The Green Party, building on recent successes in the local and European elections, and with an expanding membership, hopes to make a breakthrough in national politics at the next general election. The Greens' autumn conference was held from 3-6 September in Hove, next door to Brighton Pavilion, the seat that the party leader and MEP Caroline Lucas will contest in the election. She will be attempting to become the first Green MP in the UK.
Trusted on the environment, the party wants to show that it has sound policies in other areas. The Greens are expanding from policies more obviously linked to the environment -- the Green New Deal, energy and transport -- to develop positions on a broad range of topics, including a written UK constitution and the defence of civil liberties under a new bill of rights.
In the general debate about a bill of rights, most recently reignited by the government's 23 March green paper on the subject, the director of Liberty, Shami Chakrabarti, has warned of the dangers of introducing a "British" bill of rights, endorsed by both Labour and the Tories. Speaking at the party conference in the panel debate "Citizens or Subjects: Can legally protected rights guarantee our freedoms?", Chakrabarti urged delegates to be wary of such legislation, which, she argued, was aimed at undermining freedoms protected by the Human Rights Act and would compromise the values set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Conservative leader, David Cameron, has already said that he is in favour of deporting people even to places where it is known they could face torture.
Chakrabarti argued that citizens' rights which exclude asylum-seekers, foreigners and others pave the road to Guantanamo Bay and extraordinary rendition. What has made such institutions and practices politically and legally possible is having rules that apply to some but not to others.
Peter Facey, director of the campaign group Unlock Democracy, spoke in favour of a bill of rights and responsibilities, but played down suggestions that there was any friction between his position and the concern for defending civil liberties. In fact, his definition of citizenship outstrips the usual boundaries of nationality and draws on Chakrabarti's anxiety that the notion of citizenship used in mainstream debate about citizens' rights is often a polite way of excluding foreigners.
Facey defines a citizen as a stakeholder with a right and duty to be involved in decision-making which affects him or her. He argued that citizens' rights should be entrenched in domestic law, but said this was not enough. Although the Human Rights Act has shortcomings, it is an important step in protecting human rights in the UK, he said. We need a wider-ranging bill of rights, one that should, for a start, incorporate the full European Convention on Human Rights (at present only partly incorporated into domestic law). Furthermore, he said, democracy and human rights will never survive if protected in law alone; people must exercise their right to democratic participation, and assert and defend their freedoms.
Yet how are we to define citizenship, and the corresponding right to vote, if not by nationality? Facey proposed we base citizenship on residency and where one pays tax, and extend voting rights to all those with residency rights.
He praised the UK for having one of the widest political franchises in the world and called for it to be expanded. Commonwealth and Irish citizens have the same voting rights as British citizens; EU citizens are allowed to vote in European and local elections in the UK. So, the thinking goes, why not extend this to voting in general elections? People who live and pay tax in Britain should have a say in how this country is run. This right could then be extended to people of other nationalities who work and reside here, starting with Facey's suggestion: citizens of the United States.As Chakrabarti remarked, perhaps -- so long as they elect us an Obama and not a Bush.
