The Green Party Constitution
An Historical Perspective, by Brig Oubridge
with additional material from David Taylor and Alan Francis
The history of the Green Party of England & Wales may be viewed as a perpetual relationship between two inherent tendencies, one decentralist and activist, the other centralising and controlling or managerial. At times they have existed in a kind of dynamic tension, complimentary opposites maintaining a balance, managing to work together and keeping the Party on an even keel. At other times they have been in more or less open conflict and threatening to tear the Party apart. In good times and bad, both have been necessary parts of the whole, and the ebbing and flowing of the balance between them has been played out in the Party’s Constitution and organisation.
In the beginning
I first joined the Party, in the wake of the 1979 general election, which, unbeknown to most people at the time, ended the era of post-war political consensus which had been known as Buttskillism in the 1950s after one-nation Tory grandee Rab Buttler and Labour leader Hugh Gaitskill, and was personified in the 1960s and 70s as the Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee politics of Wilson and Heath. It brought Margaret Thatcher into power, but few foresaw the change she would bring about. For most it was simply time for a change, because the Callaghan government had failed to cope with the rampant inflation caused by the quadrupling of oil prices in the 70s, but nothing too different was expected to follow.
For me and many like me, the one spark of interest and glimmer of hope in the 1979 election was the emergence from total obscurity of what was then known as the Ecology Party. What was actually the world’s first ecologically based political party, it had been founded by a dozen people meeting in a pub in the early 1970s, inspired by a report by the Club of Rome and the Blueprint for Survival published by the Ecologist magazine. Originally known as “People”, it became the Ecology Party and grew slowly through the 70s to a membership of around 350. They then took the bold decision to field 50 candidates in the 1979 election, which qualified them for a 5 minute tv broadcast.
That 5 minutes of tv fame in what had otherwise seemed a rather dull election brought about a huge transformation. By the end of the year, membership had increased 10-fold to over 3,500. The small tight group of mostly middle class intellectual founders found themselves (according to their perspective) either borne up on a huge surge of new energy and enthusiasm, or in danger of being overwhelmed by an unruly mob of hippies, anarchists and assorted lefties, or possibly a mixture of the two. It was from that coming together of the first Green Surge that today’s Green Party was born.
Early organisation
Before the ’79 election, the Ecology Party had only a rudimentary form of organisation, which was sufficient for a group of only 350 members.
It had a National Executive Committee, presided over by a chairman (Jonathan Tyler, a Birmingham academic who had also written its constitution). This NEC included 13 regional representatives, who doubled up as regional organisers, 4 members elected on a postal ballot of the membership, and 4 elected from the floor of the national conference. It had an annual conference, which was the supreme body of the party, and the NEC had a Conferences Committee to organise the conference.
That was basically it, except that there were also in theory three more places on the NEC for MPs or councillors of the Party, although only one of these was occupied, by a parish councillor from Worcestershire, who may have been the Party’s only councillor at that time. There was a 3-year rule so that no-one could be elected to the NEC for more than 3 years without then taking a year off, and another rule that at least two of the NEC members elected from conference had to be people who had not served on it before. These were generally reckoned to be good rules.
(David Taylor, who joined in the mid-1970s when still at school, and was a prominent radical activist for the next quarter century, points out that the radical decentralist/centralist managerialist dichotomy existed even in the early days, and that it was the decentralists who enshrined the principal that you are primarily a member of your local party with capitations going to the region and national party.)
What they didn’t have, and hadn’t needed before 1979, were any rules governing the conduct of the annual conference. This proved to be a problem at that year’s conference, held at Keele University, when large numbers of the newly recruited members turned up for the first time. The result was chaos, with proposals and amendments being put forward from the floor to everything, entirely off the cuff. In the end, nothing actually got passed in the whole conference, although they did manage to elect the four new NEC members which the constitution required.
Following the Keele debacle, the new NEC brought in an ex-Labour man, Rob Andrews from Birkenhead, to bring a bit of order. They also decided to hold a spring policy conference in Manchester. At that time, although there was a statement of principles, known as the Philosophical Basis, there was no other party policy apart from a 1979 general election manifesto which had been put together by the leadership.There was an obvious need for all these new members to start agreeing on what the party’s policies should be, and to bring some order into that process the NEC also appointed a Policy Co-ordinator.
