Before Labour finally quit pushing the pro-austerity, pro-privatisation neoliberal orthodoxy with the election of Jeremy Corbyn as party leader in 2015 I was a big fan of the Green Party because they were the only major party in England that refused to buy into Tory austerity fanaticism (Scotland had the SNP and Wales had Plaid Cymru), but in recent years they've really lost their way.
Nothing demonstrates this Green directionlessness more than their dalliance with pro-austerity neoliberals as part of the campaign for an "another roll of the dice" referendum.
The case for another referendum looks questionable in its own right, given the possibility that Remain could easily conspire to lose again and end up creating an inescapable double-mandate for Brexit, but the loyalty pledges to Theresa May from the Lib-Dems and the CUK squatters to keep the Tories in power while they roll the dice again makes it even more risky, because a Remainer loss under these circumstances would end up creating a double-mandate for the worst kind of hard-right, economy-tanking, job-destroying, Tory administered nuclear Brexit.
Whether you agree with the campaign for another roll of the dice or not, the anti-austerity Greens make very odd bedfellows with the Lib-Dem austerity enablers who caused Brexit in the first place by helping the Tories to trash our living standards, ruin our public services, under-invest in infrastructure, health, housing and education, vandalise the social safety net, and impose the longest sustained collapse in the value of our wages in centuries.
And then the CUK squatters are even stranger bedfellows for the Greens, given that they're promising to "change" politics by ... err ... promoting more of the same pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, millionaire-bankrolled neoliberalism that got us in this mess in the first place, even after the disastrous consequences of these policies are now all too clear.
Somehow the Greens have decided that collusion with these toxic austerity ideologues is in their best interests. But when you decide that it's a good idea to swim with piranhas, it's a little over-optimistic to expect not to get bitten.
So now the Remain campaigner and vocal advocate of Lib-Dem style "centrist" neoliberal orthodoxy Gina Miller has helped to launch a "helpful" new Remain United tool to tell Remainers how to vote in the upcoming regional elections, and somehow, they've calculated that Remain supporters in the South West should abandon support for the sitting Green MEP Molly Scott Cato, and vote Lib-Dem instead.
In London where the Greens have another MEP, guess what, the "Remain United" campaign is advising Green voters to ditch their party and vote Lib-Dem instead in the hope that the Lib-Dems nick their seat!
And in Yorkshire and the Humber where the Green's leading candidate for one of the six available seats is the fantastic Magid Magid, once again the Remain United advice is to abandon the Greens and vote Lib-Dem.
And in the 10 seat region of South East England where the Greens already have a sitting MEP, and have the best mathematical chance of retaining a seat, guess what the "Remain United" advice is?
Well it's obvious, just like every single region of England, it's to abandon the Green Party and vote Lib-Dem so that the austerity-enabling Lib-Dems can wipe the Greens off the map and bag themselves two seats in the region!
This cynical attempt to use the Tory Brexit farce as an excuse to pinch Green votes on behalf of the austerity-enabling Lib-Dems (who helped create Brexit in the first place) is precisely what you's expect from a bunch of self-serving neoliberals, but then somehow the Greens have been too naive to see this threat coming, and by willingly colluding with these cynical opportunists, they've been wilfully handing out the nails that are being used to seal them in their own political coffins.
In fact they're still actively colluding with the Lib-Dems and CUK squatters over a plan to field a joint Remainer candidate in the Peterborough by-election!
The Greens are still colluding with these nasty neoliberal charlatans even as they're being stabbed in the back by them.
If this cynical effort to use Brexit to turn anti-austerity Green voters into pro-austerity Lib-Dems succeeds, and the Greens end up getting completely wiped out at the Euro elections, they'll unfortunately only have themselves to blame.
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In a speech to the Lib-Dem conference Gina Miller lamented the fact that "centrism is really struggling to make headway" before going on to call people to the left and right "fascists" with "cold hard ideologies".
The obvious problem with centrism is that the term itself is a complete misnomer that implies that hovering aimlessly around near the centre has some special moral virtue no matter how far off into the political extremes the prevailing political orthodoxy might go.
Thus during the post-war decades the political centre was the mixed economy of public ownership of vital infrastructure, services and industries combined with a strong welfare state and regulated capitalism (a position occupied by Labour, the Liberals, and the Tories), and the privatise everything, "greed is good" deregulate the financial sector right-wingers were fringe lunatics.
Fast forward to 1979 and the hard-right fringe were propelled into power and their mass privatisation, welfare-wrecking, deregulation mania has continued unabated for four decades with truly appalling consequences.
