This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
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Can the resurgent Greens win over the youth vote?
By: []
Date: 2021-09
To be honest, when I arranged to speak to a group of politicians, I wasn’t expecting them to declare their determination to “dismantle power structures that were created 400 years ago”. Or for them to speak approvingly of Black feminist organisers and theorists such as Audre Lorde.
My conversation with Tamsin Omond and Amelia Womack, who are jointly running for co-leadership of the Green Party of England and Wales, came as a surprise. For a long time, I had thought of UK politics as inaccessible, particularly for people from ethnic minority backgrounds. It’s hard to get excited when you rarely see yourself reflected among the MPs elected to represent us, and when the few Black, female MPs who do get elected are discriminated against and receive a disproportionate amount of online abuse. When I thought of politics, I would think of rich, old, white men – and I am none of these things.
But Omond and Womack are speaking a language I understand. “Those power structures and the model of extraction and exploitation that was baked into our white, Western, dominant culture, have to be dismantled,” Omond says. “Not just for social justice to be achieved, not just for healing and reparation to be achieved, but also because we’re in the midst of a climate and ecological emergency.”
Two pairs of candidates are currently favourites in the Greens’ leadership election (the party has a history of appointing ‘co-leaders’, rather than a single person, to the top job), which concludes later this month. All are seasoned campaigners: Womack is currently a deputy leader of the party, while Omond is a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion; their main rivals, Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay, are long-time Green activists and parliamentary candidates. All speak with passion, conviction and empathy, with a shared goal of transforming society for the benefit of all. As Denyer and Ramsay say, we will need “comprehensive radical action to create a greener future and a green recovery from this awful pandemic”.
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The Green Party has tended to be viewed as a space dominated by white, middle-class people, but all four candidates say they want to change that. For Denyer and Ramsay, the key to making politics more inclusive is to create a safe space in the Green Party. “There are some local parties that are really warm, welcoming, inclusive spaces. But we know that unfortunately, that's not currently the case everywhere,” Denyer says. In practical terms, the pair hope to “raise issues that the other parties just aren’t interested in, or don’t have the courage to say out loud”.
Omond and Womack take things a step further. Their recently published liberation manifesto declares that “racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, queerphobia, transphobia, sexism, ableism, classism, ageism and other human rights issues will divide us not when we take a stand against them, but when we don’t.”
They propose to transform the Green Party by establishing a “liberation panel”, comprised of representatives from marginalised groups, to advise the leadership. It will develop an education programme, to challenge ingrained cultures within the party, and tackle hate speech by strengthening accountability processes.
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