In Manchester, the Party accepted the new interim rules that Rob Andews put forward, and found that they worked. They then elected the Party’s first ever Standing Orders Committee to draft a permanent set, and to oversee the next conference, and I became one of the members of that first SOC. They even managed to pass some policy, which became the first parts of what is now called Policies for a Sustainable Society (or PSS), and was then known as the Manifesto for a Sustainable Society (MfSS). This did not, however, include the legalise cannabis policy proposed by a group of hairy hippies from the Welsh hills, which was thought too radical (but was passed at the following conference in Cardiff that autumn).
Evolution through the 1980s
Following the 1979 membership surge, the Party had to set about getting itself organised pretty quickly, and that is what it did.
My area, Wales, held its first national conference towards the end of ’79, which went much more smoothly than Keele due to fewer numbers. Other areas did likewise, and a structure of regional and local parties and regional co-ordinators grew out of nothing. It all received an additional boost from the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in the US, coupled with Thatcher’s announcement of plans for 10 new UK nuclear power stations, and new local parties were springing up all over the place.
New Policy Working Groups were formed, and started producing whole new chapters for the new MfSS, which still form much of the basis of today’s PSS.
The new NEC also formed itself into new subcommittees for internal communications, external communications, elections, international, political and management. Internal Comms produced a new Econews which went to every member quarterly, and included upcoming conference agendas, so that members and local parties were fully part of the policy making process. And all this in the days long before the internet, when everything had to be done on paper and by post and telephone.
In autumn 1980 Jonathan Tyler had to stand down from the NEC due to the 3-year rule, and I was among the new members elected onto the NEC. Jonathon Porritt was the heir apparent to take over as chair, but there was a strong anti-leader sentiment in the new intake (and among the pre-79 radical faction), and so we insisted on having three co-chairs instead of a single leader figure – a revolutionary step at the time. We also re-named the NEC as the Ecology Party Council, getting away from a name which echoed the Labour Party and its top-down ethos, and giving it a more collegiate feel. Jonathan Tyler moved sideways onto the newly created Appeals Tribunal, though this was in reality only a nominal post, as it never had any appeals to adjudicate.
Throughout the 1980s the Party continued to grow, weathering a brief pause in which the SDP broke away from Labour and formed an alliance with the Liberals, which threatened to be the new thing in British politics for a short while. Our continental colleagues continued to make progress under friendlier electoral and funding systems, particularly in Germany, and we changed our name to the Green Party.
We also benefitted from Thatcher and Reagan’s re-intensification of the Cold War and the growth of the peace movement (which Labour was split over and the Liberals unable to embrace due to their alliance with the SDP). We embraced 80s feminism and were allies of the Greenham Common women, and even went into the 1983 general election in an alliance with Women for Life on Earth (one of whose 1983 candidates, Rebecca Johnson, was until very recently still convenor of our Peace & Defence Working Group).
However, internally there were still strains beginning to show between the radical decentralists who had joined in ’79 and the managerial centralists who included some of the old guard from the 1970s.
“POWG” v. the decentralists – the long constitutional battle begins
On the sidelines of the Appeals Tribunal, ex-chair Jonathan Tyler set his mind to inventing a new consititution. From his point of view (and that of some others of the pre-1979 old guard) the party they had founded and nurtured had somehow got away from them. It had been taken over by this influx of dangerous radicals and decentralists, and needed bring back under control.
The plan he came up with was to have a directly elected executive leadership group, who would actually run the party and control the budget, and a much larger representative group, elected from the regions and local parties, who would take on some of the policy-making functions of conference. He set up a Party Organisation Working Group (POWG) and set about trying to sell his idea to the Party (which would need to vote it in at Conference).
