The perils of being a Green politician
- Posted by Sian Berry
- 22 September 2006
I was supposed to have a quiet day today at the Green Party conference – fat chance. Most of the events I am organising won’t be happening until Saturday, but a lot of people are just now finding out that I’m standing for Principal Speaker and I am finding it hard to move around the conference centre here at Hove town hall.
I was supposed to have a quiet day today at the Green Party conference – fat chance. Most of the events I am organising won’t be happening until Saturday, but a lot of people are just now finding out that I’m standing for Principal Speaker and I am finding it hard to move around the conference centre here at Hove town hall.
Every few steps someone will stop to brief me on their specialist subject so that I can help promote it in the future. This may be frustrating when you’re on the way to the loo, but is really fascinating stuff.
Among other things, I’ve had a great talk with the architect of our ‘citizen’s income’ policy and one of the founder members of the party 33 years ago (longer than I have been alive!), a chat about ethical pensions and a heated debate on 4×4 campaign tactics with a councillor while he helped me put together the props for our Trident demonstration tomorrow.
All this has meant I have neglected the main conference programme, which is a bit of a shame as I had marked off tons of fringes and debates I didn’t want to miss, including a debate on social enterprises: organisations that link trade with a social mission. Half a million people in the UK already work in this sector, which just goes to show that having priorities other than profit can be good business sense. Never mind – I will just have to catch up on the news in the bar later on.
This morning I did speak in the main hall to propose my big local shops motion. Contrary to what many people think, we aren’t an ‘anti-business’ party, but restrict our support to enterprises that are ecologically sound and socially responsible. This translates in practice to liking local and small businesses but not big multinational companies that have terrible records on workers rights, massive carbon footprints and huge numbers of air and truck miles associated with their products. All fair enough, wouldn’t you agree?
We already had some good policies to support small businesses, but these were dotted about the various sections of our policy documents. I felt that we needed a dedicated chapter and some extra measures on the list, particularly because many local Green activists are running campaigns to help high streets and town centres that are in crisis thanks to out-of-town developers, greedy landlords and the predatory tactics of big supermarkets.
The motion was almost unanimously passed – a great relief - so we now officially support the introduction of ‘business conservation areas’, will insist new developments contain affordable space for small firms, will ban all new out-of-town developments, and will empower local authorities to bring in rent controls to prevent private landlords from driving up rents and forcing out independent retailers in favour of chain store ‘clones’.
Tomorrow promises to be even busier than today. Will I survive? Watch this space.
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