Roger, I enjoy your company,
value your friendship, and appreciate your commentary on Barnet goings-on. I am
hoping you will publish this rebuttal of some of the more outrageous statements
you've recently made about Barnet Greens in your blogposts above.
The prompt was this comment
you made on 23 May: “It is time for the Greens to wake up and smell the coffee.
All they do in Barnet is scupper the chances of other progressive candidates.”*
What?! Who is scuppering
whom around here? In all the wards but one declared last week, the Lib Dems and
UKIP were also there, below Labour and the Tories “scuppering” the chances of
the two big parties. Why are you picking on the Greens? I think I find my
answer in the post of 18 May where you say: “I don't support the Green
manifesto or agenda.” I suspect you never read them, but no matter you're
entitled to feel hostile. Don't let that personal animus warp your accuracy.
You've stood for the Lib
Dems. Does it pain you that we Greens are now firmly established as the third
party in Barnet, displacing the LibDems in all the 2012 ballots in Barnet and
in all but two of Barnet's wards declared last week? I could more credibly argue
that those who get in the way of the Greens are scuppering the progressive
cause.
Ah, that 'progressive' label
– whom does it describe?
The Liberal Democrats who
are working with the Tories to impose stringent austerity on local government,
and whose credibility is blown to smithereens?
Labour who ushered in the
privatisation of the NHS, were intensely relaxed about extreme inequality and
who, in Barnet, voted for a 1% cut in council tax and, I discover reading your
blog: “The Barnet Labour Party could have stopped [One Barnet] in its tracks.
Local Trades Unions and Bloggers had dug up enough evidence to proove(sic) that
the whole scheme was a disaster waiting to happen. Labour did nothing and said
nothing. They never came out and opposed the scheme and never said they'd
reverse it?”
We Greens are at the
forefront of the campaign against the cuts and austerity (leading Green Romayne
Phoenix is Chair of Coalition of Resistance, and with the People's Assembly),
and are deeply democratic. We remain a bottom-up party, and we take no
corporate money so are not beholden to big business and committed to that
pernicious myth – the free market.
That democratic instinct
drives us to offer people the chance to vote for a genuinely progressive party,
rather than let the undemocratic diktat of first-past-the-post disenfranchise
the progressives. Wishing to remove us from the ballot paper, as you suggest in
your blogpost, is the counsel of despair seeking the least worst option. Who
would that be? Ah, in the post of 25 May you tell us: “I think we can safely
say that the Labour Party was shafted by the Greens in Hale.”
I share your profound
disappointment that Barnet's Tories, who as richly as any local administration
deserved to be booted out, are still our majority party. Being a bottom-up
party, we are in a position to conduct discussions and make decisions in the
collective interest. But not once has anyone sought to talk to us.
You wake up Roger, smell
your prejudices, and see who is the leading progressive voice in Barnet this
decade.
Poppy
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