Unfortunately, this was the exact opposite of what the majority of party activists wanted. They were fairly happy with the constitution the way it was, which seemed to be working pretty well. The Party Council, with its three Co-chairs, provided a good balance of both the managerialist and decentralist tendancies. The four members elected by postal ballot tended to be established figures. The four elected by Conference had proved their worth by their speeches and other conference contributions. The thirteen regional reps were all known in, and accountable to, their local areas, and provided a direct channel of communication with the local parties, where the actual campaigning and party building went on. Anyone who failed to be elected on the postal ballot could still get on via conference or their region, so all the best candidates made it onto the Council. And once there, they all had to find ways of working together and accommodating their various viewpoints.
Each autumn, the first Council meeting of the year carved out the territory. First, it would elect its three Co-chairs. Then the Party Secretary, and the convenors of the various committees. Each member then chose a couple of committees they wanted to be on, and any imbalance was sorted out by agreement so that each committee had about six members. (Conference Committee was an exception, as it only had three Council members, one of whom was the convenor and one the area rep of the area hosting the next conference: it also included a SOC representative, the Policy Co-ordinator, and a representative of the hosting local party.) Committee convenors were always people who had served at least one year on that committee before, so a body of experience carried on from year to year, and jobs on each committee were shared around, so new members gained experience and the burden of work (since we had almost no staff) did not all fall on the convenor.
While POWG and the managerialists wanted more centralised control, the decentralists and grass roots activixts wanted the opposite – more power, more administrative functions and more of the budget to the regions and local parties. POWG brought their proposals to conference as a discussion paper, which Conference referred back. They modified them, so the representative body had regional, rather than county or district reps. When it progressed to a voting paper, Conference rejected it. Still they didn’t give up, and the ping-pong continued conference after conference.
Meanwhile, the decentralists were pushing the other way. Wales GP insisted on having its own membership system, as no-one in the London office could transcribe a Welsh address correctly anyway, and got a special autonomous area status written into the Constitution (although the UK party never managed to agree the additional finance which should have gone with it). Scotland and Northern Ireland Green Parties began thinking about breaking away altogether.
When the appointed Policy Co-ordinator stepped down, he was replaced by a Policy Committee, elected by Conference. This was another gradual anti-centralist, pro-democratic step, which was accompanied by the rise of “OWOW”, the Other Ways of Working working group, which brought in attunement and workshops for conference motions and voting papers as well as for discussion papers.
POWG morphs into “Green 2000” and wins dirty
In the late 1980s, having failed once again to get a two-thirds majority for their new constitution, POWG managed to set up an Extraordinary Constitutional Conference to consider it all again. It took place in Coventry in 1990, and this time they managed to get it through – but only because most of their opponents had boycotted the event, and it was subsequently declared inquorate and invalid.
It was around this time that the Northern Ireland and Scottish Green Parties finally broke away.
But POWG still weren’t going away. They decided on a new strategy, masterminded by advertising executive Liz Crosby, who was by that time a Party Council member. They re-branded themselves as “Green 2000”, and re-submitted their new constitution for the 1991 Autumn Conference.
Somehow (??) they then gained access to the English membership list, and sent out a glossy letter, signed by Jonathon Porritt, which claimed that it was just the party’s rotten old Constitution which was holding it back, and promising that with their shiny new one we would have Green MPs by the year 2000. They asked members to help them achieve this by sending in their membership cards, which they could use to give themselves proxy votes at the next Conference to get their wonderful new Constitution passed.
Sure enough, the power of direct mail worked. At Conference their new Constitution again failed to get the necessary two-thirds majority, but then one Green 2000 supporter produced 350 card votes from her back pocket, and it was bulldozed through.
And then the slump
The Green 2000 victory came close to destroying the Party.
Throughout the 1980s, Party membership had grown steadily (despite the advent of the Liberal/SDP Alliance), and by the end of 1988 it had reached comfortably over 10,000. Then the Liberals mounted a takeover of the SDP to become the Liberal Democrats, despite resistance from SDP leader David Owen. That winter there were mounting signs of ecological disaster, including hundreds of dead seals washing up on the North Sea coast. In the 1989 European elections (the first such direct elections) we trounced the Lib Dems and achieved our best ever 12% vote. Membership shot up to over 19,000.