Just look at the behaviour of the self-declared centrists between 2010 and 2016 and you can see the disastrous consequences of this morally weak and utterly wrong-headed determination to occupy the centre ground between raving ideological extremism of the Tories and the Blairism that went before it:
- In 2014 Theresa May introduced her extremist "hostile environment" legislation and bragged about how the Tory government could "deport now, hear appeals later". Dozens of black British citizens were deported under these rules. Several died in exile. Thousands more were denied employment, housing, access to public services, access to banking services, even medical treatment. The majority of 'centrists' either voted in favour of this disgusting legislation, with only a tiny minority of MPs opposing it on principle (or because their "cold hard ideologies" wouldn't allow them to enable it as Gina Miller would no doubt describe it).
- After their election defeat Labour centrists like Chris Leslie actually tried to argue that losing the election by copying Tory extremism rather than opposing it meant Labour should shift even further to the right! Thankfully the Labour membership strongly disagreed and voted for a candidate who would actually oppose ruinous Tory austerity dogma instead of meekly copying it.
- During the Labour leadership election the Labour centrists decided to abstain on a massive programme of Tory welfare cuts designed to further impoverish the poor, especially the working poor. Jeremy Corbyn was the only Labour leadership candidate to vote against it.
Centrist collusion with Tory austerity dogma had appalling consequences: The longest period of sustained wage devaluation on record, public services put under massive strain or shut down entirely, in-work benefits slashed, soaring food bank dependency, exploitative employment practices like Zero Hours Contracts and fake self-employment spreading like wildfire ...
Then it came to the Brexit vote and suddenly the complacent centrists were trapped in a pit of their own digging. The far-right Brextremists opportunistically blamed immigrants and the EU for the wage collapse, the failing public services, the in-work poverty, the suffering ... But the centrists couldn't fight back with the truth that these things were the result of austerity, because they were all complicit with austerity.
The only way the centrists have countered the far-right anti-immigrant anti-EU lies would have been to admit that 'centrism' itself was a fraud!
Amazingly centrists still occupy this bubble of delusion that it's somehow morally superior to triangulate with hard-right Tory austerity dogma than to oppose it. That all the 'centrist' MPs abstaining on Theresa May's vile "hostile environment" policy was acceptable and palatable xenophobia, but the xenophobic Brextremist lies were somehow so much worse than a policy they couldn't even be bothered to oppose that eventually led to British citizens dying in exile abroad!
The problem is that centrists promised us that their watered down version of neoliberalism would bring prosperity, but what it's actually delivered is Tory austerity dogma, collapsing wages, failing public services, exploitative employment practices, ridiculous privatisation scams, grotesque "hostile environment" policies, soaring in-work poverty, and eventually the centrist's own worst nightmare; Brexit.
But rather than admit their culpability in creating this dreadful situation, they're intent on moral high-horsing and abusing everyone to the left, and everyone to the right of them as "fascists"!
And it's exactly this kind of self-aggrandising and aloof sneering that's going to keep them in the political wilderness, because like it or not, the idea of aimlessly drifting around in the totally artificial territory of the 'centre ground' is finished.
The choice now is between the hard-right neoliberals who want to keep us on the same course we've been on for four decades (more privatisation, more undermining of workers rights, more public service cutbacks, more under-investment in infrastructure spending and research and development, more welfare cuts for the poor, more tax cuts and lavish handouts for the mega-rich) or those on the left who want to change direction and make Britain more of a high-tech, high-skill society with a decent welfare system like Norway, Finland, Germany, or Denmark.
Of course it's necessary to take an ideological position to step away from the complacency and aimlessness of the political 'centre', but there's nothing "cold" or "hard" about opposing the political orthodoxy of welfare cuts on the most vulnerable people in society (the sick, the disabled, the working poor, the jobless, the children, the elderly and infirm ...) in order to lavish corporations and the mega-rich with ever more tax cuts and handouts.
Quite the contrary, it takes a "cold hard" heart to go along with such barbarity solely because you want to maintain the illusion that by doing so you're somehow a 'moderate' occupying the 'centre ground'!
When centrism actively helps the Tories grind the most vulnerable people in society into absolute destitution for five years in order to feed the greed of the mega-rich, and then centrists accuse others who object to this horrific agenda of "fascism" and having "cold hard ideologies" then you really can't expect anyone other than your ever-diminishing echo chamber of delusional 'centrists' to applaud your unbelievably hypocritical message.
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