Green party manifesto at a glance

The Guardian’s guide to the key points of the Green party manifesto.

The Green party have launched their election manifesto.

The Green party has published its manifesto ahead of tomorrow’s general election. The Green party is an environmentalist and socialist party led by IceCreamSandwich401, who previously led the Scottish Greens and served as Scotland’s first minister for 107 days. Here is the Guardian’s guide to the key points of the Green party election manifesto.

Defence

• Unilateral nuclear disarmament.

• Decrease the focus on NATO – supporting proposals for an EU army, decreasing the importance of the 2% spending target in times of auserity, and promising a withdrawal from NATO.

• Abolish the post of veterans minister.

Finance

• Abolish stamp duty for first time buyers, fund the abolition with a new ‘Mansion Tax’ on the wealthy.

• Duties on Tobacco, Alcohol, Salt, and Sugar to support the NHS – so-called “sin taxes”.

• National Investment Accounts for young people with donations from the Government.

• ‘Amazon Tax’ to support the high streets.

• Replacing the Pound Sterling with the Euro.

Transport and environment

• Ban on ‘fracking’ or hydraulic fracturing.

• Prohibit internal flights to the UK mainland.

• Better rail connections – expanded HS2, new HS3, 2nd rail connection with mainland Europe.

• Plant 4 million trees.

• All new buildings to be powered by solar panels.

Foreign affairs

• Full and unreserved apology for colonialism.

• Transfer the Falkland Islands to Argentina, and Gibraltar to Spain, against the wishes of their residents as expressed overwhelmingly in referendums in 2013 and 2002 respectively.

• UN Security Council reform.

• Expel illiberal countries from the Commonwealth or leave.

• International body for environmental protection.

• International action for nuclear deterrent (talks with Iran and North Korea).

• Play a central role as a peace negotiator in Israel and Palestine and in Cyprus.

Constitution

• Proclaim a republic and abolish the monarchy without parliamentary approval.

• A Green prime minister’s first action will be to write to the European commission and request membership of the EU without a referendum.

• Abolition of the House of Lords.

• Rapid devolution to Wales, Scotland, and England.

• Elections on Saturdays.

Home affairs

• Merger of police forces in England and Wales into one national police force, armed in the European fashion.

• Similar merger plans for fire and rescue service.

• Joining the Schengen Area as soon as possible.

• Eliminating immigration restrictions.

• Resettling 750,000 refugees and becoming a world leader in asylum protection

Health

• Nationalise social care facilities, which will then integrate with the NHS, along with independent hospitals, along the lines of hospital nationalisation in Scotland which is now being reversed by the Classical Liberal led government.

• Regular five year plans for the management of the English NHS will be released, but it’s unclear whether these will be produced by the Department of Health or NHS England.

• Set up a global recruitment drive for medical staff to the NHS.

• Health charges for non-European Economic Area nationalist will be eventually abolished.

• Ban private profit being made from the NHS except in exceptional circumstances.

• Put mental health services in all schools, with no clarification as to what these services will look like.

Education

• Abolish the current school system and rebuild it on the basis of the Swedish model.

• Designate technical universities to support high level practical skills.

• Digitise the education system as soon as possible.

• Abolish charity status for independent schools and de-fund religious and single-gender schools.

• Abolish the national curriculum to be replaced with freedom for teachers based on the Scottish model.

• Provide all children with free school meals and review the quality of school food.

Culture and media

• Abolish the free TV license for over-75s.

• Establish a fund to encourage media to relocate from London and the south-east.

• Mandate that BBC linear TV and iPlayer have 10% of their programmes in Welsh or Scottish Gaelic.

• Support regional cultures of England, but with no detail as to how.

• Promote multicultural Britain in all supported cultural events and media outlets.

Local government

• Replace England’s local government system in its entirety, replacing it with an English parliament alongside a number of regional assemblies covering large, traditional areas.Current districts will exist according to their current boundaries while all settlements with more than 500 residents will have a municipal council. All levels of government will have the appropriate financial powers.