That second big Green surge was one of boom and bust. By the end of 1990 we were already in trouble, because two thirds of the new members failed to renew, having found out that we weren’t the Liberals and that Green politics consisted of more than cute furry animals. And our then Principal Speaker, Sara Parkin, had portrayed the Party as split (which it wasn’t) by saying that everyone should pay their Poll Tax, while members up and down the country were being taken to court for non-payment.
The Green 2000 coup was the last straw for many seasoned activists who had been with the Party throughout the 1980s. Many left, many others became inactive, and morale was at rock bottom.
In the special GPEx elections which took place after the 1991 Autumn Conference, Green 2000 put forward a full slate, who were elected unopposed because their opponents boycotted the election. When they took over at the start of 1992, they found they simply couldn’t cope. Half of them had no experience at national level, and the old committee system was gone, so there was no-one to help them out. With no committees and almost no staff, the jobs they have taken on were too much to handle. By the end of their short nine-month term, a number of them had already dropped out. That autumn, the decentralists had to come back in to keep the Party from collapse.
Ever since 1992, we have been stuck with the dysfunctional Constitution which Green 2000 foisted upon us. However, the proxy votes system was immediately reformed, limiting proxy votes to a maximum of five per person, so that a similar coup could no longer take place.
GPRC flexes its muscles
While the 1992-3 GPEx had enough to do to stabilise the situation, the 1992-3 GPRC used its new disciplinary powers (powers which the old GPC had posessed, but almost never used) to tear apart Wales Green Party, and obliterate the one good outcome of the 1992 general election – a pact with Plaid Cymru in Ceredigion which had got Cynog Dafis elected as a joint Plaid Cymru/Green Party MP.
The English GPRC members had no understanding of Welsh politics, and knew nothing of the previous decade in which Greens had worked alongside the radical wing of Plaid in the 1981-2 Nuclear Free Wales campaign and the 1980s peace movement. Nor did they appreciate that Plaid Cymru’s chief policy person at the time, Phil Williams, was actually an atmospheric scientist at Aberystwyth University, so there was a strong possibility of Plaid taking on a very Green direction.
The Wales reps on GPRC had taken on the posts that no-one else in Wales wanted to do, and pursued their own agenda against the pact, while Wales members found the new Constitution gave no area any control over their GPRC reps, – and still doesn’t. That year’s GPRC invented the “no fault suspension”, which doesn’t exist under the Constitution, but was used then and has been ever since to remove people that GPRC disagreed with.)
The lost committee structure
Probably the worst consequence of the Green 2000 Constitution was the loss of ther previous committee system. As noted above, that system created an on-going pool of GPC members with experience of each aspect of the Party’s national-level operations, which could share out the work and provide an experienced committee convenor each year. The new system provided a newly elected Co-ordinator each year who often had no experience and had no supporting colleagues.
The first (short 1992) GPRC tried to restore a vestige of this, and to create better liaison and co-operative working between GPEx and GPRC by instituting the system of GPRC members being”friends” of GPEx Coordinators, but this has never really worked, and its purpose has been lost over time. The GPEx Coordinator roles are too big for a single person to do on their own, and this has lead to an over-reliance on paid staff, who now effectively run the Party.
Other attempts to restore the functionality of the previous committee structure have led to the extablishment of a Conferences Committee, an International Committee, a Campaigns Committee, and a Green World Editorial Board, all elected by Conference, but there is often a disconnect between these committees and the relevent GPEx Coordinator, in which the committee has no real authority.
No way back
There was one attempt in the mid-1990s to restore the previous Constitution, but because of the churn of membership and the persistence of the myth created by Green 2000 that the previous Constitution had not worked, this also failed to achieve the required two-third majority. Those behind that attempt (of whom I was one) had agreed in advance that they would not be like POWG and keep coming back, so there was no second attempt. There are now sadly few of us left who remember the 1980s. In fact the old system had worked very well throughout the 1980s, because all sides realised that they had to show give and take and work in a consensual manner. There was only one year, 1990-91, when this broke down, due to an attempt by the Green 2000 faction to control the Council and rule by majority vote.
