In my ‘series’ here on BG (see here) exploring the direction our Party (GPEW) needs to take, I have covered a little about our policy debates, and the potential we have for growth at local level. But I now want to turn again to our most important resource: our members, and their activism.

It seems to me desperately important that we find ways of involving our members more in our Party. As a democratic organisation, we live or die by our ability to shape decisions through everyone’s participation in our decisions. As we move forward, and gain more successes, with the growing numbers of members that I described in my previous posts, accountability becomes ever more important. (Looking outside our Party, we can of course easily see what happens when accountability and transparency is reduced to a charade.)

It disturbs me for example that we have such strict rules against campaigning for internal elections within our Party. How are we expecting new members to get more involved in the Party, if we don’t even make it easy for them to feel involved in our internal elections? Didn’t they opt to join a political organisation?

And it’s even more important that selection of our election candidates proper be fully open and engaging. It is possible, currently, for very small numbers of members to vote for candidates on lists for Europe and regional elections in selections that are not well known about and for candidates who are themselves not very well known (especially if they are newish to the Party). Our procedures may be abstractly “fair” to candidates, but are potentially very unfair to the people voting, who may find themselves asked to vote for people who may get elected on the basis of a piece of paper and a passport photograph alone. Not to mention being potentially unfair, in practice, to some candidates, newcomers in particular.

This stands in contrast with procedures in Labour, Conservative and Lib Dems, where candidates are expected to canvas their members, and, in the Conservatives’ case, may even be subject to open, public primaries. We must ask ourselves whether our procedures are more open and democratic, or potentially more closed (in practice) and therefore more prone to promote a party “elite”.

However we view our internal selections, surely we must all agree that we badly need to find ways of making it easier for members, and especially our burgeoning numbers of new members (including recruits from the LibDems), to get involved in the Party. We need to try to re-design the Party to be ‘self-explaining’, rather than somewhat obscure and labyrynthine.

Similarly, I think that most ordinary members feel at present extremely remote from the policy-making process in our Party. It is good that we now have our ‘Policies for a Sustainable Society’ separated off from our manifesto commitments for upcoming elections and from the day-to-day decisions that our elected politicians make. But doesn’t that mean that we now need to reconfigure Conference? Shouldn’t a lot of the emphasis at Green Party Conference now shift toward the making of actual policy in response to actual circumstances?

At present, we do this in the Green Party Conference primarily by means only of ‘Emergency Motions’. It seems to me – and I know I am not alone in this thought – that that really isn’t good enough any more. We need to reconfigure Conference so that a significant percentage of its time is spent looking at the actual issues of the day. Things like the Digital Economy Bill, the AV referendum, House of Lords reform, the ‘big society’. . .  The impending move to delegate conferences will offer us an extremely exciting opportunity to involve the membership much more in these kinds of issues and questions, the important and more immediate questions facing us, policy-wise. We need to be working now to ensure that delegate conferences are thinking about and determining where we stand on issues that matter, to our growing numbers of elected politicians.

Apart from anything else, our new leadership model and our breakthrough into Westminster require that we ensure that our leaders are accountable, and are benefitting from the full extent of the advice and input and confirmation that we can offer them. Caroline needs to be given the full benefit of what help we can give her in facing, alone, the rest of Parliament. Conference ought to be much more about that now, and much less about thinking about the shape of utopia.

And surely Spring Conference should become what it is for other political parties: primarily a training event and a rally, rather than spending lots of our time, when elections are imminent, focussing on ‘policies for a sustainable society’.

I was delighted with Jane’s and Tom’s blog-posts in response to my original post. But I confess that I have been slightly surprised that there haven’t been more people involved in debating these matters. As I say: I really hope that we get debating these things now, and help thereby ensure that Conference this year reflects an awareness of these issues as requiring and deserving action. As they are.

(Procedural Stuff – Probably Boring)
The way this works is the whole section is submitted to conference under a separate section in the agenda and amendments are taken to alter, subtract from or add to it. Each amendment is debated separately, normally, before the whole section, as amended is voted on at the end. If the final vote falls, or isn’t reached due to time constraints, the whole section falls and we remain with what we had before.

This might not seem like an issue but with only 80 minutes originally scheduled to debate the motion and 29 amendments I was really worried at the start of conference that we might succeed in amending the necessary parts of policy only to see our efforts wasted at the last minute. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case, debate was extended into an extra session on Sunday and we got through all 29. To digress for a second, however, I think this is a serious issue, in a conference that lasted over 3 full days we had only around six and a half hours of debate on the health policy paper, organisational and policy motions, emergency motions and reports. We ended conference having failed to even discuss 10 out of the 20 policy motions.

(Back to Policy – Hopefully Less Boring)
To get back to the health paper though, what did we actually pass then? Well, a lot of good policy I think. We now have a much more rational and scientifically defensible section. One I would no longer be embarrassed to show to my non-green party friends (actually most of my green friends thought it was pretty awful too to be honest).

Number one on my list of priorities was amendment 28, which removed our opposition to embryonic stem cell research. I can’t begin to describe how pleased I am that passed and how ridiculous it was that we ever opposed it in the first place. As fellow Bright Greener Adam said as he proposed the policy (Stuart, who had been proposer couldn’t make the last session on Sunday) it was a cruel and inhumane position that put us in alignment with the Bush administration in postponing developments that could lead to huge advances in medical research and treatments. I don’t know the circumstances under which we first adopted the original policy but I was pleased to see that the new policy was easily carried in the end.

Number two was homoeopathy and the numerous references to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) the old section contained. I think I’m right in saying that what we passed this weekend no longer mentions homoeopathy once. One might suggest we should have gone further to actively oppose it (and I might agree with you) but two other new sections of policy probably make that unnecessary. Firstly, all medicines, real or CAM, would have to clearly state their ingredients and side effects and, secondly, all treatments would have to prove their efficacy under independent clinical tests to be provided by the NHS.

I think the proposers were clever here, rather than explicitly attacking CAM and risking a fight that could have jeopardised passing the motion, or having the time to finish it at all, they removed all specific details from the policy and set up a framework which anyone who believes in homoeopathy should support but which, in reality, would prevent most CAM from receiving any funding. Unless, of course, they can show their treatments work, in which case we’ll have no problem with them.

Animals
One problem I do still have with Green Party policy, and one I’m sad to say I don’t have high hopes of sorting soon, is on animal testing. I wrote a bit about this the other day but it reappeared on Sunday. In the health section, we made some progress. Amendment 11 removed the line “vivisection is of questionable value and incompatible with ecological philosophy”, whatever ecological philosophy means. Amendment 14 added a new paragraph proposing a review would be carried out to compare animal testing with “human biology-based tests” to “determine the best means to predict the safety and effectiveness of medicines and treatments for patients”. That sounds fine to me, and indeed, was accepted by most of the animal rights enthusiasts, convinced as most of them are that animal testing is scientifically inferior to other methods. I wonder though what would happen if that review said animal testing was best given our policy elsewhere?

Speaking of which, C09 and C10, having not been referred back for further work, came back immediately after we passed health. Unfortunately, Jim’s proposal that the animal rights section would be the appropriate place to list an ethical objection but that scientific concerns were already covered in the health section fell, mostly, on deaf ears and his motion fell. Commiserations Jim. Under party rules I believe that means we can’t try that approach again for two years. Removing our opposition entirely, however, that’s another matter.