Courtesy of Andrew Sinclair, BBC East’s political correspondent…
Philip Hardy, the Group Leader for the Greens on Norfolk County Council, and councillor for Thorpe Hamlet has defected to the Conservatives, the first Green councillor thought to have done so. Elected to the council in 2009, he gained the seat from the Liberal Democrats, before becoming Group Leader in July last year.
From the Eastern Daily Press;
Derrick Murphy, leader of Norfolk County Council hailed Mr Hardy’s move as a “major coup”. He said: “Philip is a fantastic councillor who has already managed to make Norfolk a better place through his work on the Energy Services Company amongst other projects.
He is a dynamic, passionate and hard working individual and I am confident he will make an excellent contribution to the Conservative Group at County Hall.
We have worked out that he is the seventh most senior Green Party politician in the UK and one of the first group leaders in local government to join another political group.”
This is the third defection to the Conservatives on Norfolk County Council in recent months, following those of Paul Rice (Liberal Democrat, South Smallburgh) and David Callaby (Liberal Democrat, Fakenham).
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13 Comments
they realise that they might as well go to the real thing rather than Tories-lite
@Simon, the Greens are Tory-lite?
The main thing they have in common with the Tories is their euroscepticism (we have one of the only Green Parties that is that way inclined). Given that issues such as environmental protection don’t respect national boundaries, this seems to me a ridiculous position. I suspect their sister party colleagues overseas agree too.
“The main thing they have in common with the Tories is their euroscepticism”
— I don’t think the Greens’ euroscepticism is really comparable with the Tories’: it’s about the nature of the institutions rather than opposition to multinational sovereignty as such. And it’s an odd thing for a Councillor to defect over. Very peculiar. 😕
There are reports that he wishes to run for elected police commissioner of Norfolk. As they say, “normal for Norfolk”. http://councillor.danielbrett.com/2011/12/19/bizarre-defection-to-the-tories-in-norwich/
You can be a “green” fascist or a “green” trotskyite, and anything in between – liberal, conservative, anarchist, socialist, whatever. That’s why I’m a Liberal, not a Green.
Tony’s right. Anyone can claim to be “green”. It’s such a nebulous and woolly concept. That’s where I think the Green party, particularly in Norwich where they positioned themselves comfortably in the mainstream, comes unstuck. Many years ago I stood for election for the Greens in a county election in large part because I wanted to advance a sustainability agenda in issues such as housing, local business and airport expansion. But most of the Green party members were obsessed with competitive recycling, attempting to outdo each other in the austerity stakes, glaring at me for eating polo mints because they are manufactured by Nestlé and worrying about the kind of shit their mushrooms grew in. It felt decidedly authoritarian – far from the left libertarians they assume they are.
I think in Norwich the Greens became a bandwagon for various members of the UEA-linked intelligentsia of which Hardy, a postgraduate student and son of a UEA lecturer. Then reality starts to bite: difficult choices have to be made, you’ve reached the maximum number of votes and you cannot go further, ambitions are stymied and personal disputes break out. Then idealism and ideology are subject to harder tests – the Lib Dems are now learning this in government. Hardy jumped ship because he has ideas he wants to put into practice and he as a political career he wants to further, but ideology really didn’t matter to him because the Greens are not ideologically rooted anyway.
The green party is very much like that. Even on the environmental agenda they range from Gaia worshippers to hardheaded respectable scientists carrying research data.
To what extent is this not true of us though? I have a test question. If I stay at work for an extra hour tonight (teaching English as a foreign language), I make an extra 10.00 – of this, how much of this extra money should belong to me and how much to the rest of society?
I don’t mean it rhetorically, I would actually like people to post answers. Reading the posts on these boards, I get the impression that the answers will range from almost 0.00 for me (i.e. it should be split as evenly as possibly between everyone to ensure equality and avoid psychosocial stress), all the way up to around 8.00 for me (i.e. it’s my money and why should I lose it). I also get the impression that if I wasn’t teaching English but working in some hate-profession such as banking then the answers would also be different.
If the range really is a wide as that, then can’t we say that we have LibDem communists, and LibDem conservatives and everything in between?