Alan Francis has reminded me of two further attempts this century to make major reforms of the Green 2000 constitution, both of which failed. Firstly there was a Constitution Review Group around 2000. John Norris was the main mover. Alan was chair of GPEX at the time and became the GPEX rep on the group. It came up with a new constitution which was put to conference. It got a simple majority but not the 2/3 necessary.
Secondly, several years before the Holistic Review there was a Governance Review Working Group. Alan thinks this was set up by a conference motion, although he had nothing to do with it initially. It was chaired by Doug Rouxell and came up with radical proposals that gave a lot of power to sectional interests such as Young Greens. He was sacked by GPRC and there was a call for nominations for a new chair. Alan Francis was asked to stand, did so and was appointed as chair. Working with the group, Alan modified the proposals to try and get more of a balance between the various groups and sections within the party. A new constitution was drafted and put to conference. However conference never got to debate it because the managerialist group came up with the Holistic review proposal and ensured that it got taken before the motion from Governance Review Working Group. Caroline Lucas spoke passionately for the Holistic review proposal and it was passed. That meant that the Governance Review Working Group motion was not taken.
The 30-year aftermath
The Green 2000 Constitution was dysfunctional from the beginning, and has remained so ever since, despite all attempts at amelioration. It was born out of a power grab by those who wanted to be able to manage the Party from the centre, and based on the ancient technique of “divide and rule” – dividing the all-powerful managerial group on GPEx from the more potentially troublesome representative group on GPRC, to enable the one to rule over the other. This split introduced an inherent weakness into our governance structure, which has handicapped the Party ever since.
GPRC was conceived as a backwater in which the decentralists could be sidelined and kept busy writing meaningless strategy papers. Of course, it couldn’t be presented as such, so it was given a theoretical power to remove members of GPEx (which it has never used), powers of internal discipline (which the previous GPC had almost never found cause to use), and a nebulously ill-defined role of “overseeing agreed democratic procedures” within the Party. This ruse was seen through by the decentralists of 1991, most of whom preferred to be active at regional of local level, so from the outset GPRC had a problem of recruitment, as well as that of finding a role.
As that role developed, it was only natural that GPRC members should focus on the powers of discipine, suspension and expulsion which they had been given, and the destruction of the Wales Green Party/Plaid Cymru pact was the first instance of this. I was a member of the previous GPC for 8 of the previous 10 years (plus the last 3 months of 1991), and I can only recall three disciplinary cases in all that time – the first resulted in a one-year suspension of a member from his local party, in the second the member resigned before a hearing could take place, and the third was resolved by the member moving into a different region. Since 1992, the number of such cases has grown beyone all recognition, and in recent years our disputes procedures have become weaponised in internal factional power struggles. Despite the creation of a separate Disciplinary Committee, there is now a backlog of at least 36 unresolved cases awaiting a hearing.
Another major flaw in the Green 2000 Constitution is the election of GPEx by postal ballot for individual posts. Postal ballots are a poor way of electing people in a party in which there are few nationallly known figures, so that all the members have to judge on is the ability of the candidates to write a couple of paragraphs extolling their own virtues. Incumbents have a huge advantage, and ever since 1991 far too many of these posts have had a single candidate elected unopposed, so there has been little or no accountability.
Under the previous system, the four GPC members elected by postal ballot (and the four elected from Conference) were elected as a group by STV, so at least different strands of opinion within the Party could each be represented in a vaguely proportional fashion, and all the posts were cvontested. Since 1991 it has been individual contests for individual positions, many or most of which have actually been uncontested, as few people were keen on doing the jobs. Worse still, the Green 2000 Constitution prohibited people from standing for more than one post, so when there was a contest any talents of the losers were simply wasted.
Backwards steps
Since 1992 there have been a number of constitutional changes which may have seemed positive at the time, but which I believe have turned out to be backwards steps.
One has been the change of GPEx terms from being one year to two. This was brought in to provide more of the continuity which had been lost due to the scrapping of the previous committee system on GPC. Instead, new people still come onto GPEx totally unprepared for the job they will have to do. Many give up after one year or less, and are replaced by co-optees, weakening those positions as co-optee do not have a vote or any real authority. The result is simply a reduction in accountability.