Justice

• Create an assumption against custodial sentences of less than 12 months and a broader assumption against custodial sentences for those who are not a threat to public safety.

• Use undisclosed savings from an undisclosed number of prison closures to invest in community based rehabilitation.

• Increase funding for employability courses in prisons, up to and including undergraduate teaching.

• Protect and expand the availability of legal aid.

International development

• Spend 2% of GDP on foreign aid and aim to surpass this every year, half of which will be designated to emergency response.

• Only fund environmentally sustainable development funding.

• Restrict funding to development organisations which uphold the same values as the UK.

• Cut or limit funding for richer nations such as India.

Devolved areas

• The Green party’s Northern Irish sister-party, Sinn Fein, will demand an immediate referendum on Irish reunification if they win the majority of the country’s votes. If the party does not, the Greens will fight attempts to separate Ulster from the rest of Ireland.

• Make the secretary of state for Northern Ireland apolitical and fill it with a civil servant.

• Confirm that only the Scottish people should be allowed to determine its constitutional future.

• Green MPs will refuse to attend the Queen’s speech.

• Secure the transfer of powers to local communities in Wales, rather than the Senedd.

• The Greens support Welsh independence and official bilingualism.

• Build a high speed rail like from Swansea to London.

• Focus effort on direction action to avert Wales’ climate crisis, with no such commitment for the other regions.

Analysis: A party in its death throes

The only positive thing I am likely to say about the Green manifesto is that it is absolutely beautifully designed. Perhaps the Green party – who have now abandoned their Green-Left rebrand – would be much healthier if they redirected their design spending into policy advisors and parliamentary activity. That aside, this is the manifesto of a party that knows that it is about to be wiped out in a general election. According to an opinion poll released at the start of the campaign, the Greens are now polling at less than 1% of the vote, meaning they are all but certain to lose every last seat in parliament. They are polling above only the English Regionalists, the newly formed far-left Phoenix Committee and various independents.

The party is bereft of clear leadership, it’s June turnout for Commons votes was less than 40%, it barely turns up to Commons debates, it has alienated traditional allies such as Labour and the Liberal Democrats over the way the TLC official opposition fell apart, and it is totally disorganised. It is the basic law of politics that parties in such a state of terminal crisis be wiped out, and it is now a near inevitability that the Greens will suffer that.

This has clearly had two effects on this manifesto. The first is that there has been a mass exodus of some of the Greens greatest strategic brains, including three former principal speakers: DF44, ContrabannedtheMC (both to the People’s Movement, which the latter founded), and zombie-rat (to Labour). Not only that, but high profile moderate members have also fled the sinking ship, such as Weebru_m, a former first minister of Scotland, who is now a Liberal Democrat. That means that a lot of those with experience and knowledge, as well as those others who brought moderation to the party, have had no input in this manifesto.

The second is that the party has abandoned any hope of winning Westminster seats. All of their efforts have been focused on the Holyrood parliament, knowing that their UK-wide operation is electorally doomed without a drastic turnaround for which they lack the membership, resources, and time. This is a position publicly exemplified by former Shadow Foreign Secretary WiredCookie1 who tweeted: “do [sic] you really expect us to win any seats or do any of this… we [sic] going regional.” And without hope of winning, the party has also abandoned all efforts to be electable. What’s the point of being electable if you’re not going to be elected anyway when you can retreat to an ideological comfort spot that makes you feel like you’re on the right side of history without any thought to implementation or workability?

The result is one of the worst manifestoes that I have seen in my time in politics, and one that has been met with near universal derision. The policies are so far to the left that even Michael Foot might have thought they were a bit much. But worse than that is the fact that they’re so poorly thought through and vague that they would be disastrous if enacted and demonstrate a party that is now driven by a far-left echo chamber that knows it cannot do well. Not that there is much concern about them being implemented. Very few of these policies will carry a majority in the country or the sort of House of Commons that is likely to result from this election, and are thus very unlikely to ever come into force – even if the Greens do win seats.

