Sunday mornings at the autumn Green Party conference are usually a very uneventful business; finishing essential tasks such as ratifying reports, working through policy motions left over from earlier in the week and a handful of fringe meetings. A quiet time after a big Saturday night out.
This year was different. The party-wide referendum on whether to replace our two Principal Speakers with a more traditional sounding Leader and Deputy (or Co-Leaders) is happening in November, and part of the process was a ‘big debate’ on Sunday.
There are two quite organised ‘camps’ now, who are busy organising for a Yes or No vote, and the expectation was that everyone attending conference would have already made up their minds. But a show of hands, called by the chair at the start of the debate, demonstrated a surprising number of undecideds on the floor.
I make no secret of how rubbish I find the title ‘Principal Speaker’, which I have lived with now for a year. I have blogged here before about the way it is misused by the media so that it either comes out incorrectly (chief speaker, co-leader, spokesperson, or the classic ‘principle speaker’) or is used on air to trim my credibility before I even open my mouth (“Here’s Siân the Leader of the Greens. Oh not you don’t believe in that kind of thing do you – what’s your crazy title again?”).
Some of the ‘No’ campaigners wrongly characterise this concern as being an ‘obsession with spin’ or a desire to ‘do what the media wants’. But the point is not pleasing the media, but using a title that has a clear meaning, which will make it through the media filter unscathed so we can communicate properly with the public. There’s no point in making it necessary for broadcasters and the press to explain what our titles mean, or giving them the opportunity to poke fun.
I do have sympathy for some of the arguments on the other side. I agree that we are a different kind of party, and that we do advocate and practise more decentralised and democratic ways of working, so I understand their affection for a title that rams that point home.
I don’t, however, think that rejecting the title ‘Leader’ is worth the other trouble it causes. And I don’t think that hamstringing our front-line reps even further by denying them a vote on the party Executive is fair at all. As the only guaranteed female member of the Executive, I have found being unable to vote in meetings incredibly ironic, so I was pleased to see that the issue of giving the posts a vote each (the other measure in the motion we are voting on) seems to have almost universal support.
The main sticking point remains the title. A lot is being attached to the simple word ‘Leader’, and both sides in the conference hall associated a host of extra consequences with the change. The Yes speakers claimed attendant benefits including increased enthusiasm from members and increased membership once people can identify personally with a clear leadership figure. Both of these I agree are likely to occur to some extent.
The more negative No speakers announced a list of dangers that would come with electing a Leader; ranging from massively overworking the person in the post to full-on dictatorship. I am not at all convinced by these arguments. The first of these is simply a straw man: no-one is proposing we wouldn’t still have a range of spokespeople available to the press. The second is pure hyperbole: we would still be the Green Party after all, with an almost universal libertarian bias and a natural abhorrence of authoritarian figures. Whoever thinks we might elect one of those to the post is thinking far too little of our members.
Sunday’s debate was very well conducted by all, despite fears of a rumble, and I found from speaking to people afterwards that it did change some views. I really hope the referendum is passed by our members in November. Although most people I have spoken to appear to be voting yes, the two-thirds majority required is still quite a hurdle to clear
Whichever way the vote goes, campaigners on both sides have made it clear that the party should take the positive ideas from both sides to heart. I agree. A Green Party that keeps the current titles but looks for other ways to develop its professionalism would be almost as good as a Green Party that chooses to have a Leader while encouraging more participation and activity throughout its structure.
But, as I said in my contribution on Sunday, when it comes down to it, the real question is a simple one. In a time when we have to show the electorate we mean business, which message do we want to come across most loudly: that ‘we are different’ or that ‘we can make things different’?
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