Split over HS2 exposes deeper schism within Green Party
Can the party ever move beyond its various legacies and internally competing ideologies?
Today, a faction of the Green Party of England and Wales (including leading elected members) has publicly denounced their party’s stated position on Britain’s new high speed railway line, HS2.
In their statement explaining the split, Greens4HS2 highlight that, far from forming party policy, the anti-HS2 (and thus, anti-rail) stance of the GPEW is based only on a policy statement dating back to their 2011 conference. Meanwhile, the formal policy remains that “…[the] Green Party supports the principle of a new north-south high speed line…” which takes precedence over the conference statement.
But the divergence represents more than just a disagreement on semantics. It is an allegory for a wider problem in the party and the environmental movement at large: that of a transition from protest and the politics of “no” into one of positive action, political success and the ability to implement the policies of “yes”.
This comes down to evidence and making difficult choices balancing up all of the available information, rather than relying on over-simplified soundbites and taking a polarised stance against perceived environmental threats. In the case of HS2, it isn’t just that data is being overlooked or ignored. Figures are literally being pulled out of thin air.
A bit of digging reveals that the architect of that 2011 conference statement, Professor John Whitelegg (a long-time opponent of high speed rail) based it on greenhouse gas emissions figures that were ten times greater than contemporary data showed. He continues to provide no source for his figures, but work by ESA engineer David Peilow has shown that they likely rely on a single paper from 2003 which uses a series of outdated or erroneous assumptions.
Only this month, Whitelegg has claimed that HS2 will release 80 million tCO2e (tonnes of CO2 equivalent) during its construction, where as the real figure is estimated at 8–14 million tCO2e (and, all credit to HS2 and its contractors, they are closer to hitting the lower target at this point). Again, he is exaggerating the numbers by a factor of ten.
Why is a party that claims to be on the side of science and reason so wedded to positions based on precisely the opposite: misinformation and dogma?
The GPEW (and wider green movement) is formed of people who fit across two spectrums, and it is this which has caused much of the current friction.
The first spectrum is the range of political views the party encompasses — the right/left axis, if you like. On one side you have people with a little or big C conservative bent who joined the party to keep things the way they have always been, and who have little interest in the financial or social structures that are a core contributor to climate collapse. On the other you have the anti-capitalists with varying degrees of rationality in their intent to change those financial and social structures.
The second spectrum is one of conservationism versus environmentalism, of protest against any change at all versus a more complete look at the necessary trade-offs to create a sustainable future. At one side of this axis is where we see activists and conservationists like those currently being extracted from under Euston Square Gardens or petitioning against trees being removed from alongside railway lines. They don’t want anything to change, they cannot tolerate the loss of even one tree, and the longer-term ecological impacts from climate change resulting from continued road-reliance be damned. At the other end of this axis sit people who understand the value of direct action, but also want to see a more defined vision of what success looks like. This axis pits people who see the GPEW as an extension of other campaign groups versus those who want it to be a viable political force that can win votes and make change happen.
The positions available on these two axes, apparently complementary but on closer inspection conflicting, means that without assertive leadership, the GPEW cannot move forwards. And yet here we find a vacuum. Jonathon Bartley, one half of the co-leadership team, dismisses the entire collective voice of the railway industry as “the usual trainspotters” and according to party insiders has a personal vendetta against the project and anyone who supports it. Sian Berry (Jon’s opposite in more ways than one), unable to say anything different to him, has to endure uncomfortable public appearances where she repeats meaningless soundbites she clearly doesn’t actually believe in.
Climate action has three facets: (1) doing everything we can now to minimise and indeed reduce to below zero our GHG emissions; (2) doing longer term things that allow us to live in a more sustainable society without entrenching existing prejudices and inequalities; and (3) making changes to the built environment, to underlying economic assumptions and to democratic processes that will keep our society sustainable and will take a generation or more to enact.
As it stands now, the GPEW is not capable of achieving any of these aims without more political power, and it will not gain more political power if it cannot retain the people in its ranks who believe in evidence and doing the things that are hard, rather than easy.
A quick flick down the “who we are” page of the Greens4HS2 website indicates that these aren’t just a localised group under the spell of a shiny project — these are people spread across the country who are feeling deeply at odds with a policy not only in conflict with green parties elsewhere, but with its own stated manifesto objectives.
This split shows that it is no longer acceptable for the GPEW to say, either literally or metaphorically, that “we want more trains, we just don’t want the tracks needed to run them” — and I hope we’ll see their formal stance change in the near future. For the sake of our planet, it needs to.