There are so many problems with so many of the policies enclosed that it is very difficult to do an analysis that does not talk about them in some detail in order to demonstrate exactly what a party flailing around at the end of its life looks like. The defence section is the home of some of the worst ideas. It contains one standard Green policy – the dismantling of the trident nuclear deterrent, alongside four newer ideas. Most eye catchingly is the Green plan withdraw from NATO, alongside winding down Britain’s military capabilities to be replaced with a new national defence force which would not be allowed to be deployed abroad. The purpose of NATO withdrawal, however, becomes unclear when the very next policy is to join a new EU army. How our army is supposed to be part of this when they can’t even leave the country is a mystery.

The Greens also deride “importation of American military fetishism” in the form of a veterans affairs minister, promising to scrap the post, while maintaining current levels of support for veterans. This sounds like a “cake and eat it” policy of removing cabinet recognition of veterans issues whilst promising to keep it as a key priority. It makes innately more sense to do one or the other, but innate sense is not what has driven this slate of policies – why else would we be leaving NATO to join what sounds like it might be a mini-NATO.

The stand out Green policy on finance is a promise to scrap the pound and adopt the Euro. There very few avid remainers who want to see Britain adopt the Euro and join the Schengen Area, which goes to show fringe a policy these are. The Greens, who have gone on a Brexit journey from remain, to pro-respecting the referendum, to pro-people’s vote, have now gone full extreme remain with a promise that a Green prime minister’s first act would be to send a letter to the EU requesting to re-join. No referendum. No parliamentary vote. The Greens would have Britain straight back in the EU – Euro and all. Again, most remainers would say that this is too far and too undemocratic, and many are likely to instead back the SDP’s much more moderate promise of a referendum.

The Greens are not just content with avoiding democracy in relation to EU membership, they are also determined to repeatedly rip up democracy in Britain. Not least by abolishing the monarchy and declaring Britain a republic without a parliamentary vote. This is clearly constitutionally illegitimate and illegal, not to mention a very dictatorial way of supposedly democratising the country by abolishing the monarchy, and would leak to a protracted legal battle that a Green government would inevitably lose. And while it’s a much more minor concern, they also present no plans for a post-monarchal Britain. I was very damning of the Democratic Reformist Front’s lacklustre and vacuous plans for a republic, but at least they had a sketch of a replacement and weren’t promising to destroy British parliamentary democracy.

But the Greens – who previously used to be a party committed to the principle of self-determination for the people of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and of democracy – are not finished overriding democratic processes. They would also seek to give the Falkland Islands to Argentina and Gibraltar to Spain, despite at 99.8% vote in favour of the Falklands remaining a British overseas territory and a 98.97% vote against Britain and Spain sharing sovereignty over Gibraltar. There is clearly no mandate for the complete handover of these territories to countries that the residents have very little affinity with. Besides that, other Green foreign policies include a full apology for colonialism and a threat to withdraw from the Commonwealth – an organisation founded by Britain and that the Queen is the ceremonial head of – and the UN security council. This, coupled with their defence policies, makes for a plan to isolate Britain on the world stage.

The manifesto is littered with other extreme, and likely unpopular, promises including, most notably, the nationalisation of private hospitals and social care without a sketch of a plan or costings – a policy that was rushed and poorly costed in Scotland is now being reversed by new First Minister Duncs11’s government. There is also a pledge to abolish the free license fee for over 75s – a policy that you would expect in a right wing manifesto – a ban on all domestic flights between points on mainland Great Britain – while good for the environment, it is likely to go down very badly – and the devolution of as much as possible to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. It’s not clear whether this will equate to Devo Max, which the current First Minister for Wales has previously strongly opposed, and the devolution of justice to the country, which would lead to a bureaucratic nightmare as every justice bill passed for centuries treats England and Wales as one authority.