Another has been the gradual increase in size of GPEx, by the inclusion of additional posts, of which there are now too many.
Policy Development should not be part of GPEx’s job, but that of Conference and the elected Policy Committee.
Publications Co-ordinator should not be a GPEx post, as it overlaps with the responsibilities of the Elections, Campaigns, and Internal and External Communications Co-ordinators for publications in each of their respective areas. If anything, it should be a staff position, making sure that there is a consistent house style used, and in charge of the mechanics of placing print orders.
The Equality & Diversity person should be attached to GPRC, who have the job of dealing with complaints, disciplinary matters and agreed democratic procedures.
It is hard to see what the TU Liaison Officer’s post is for, since we have failed to poach any disaffected Trades Unions from the Labour Party, but if their role is more concerned with our policy stances on matters concerning TUs, they also should be attached to GPRC (and/or PDC) rather than being full voting members of GPEx.
The Young Greens have become a lobby group exercising disproportionate power within the Party, and if they should be represented anywhere it should be on GPRC, and alongside other groups such as Green Seniors and Green Party Women.
Any of these post holders could be invited to attend a GPEx meeting if their views are required, But by their inclusion, GPEx has morphed from being a management body to one which is more quasi-representational, but disproportionately representational of certain sectional interests, and with extra posts which such interests can capture in uncontested elections.
The disciplinary role of GPRC has also expanded (partly due to increasing demand) by the creation of both Disciplinary Committee and Disputes Resolution Committee, with GPRC itself becoming in part a referral body and in part an appeals body. The whole system needs overhauling, and the unfair system of “no fault suspensions” (which have become automatic) should be severely curtailed.
Our dislike of “Leadership” and the failure of “Principal Speakers”
The Party I joined in 1979 was steadfastly against the idea of having a Leader, and this attitude was reinforced through the 1980s by the examples of Margaret Thatcher’s “strong” leadership of the Conservatives, and Michael Foot’s “weak” leadership of Labour, followed by that of Neil Kinnock striving to show how tough he could be. Leadership and democracy were seen to be poor bedfellows, and the Green Party preferred democracy.
Thus, in 1980, the Party Council opted for three Co-chairs, rather than one Chair who would be seen as de facto Leader. Jonathon Porritt may have felt some chagrin over this, but disguised it well. However, at a time when other parties were very much defined by the personalities of their leaders, both the media and the public found it difficult to understand. In the 1983 general election, when we got our turn in the daily leader’s tv phone-in with Sir Robin Day, it was Porritt who appeared for us (and confirmed our distrust of leaders by disowning the Party’s legalise cannabis policy).
In the 1987 election, the BBC allowed us to be represented on the equivalent programme by a double act of Jean Lambert and Jo Robins, who were two of our 3 Co-chairs at the time. However, they felt that combining the roles of Co-chair and party spokesperson had become too onerous, so in 1988 we adopted the new positions of two Principal Speakers, one male and one female. Their jobs were to be simply those of media spokespeople, and they were not members of GPC and had no executive roles whatsoever.
Over the years that followed, there were a succession of Principal Speakers, but two were particularly worthy of note for very different reasons. One was Sara Parkin, and the other David Icke.
Sara had been one of the pre-’79 old guard, and a friend of both Jonathan Tyler and Jonathon Porritt. She regularly came to conferences, but was otherwise somewhat semi-detached from the Party because she lived with her husband in Lyon. Because she could easily travel to meetings on the European mainland, she became part of International Committee and our main liaison with other European Green Parties.
Sara therefore seemed like the ideal person to front up our 1989 Euro-election campaign in the new role of Principal Speaker. Although she rather played down the more radical aspects of our policies, this proved successful is grabbing votes from the newly-formed Liberal Democrats, and the media (still not understanding) hailed her as the new Green leader.
Among the many who joined the Party around this time was David Icke, an ex-goalkeeper who read out the football results on the telly and introduced the snooker. He spent one year on Party Council, without making a significant contribution, and seemed a slightly odd character who didn’t mix well, but that may have been because he had to leave early on Saturday afternoons to read the results on the BBC. However, as an established media personality, he was easily elected in 1989 as our male Principal Speaker alongside the triumphant Parkin.
