The new burden on the Greens

I have just posted this short on YouTube and elsewhere:

This is the transcript:

The result for the Greens in Gorton and Denton is stunning, unbelievable, off the scale. Whatever words you want to use, this was a historic by-election result by a party that is clearly going to shape the future of British politics, and I’m delighted about that because we have needed a left-wing challenge to Labour for a very long time and have not had it.

But, and I want to add a word of warning amongst all the euphoria we’ve got now, this places an enormous burden on the Greens.

Let’s be clear. There aren’t many of them in Parliament. Zack Polanski isn’t even there yet, and the party processes are incredibly slow. Changing Green policy is difficult, even cumbersome, and requires people to attend at its conferences, which is not a democratic representation as a consequence, and there are still real flaws in green economic policy.

The Greens have to speed up their processes. They have to make sure that they can come up to date. They have to create policies which are acceptable now to people, particularly in the field of economics.

They have still not properly updated their economic policy, which says that the government should create all money. That is absurd. We now need the Greens to have a solid, modern monetary theory-based economic policy that can answer the questions that our economy has and which can liberate money to achieve what they want: full employment, prosperity, equality, a real prospect of tackling climate change, all those things matter. But the Greens, without a sound economic policy based, as I say, on the principles of modern monetary theory, which explains the proper role of money and taxation and how the government should manage both, is not going to be viable.

So I’m delighted for everybody involved in getting Hannah Spencer elected in Gorton and Denton. I admire what Zack Polanski has done. I believe we have an opportunity. But please, can you look at your economics again and again until you have something that is available which will withstand the attack from the right-wing that is inevitably coming your way, because without that reform, without a solid economic foundation, without a justification for the programmes that you want to put in place and which this country wants, you will be in trouble.

So my appeal is  this: let’s go Green, but let’s do so on the basis of sound economics.

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