Others are not just extreme and potentially unpopular but also downright daft and extremely ill thought through. The most glaring example of this is the plan – which is a very generous way of describing an idea consisting of a few lines – to merge every police force in England and Wales together into one. This is clearly based on the police Scotland model, but England and Wales is an area covering over 58 million people, compared to 5.4 million in Scotland. Not only that, but the Greens wish to see the same done for fire services and to have police officers regularly armed, which is a huge contradiction with their more-pacifistic commitments on defence. This plan is further complicated by the promise to create new unarmed municipal authorities to deal with minor issues. This is a recipe for all kinds of confusion and disaster, with armed emergency response seemingly to be controlled centrally from Westminster, and not integrated with local police forces. We also don’t know how many officers will be put into each force, what issues both will deal with, or how the government would ensure proper cooperation. Why part of policing should be centralised while the other is not is very unclear and that is the issue when the manifesto offers no justification or explanation for many policies.

Vagueness and a lack of thought again shines through on education, where the Greens want to conduct, and this is a direct quote, “The abolition of the current school system and its recreation based on the Swedish model.” They don’t just want to introduce education reforms. They want to tear the whole system down and start again, which is likely to be messy, difficult, and time consuming – afterall, even simple education reforms in the past have been very tricky to actually implement – particularly when the schools are set to come back from their summer holidays in about a month. We have no idea to what extent the Greens would change the system, or how long it would take, or how much it would cost, or what the new system would look like besides a vague mention of the “Swedish model,” which is this whole manifesto in a nutshell: extreme policy that would cause massive issues proposed with no explanation or plan.

Not only that, but there is something of a pattern of Green policy being heavily based on certain European countries. Not least, of course, is the plan to join the Euro and Schengen, along with the arming of police, which the manifesto says is based on “the European manner,” and the reconstruction, weeks before the new academic year, of the whole school system without any specifics as to what will be needed to get there, and what it will look like in detail. It comes across as the party having run out of ideas of their own, telling the electorate that they want to carry out half baked and badly considered adaptations of European policies without any clear idea of how. Which is strong proof that this is a party that knows that it’s going to struggle to win any seats. =

Local government is probably the manifesto’s strongest and most detailed section, which isn’t saying a lot given that it is still vague and leaves many questions unanswered. But it does show that the Greens have thought about what the new system will look like, which is not something you can say for any other policy. We know what the new tiers of local government would look like. What we don’t know is what powers will be given to each, what the new English assembly will look like – seat numbers, constituencies, electoral system, authority and powers – what the new regional assemblies will look like and how these will differ from existing authorities, and how all of these will integrate and interact. In reality, the details of this local government reform plan actually give us more scope with which to come up with questions that will likely go unanswered.

The most honest and realistic line in the whole manifesto is that Green MPs “shall not attend the Queen’s Speech.” They say that they won’t as backbench MPs because they’re committed republicans. The truth of the matter is that, on the basis of this manifesto, there will be no Green MPs. The Greens have given up on fighting against the rot, fighting for a mainstream party of socialist environmentalism and have given into the worst instincts of all dying, dead and fringe parties – to retreat to the base and away from the electorate. This is the Green’s last will and testament and the want their most dedicated supporters to feel that they went out in a blaze of glory at Westminster.

I have no allegiance or sympathies with the Green party, and I risk veering from analysis to opinion here but it must be said. We should all be deeply saddened that a party that has produced four prime ministers and several leaders of the opposition has been led to this destruction by incompetence, fanaticism, laziness, and chaos. It is always a shame to see once great parties decimated by those with no allegiance to its history, its achievements, or its electorate – instead opting for easier course of becoming a Scotland only party. They may hold on to one seat, but that seems vanishingly unlikely given how little they deserve it, and those who have driven it to this point should hold their heads in shame.