Then came 1990, the year of the Poll Tax, which brought about the eventual polical demise of both Parkin and Icke, as well as that of Margaret Thatcher.
Although Parkin lived in France, she had retained a holiday home in Scotland, where she decided to pay her Poll Tax and enraged the Party’s grass roots. Icke, however, followed the Party line and refused to pay, ending up in court. This mixed messaging meant that we failed to take advantage of our Euro-election success by becoming the leaders of the Poll Tax revolt. It also meant that Icke was sacked by the BBC for becoming too political and had a mental breakdown.
Icke was to re-emerge the following year as a totally bonkers new-age guru figure, claiming that the royal family were shape-shifting lizards from outer space, while Parkin (a prominent supporter of POWG and Green 2000) became Chair of GPEx in its fiest disasterous nine months before resigning and retiring to Lyon. Each in their own way brought the Party into disrepute and helped precipitate our years in the doldrums in the 1990s. Both reinforced the Party’s opposition to having a leader.
Although we continued to elect Principal Speakers, none of their successors achieved anything like the same prominence.
The coming of the “leadership”
In 2008, partly in desparation after almost 20 years in the wilderness, the Green Party gave way to the inevitable and decided to have a leader. Caroline Lucas, the younger and more charismatic of the Party’s two MEPs elected in 1999 in the UK’s first ever election under a proportional representation system. She was a popular choice, and after being re-elected to Brussels in 2009 she went on to capture the seat of Brighton Pavillion and became the Party’s first MP.
In 2012 she gave up the leadership, and was replaced by Natalie Bennett. In 2016 Natalie stepped down, and Caroline returned, this time as Co-leader in partnership with Jonathon Bartley (who was relatively unknown in the Party). In 2018 Caroline again stepped down, and was replaced by Sian Berry, again in partnership with Jonathon Bartley.
The Constitution allowed for either a single leader with two deputies of opposite sexes, or two Co-Leaders with one deputy. The new leadership posts replaced the previous Principal Speakers, but unlike them were also members of GPEx, on which they have considerable influence.
Since 2016 the Deputy Leader has been Amelia Womack.
In none of these elections has an incumbant ever been defeated, and incumbants appear to have a distinct advantage, as would be expected in a Party in which they are likely to be the most well known members.
In recent years, this leadership group, together with the Chair of GPEx and MP Lucas, have set up a Political Committee, which does not exist in the Constitution. This subverts the original proclaimed Green 2000 intention, under which GPEx was supposed to be an administrative or management body, with GPRC having the more political role and making interim policy statements on behalf of the Party between conferences. The creation of this Political Committee foreshadows one of the changes proposed by the Holistic Review.
The Power of the Staff
Another major power shift within the Party which is also extra-constitutional, is the establishment of a pyramidical staff structure.
Caroline Lucas’s election to Parliament meant that, for the first time, the Party gained access to a pot of government money – the Short Money, which is paid to opposition parties in proportion to the votes they received in the previous general election. Before this we had hardly any paid staff, now we have lots of them.
Before the Short Money, what staff we had were under the direct control of the relevant GPEx Co-ordinator, so that (for example) the office manager would work under the Management Co-ordinator and the Press Officer would work under the External Communications Co-ordinator.
Now that we have lots of staff, this system has changed. Because (it was decided) staff needed clear lines of accountability and communication, they now all work under the direction of the CEO, and the CEO takes instruction from the Chair of GPEx. This means that we now have two parallel pyramidical structures, under which those at the top of the pyramids, the Chair of GPEx and the CEO, both have immense power, particularly in the ordering or priorities, and the GPEx Co-ordinators have lost effective control over what happens in each of their departments, as the staff will only do what the CEO tells them.
The “Holistic Review” and another new Constitution – same old same old
For those of us who went through the experience of the 1980s and ’90s, the present situation has very distinct parallels with the past, with POWG and Green 2000, and indeed it is the same set of ideas which are in play.
