Of all the contradictory ideas in the Green Party’s manifesto, I love their plan to raise the age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 14, while at the same time lowering the voting age to 16. So in just two years someone could go from not understanding the basic difference between right and wrong, to being able to decide who runs the country and sets its macroeconomic policy. That’s a steep learning curve to say the least.
As I wrote before, the Green Party is an organisation living with extreme cognitive dissonance. They support secularism, environmentalism and population control policies, yet also open borders and pacifism, even though this would vastly increase our population (and since emigration has also been shown to increase a country’s fertility rate, the world population) and lead to far more extremely religious people entering the country. All this would be fine if everyone on earth was a Green, a secular pacifist with one child, but Greens are a minority within a minority within a minority, the very W.E.I.R.Dest of the W.E.I.R.D. Have you noticed that Green Party activists aren’t that, ahem, diverse? The Green manifesto is full of such contradictions. So while they are very keen to take domestic violence seriously, since female victims of male abuse are undisputed victims, they also want to scale down prison and create the ‘presumption against the imprisonment of young offenders’. Wouldn’t one way to drastically reduce domestic violence be to imprison violent men? No, because young offenders come from the victim class and running like Brighton rock through the Green manifesto is a desire to help perceived victims. The Greens are a great example of Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundation theory, all their moral energies being focussed on the care principle. That is possibly why the Greens are disproportionately female, and why their manifesto contains a long litany of groups they feel are vulnerable. For example, their mental health section promises to ‘pay special attention to any mental health issues of mothers during and after pregnancy, children and adolescents, Black and Minority Ethnic people, refugees, the LGBTIQ communities and ex-service people and their families.’ Anyone else? Likewise, although they wish to abolish all grammar, private and religious schools, in order to create a selection-free system (never mind that even the Soviet Union failed to eradicate educational inequality), they say we must ensure that ‘all schools that serve particular vulnerable communities, [their italics] for example the Jewish, Sikh or Muslim communities, are adequately protected from sectarian attacks’. Although they are fairly anti-religion, of all the party manifestos the Greens’ looks least like a policy document and most like a brochure for a religious course. ‘It’s hard to be a citizen when life tells you that you are a consumer,’ it announces, ‘it’s hard to think of others when we are pitted against one another and sold the lie that individuals are to blame for their misfortunes’. It could come straight from one of those leaflets we see the nice, well-dressed Caribbean ladies handing out by Underground stations, promising us the answers to all those questions we’ve been asking about the meaning of life. This is not a coincidence, because unlike more mainstream parties, the Greens do offer a sort of vision of paradise on earth, the manifesto asking us to ‘Imagine a world of efficient and welcoming public services, coordinated action on climate change, equality, workers’ rights, an economy that works for people and planet at a human scale, restorative justice, and real care for the future.’ Good luck with that. Human beings are by nature not rational – a small number pass the standard tests of rationality but only something in the region of 10 per cent – which is why the new atheist argument that without religion we would behave rationally was itself so irrational. All that happens when cultivated and philosophical religion declines is that dafter religions take its place or people start to look for justice and paradise in this world through politics – an impossible goal. The Greens represent a post-religious belief system for secular W.E.I.R.D people who are at the lower end of the rationality scale. It’s no coincidence that the Greens are by some way the least Christian of all the parties, with 0 per cent of candidates in a recent poll in Suffolk professing Christianity, compared to an average of 60 per cent for all candidates. Thanks to St Augustine, Christianity accepts that people are by nature sinful and so a world of ‘security of all’ in which western liberal nations can throw away their nuclear weapons is absurd; irrational, post-Christian people instead start to believe in the inherent goodness of man, which is why in the Green mindset all social problems are due not to people’s own behaviour but to ‘inequality’. The only solution, as they set out, is to have massive levels of government interference into every sphere of our lives in order to achieve equality. And, as Edmund Blackadder might have put it, that this goal has eluded the most intelligent people since the dawn of time doesn’t dampen their spirits.
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