Green party

The Green Party’s fundraising ball was set to be an event to rival the Tory Black and White ball. Tickets to the lavish bash, which included a champagne reception, started at £500 with tables going for up to £15,000. However, after news of the planned fundraiser broke on Friday, party members complained that the the ball was at odds with the Green party’s policy to redistribute wealth. Now, Mr S hears that the event has been cancelled as a result of the public backlash. ‘After feedback from our membership, supporters and donors, the Green Party Executive decided not proceed with this event,’ a party spokesman tells Steerpike. Green donors now have the chance to

If general elections were won on how swanky a campaign office is, the Greens would beat the Lib Dems hands down in Bristol West. Their candidate Darren Hall works out of a smart, airy office overlooking the harbour in one of the most expensive commercial parts of the city. It’s all thanks to Vivienne Westwood, who has funded the office as part of her support for the Greens, and given Hall was until recently keeping most of his campaign materials in a garage, it’s quite a step up. Indeed, it puts him in far more glamorous quarters than the Lib Dems, who are working in a garage, albeit a converted

Natalie Bennett needed to give a good solid speech to the Green Party conference after a difficult few weeks, and she managed that today. The Green leader hadn’t undergone a personality transplant though, so she still wasn’t the most stirring speaker ever. listen to ‘Natalie Bennett speaking at the Green Party Conference’ on audioBoom

It’s been an inauspicious start to the Green Party’s election campaign. Natalie Bennett has given two radio interviews this morning where she produced rather poor answers regarding her party’s policies. On the Today programme, Bennett said Britain’s foreign policy should be centred around appeasing Russia: ‘What we need to do is put diplomatic pressure on Russia, put economic pressure on Russia, but we also have to understand that if we’re negotiating with Russia, it’s really important not to take what you might call the Versailles approach, to understand that President Putin has to walk away with something – things that we might not necessarily like. So we have to stand up for international law, for human rights,

Socialism fever is spreading. This time last year, Ed Miliband looked to be on course for 10 Downing St for the simple reason that the right in Britain had been split (by Ukip) while the left stood united for the first time since 1983. Lefty LibDems had returned to Labour and it seemed that Miliband was the bad leader of a massive block of votes. Now, things have changed. The left is unravelling too: Labour is losing votes to the SNP in the north and the Greens in the south. That’s why the Greens’ recruitment of a top trade union official is significant. Peter Pinkney, president of the RMT union, says he’s joining

Natalie Bennett has just been taking questions as part of the Sky leaders’ debates for younger voters, and delivered the second Green U-turn of the day, this time on terrorism. After struggling on the Sunday Politics to explain why her party thinks that membership of a terrorist group alone should not be a crime, the Green leader decided to say that actually, her party thought that it was: ‘Obviously [Islamic State] and al-Qaeda are hideous terrorist organisations that advocate and support violence. If you are involved in them, support them in any way, then you are participating in inciting violence, that’s a crime, rightly, and should be pursued to the

The Green party has been likened to a watermelon: green on the outside and red on the inside. But that is to do a huge injustice to generations of socialists and communists. Misguided though they were in many of their ideas, nobody could accuse them of actively seeking to make society poorer. That, however, is the unashamed aspiration of Natalie Bennett and what has become the fastest-growing political party in Britain. It is quite possible that a good proportion of the 9 per cent of the electorate who say they are planning to vote Green in May are unaware of this, but it is there in black and white (‘policy

Nigel Farage’s secret is out. In an interview with the Mail on Sunday, the leader of Ukip let slip that he once voted for the Green Party. ‘I voted Green in 1989 in the European elections,’ Farage admits. While he fails to give any further explanation of why he supported a party that appears to be at loggerheads with his own views, Farage does go on to reveal the most insulting names he has been called. ‘I was called a football hooligan once in public and I didn’t like that. I am many things but a hooligan I am not. I have been called everything this year, absolutely everything, racist, xenophobe – there’s

Do the Green Party’s policies stack up? Although its membership and prominence have rocketed in recent weeks, little focus has been put on what the party campaigns for. Green leader Natalie Bennett was subjected to a dissection of her party’s principles on the Sunday Politics today (watch above) and demonstrated why most of its proposals are pipe dreams. Bennett said her party wants to ensure ‘nobody is living in fear’ but exactly how they would pay for that remains unanswered. One of its policies would be a ‘Citizens’ Income’, ensuring everyone has a minimum weekly income of £72. This would cost up to £280 billion and Bennett said it would be funded in part by abolishing Jobseeker’s

An email arrives from the excellent Zoe Williams, Guardian columnist and leftyagitfem middle-class propagandist. It requests that I should sign a round-robin petition to ensure that the Green Party is included in these proposed TV general election debates – much as David Cameron has, rather disingenuously, demanded. I couldn’t sign the petition. I can’t think of a reason why the Greens should be excluded from the debates if, say, Ukip is to be there as well. The Greens’ current opinion poll standings put them level with the hapless Lib Dems. They have an MP. They should probably be in there, somewhere – even if they lose their sole MP come May,

‘The Green Surge’ has already become a fixed feature of the election campaign, but are we just reliving the giant damp squib of ‘Cleggmania’? According to Green Party officials, their membership stands at 45,558. Since Cameron declared they should be in the TV debates, thousands have supposedly signed on the dotted line. Apparently, of the 14,780 new members that have signed up since 1 Jan 2015, just 151 are renewals. But there has been zero independent verification of the numbers; they are asking us to take their word for it. A spokesman tells Steerpike that the party was not prepared for the influx of new members: ‘Our servers did become overwhelmed for

I was about to shut down my computer last night when I made the mistake of clicking on an article about the Green Party’s manifesto, possibility the scariest thing since Victor from The Returned. Say what you like about the Greens, a party with support now at 11 per cent, but at least they’re not just the same as any other party. None of that ‘neoliberal’ nonsense here. Here are some excerpts from the Daily Telegraph article:   Top-ups [will be] given for people with children or disabilities, or to pay rent and mortgages. No-one will see a reduction in benefits, and most will see a substantial increase. Parents will be entitled to

After overtaking Ukip in membership stakes, the Greens are now snapping at its heels in the polls. According to Lord Ashcroft’s latest poll, 11 per cent are now intending to vote Green — up from eight per cent last week. As the chart above shows, this puts them four points behind Ukip. The party has come a long way since the last election, where they gained just 0.9 per cent of the vote. As Natalie Bennett acknowledged this morning, the Green Party is getting more help from David Cameron than it ever imagined. The natural assumption is that the Green vote is primarily coming from Labour — but its vote has remained steady from last week’s poll.