Once again in May 2021 we faced a special Extraordinary Conference, set up by a dedicated group intent on foisting a whole new Constitution on the Party, after a long process in which most members failed to be engaged. Once again we were being promised that this would be the wonder solution to all our problems and bring us legions of MPs, ignoring the political reality that it is the First Past the Post system which holds us back, and that progress can only be achieved by working with others to campaign for electoral reform. And once again, the internal reform we were being offered was based on the wholly mistaken idea that everything can be managed better by concentrating power more centrally in fewer hands and destroying existing committee systems.
It was precisely the same mistakes made by POWG and Green 2000, only this time writ even larger.
Firstly, it is never a good idea to re-write a whole Constitution in one go. Even more so than 30 years ago, it produces a huge mass of new documents, rules and relationships that very few people, if any, can manage to get their heads around. Inevitably, there will be gaps and contradictions which create new areas of dysfunctionality. And no-one can know in advance exactly how it will all work out in practice.
Constitutions should not be changed in this way. Not ever. They need to evolve, one bit at a time. Whatever problems there are should be clearly identified, and changed individually. That way, everyone can see what is being done and why, and understand it berfore being asked to vote on it. And afterwards they can see whether the change has worked, and what are the unforeseen consequences. Then people can decide whether there needs to be further change, or if the change that has been made needs to be reversed.
Secondly, the direction of the proposed changes is exactly the same as that which was imposed in 1991. Instead of GPEx, we will have a smaller Board (who will be less accountable and less easily removed), and a small leadership group and Political Committee, similarly unaccountable. As with GPEx and GPRC, disagreements between the two will be inevitable, and cannot be foreseen. And as with GPEx, putting all these jobs in so few hands will lead to overload and burn out, bad decisions, and too much reliance on unaccountable paid staff.
Instead of GPRC, we will have an even bigger, supposedly representative, body without a clear role or purpose. It will waste the time of yet more activists writing yet more irrelevent strategy papers, while the higher echalons continue to do whatever they like, and when a few of its members are drafted into one of the proposed “Task and Finish Groups” to actually do something, they will have no experience and no idea of what it is they are supposed to be doing.
The Holistic Review Report was accepted by a ballot of the Party membership in 2019, although the voting period had to be extended because the number of votes initially failed to meet the necessary quorum. In a parallel with the Brexit referendum, members were voting only on a collection of vague promises of how wonderful it would be, rather than a fully defined new Constitution. The “Task and Finish Group” which was set up to produce a fully drafted proposal failed to do so, and the version which was produced and submitted for the 2019 AGM was so full of holes and internal contradictions that it was ruled out of order by the then SOC.
The latest version had been re-worked by a Constitutional Working Group set up by GPRC, who also set up the Extraordinary Conference in May. However, their redrafting took into account only about half of the faults and errors SOC had found in the previous draft, and the current SOC once again ruled it out of order.
The proponents were still determined to do whatever they can to bulldoze it through, and came to the Extraordinary Conference intending to challenge the SOC report and get Conference to rule it back in order, with all its faults still in place, and with no-one having had any chance to make amendments. Fortunately, just as happened with the previous Extraordinary Constitutional Conference in 1990, the May 2021 Extraordinary Conference turned out to be inquorate, so nothing was done.
So where do we go from here?
If it comes back in the autumn, the proposed CWG Constitution, derived from the Holistic Review, needs to be decisively rejected, either at Conference, or, if it gets that far, in a membership ballot thereafter.
The other alternative Constitution which was also being proposed to the May Conference is a little better, but we would be better off still to stick with the one we’ve got, which we at least all know our way around. Then we can set about reforming it one step at a time, understanding what we are doing at every stage, and gradually remedying the problems we have inherited from Green 2000 in 1991.
The most significant change which was proposed by both the CWG and the alternative new Constitution put forward to the May Conference is the incorporation of the Party as some form of limited liability company. This idea has already been under discussion within the Party for at least a decade, and is quite big enough on its own and profound enough in its implications to require the full attention of a whole Conference, or more than one Conference, without any attempt to re-write all the rest of our governance structures at the same time.
We have a history of over 40 years of repeated attempts to re-write our whole Constitution in one go, which has resulted in nothing but failure and disaster. It is time that we learned the lessons of the past, and resolved never to go down the same path again.