Nandor hate

I was mildly pleased to hear that Russell Norman had won co-leadership of the Greens. I don't actually think it matters, and I'm sure there are arguments that says it's advantageous to have the Greens run by someone awful. But I've read Nandor's paper about how the Greens are not a left wing party, and I thought it was ridiculous. So I'm glad he's not getting what he ants.

I don't necessarily disagree with the conclusions, the Greens aren't a left wing party (I've got a friend who describes them as one of the few political parties in the world where the representatives are further left than their members). But his arguments are just unbelievably stupid.

Now I don't have a copy so I'm quoting from memory, but the bit that pissed me off the most went like this:

We shouldn't lessen our commitment to social justice, but we should look for green solutions, rather than old left solutions. We could address poverty by increasing people's income, or we could do it by decreasing their expenditure, for example by installing state funded solar panels.

Now I happen to believe that the only way to deal with poverty is to end capitalism, but I think social democrats, socialists, anarchists, and anyone else with a brain can join together and point and laugh at the ridiculousness of that statement.

Decreasing people's expenses is an 'old left' solution. Lets take, for a not particularly radical example, state housing - that's an old left solution , making those houses warm and water heating heap, is just an extension of the same solution. In fact the Greens, with their incessant promoting of consumer taxes (for sugar, oil, and anything else that pisses them off) are about *raising* people's expenses.