to psychopathic TransNational Corporations such as Trafigura.

We need to be setting up NOW with a

• Twitter based campaign alerting to viral videos on YouTube actually demonstrating what our representatives are doing, giving examples of how the Green New Deal would work, using video-based imaginative techniques to illustrate the point,
• we need to show how the Green Party is the political wing of the mass of NGOs who are fighting to clean up the effects of a dysfunctional economic system, showing them that green reforms would switch off the fan that is spreading the muck that they are cleaning up.
  
• We need a powerful, radical Party Election Broadcast that will give people a single, stark, real understanding of the mess that grey politics is making of the planet, and giving hope for a radical transformation of the system.

We do not need a succession of talking heads in suits telling us in manager-speak what good chaps and chapesses they have been. That should be a given, a footnote and a link on each press release to a page that documents our achievements.

We need a radical attack on a rotten, tottering political and economic system, backed with a clear exposition of how green solutions work.

[Long pause before hitting the Publish button. Partly caused by whether I am going to be slung out of the Party for Bringing the Party Into Disrepute, and partly seeking a suitable word to round off the argument. The only suitable word I can think of is French, and rhymes with "Bared".]