Richard: That’s why you have to have debates and policies based on liberalism, not populism or what makes headlines. Liberalism means respect for life, liberty and property and advances the notion of equality before the law. The intervention of the state should only be to enhance these, not restrict them, and according to clearly defined laws (hopefully, a codified constitution). We’ll all have different ways of interpreting this, according to how we approach the balance between the state and the individual. I tend to favour limiting state power wherever possible, particularly removing its protection and tax favours for large multinationals. On the issue of green issues, life and liberty are under threat due to a variety of environmental issues, including global warming. What is the liberal response to this?
I love the phrase ‘competitive recycling’, Daniel – it’s got such a poetic succinctness.
Richard, the range of opinion amongst Liberal democrats is not as wide as as 0% to 80% as I’m sure you know. What Liberal democrat has ever suggested that people should be taxed “until the pips squeaked”, as a well-known former Labour Chancellor did? I therefore don’t think that you could conceivably have LibDem communists – unfortunately conservative LibDems are another matter!
@TonyHill – maybe not, but then my question is how far should this “equal=fair” agenda go then? There are plenty of people on this site whose posts lead only to the logical conclusion that I am in the wrong because in staying later at work to earn more money for my family I am pushing other people into relative poverty and their children into child poverty.
I think you also have to make the distinction between the percentage people would choose as their “ethical” position and their “tactical” position. There are people who don’t have an ethical problem with calling some people donkeys and making them pull along the rest of society, and would see income equality as a fair ideal, but they know it is difficult to implement without guns, fences and watchtowers (as was pretty quickly discovered in Eastern Europe), so instead they argue for taxes as high as practically possible (in other words to go for the peak on the Laffer curve). It’s true that I have never heard a “Senior Lib Dem” argue for making the pips squeak, but I have also never heard one describe any level of taxation as unfair on the grounds that “It’s not our money”, as distinct from inexpedient on the grounds that “Incentivization will be lost”.
Richard: The difference between liberals and socialists is that the former believe in equality of opportunity and the latter believe in equality of outcome. However, there is some cross-over. Liberals tend to believe in certain social safety nets while many socialists in the Labour party have long abandoned the idea that everyone should earn the same (after all, this would mean trade union leaders taking a pay cut and we can’t have that!).
If earning more money makes some people poor, then there is something wrong with the economic system not with the individual who is earning. This does indeed happen. Resources are taken from poor countries for the profit and benefit of richer countries without any effort to alleviate the conditions in these countries. One of the world’s most resource rich countries is Congo-Kinshasa, which has one of the world’s lowest rates of GDP per capita and some horrendous poverty – not helped by the constant invasion of neighbouring countries in the resource grab, helping destabilise the country and prevent any kind of accountability to the citizens. It’s that kind of unfairness that prompts debates about using taxation to redistribute and invest.
Taking the argument closer to home, is it fair that our country is beholden to multi-national corporations and banks that are engaged in systematic tax avoidance, including apparent corruption of the HMRC? Shouldn’t they pay their fair share for once, given that their decisions are impacting unfavourably on our welfare?
Daniel: Yes, but in the UK at least poverty is usually defined in relative terms, so if some people earning more money pushes up national average income, then other people are pushed into poverty. This is the idea behind a book called the spirit level that has been name-checked by posters on this site at least twice in the last few days, which states that equality per se (as distinct from raising the minimum level of income) is the most important goal as it is inequality that leads to lower health outcomes, psychosocial stress and so on. The implications of that are of course, horrendous.
The tax-avoidance/Africa point is true, but once you fix that then you still have to decide what the fair tax levels should be. Actually those are some of the points that really divide liberals from conservatrives, who care much less about those issues.
It also should remembered that opportunites in a country (such as where I live, Slovakia) with no real financial services sector beyond retail banking are much more limited than in the UK as inevitably all but very few businesses of any size are foreign-owned (who generally import their own nationals into top positions) or belong to rich families (who favour their relatives). So it is questionable whether banks and particularly the markets they operate are really depressing national welfare in the UK or not.