THE local elections are a big opportunity for the Greens, but will they ditch the wacky policies and oddball behaviour that kept them on the fringes before, like this?
Banging on about vegetarianism
The Greens are very keen on reducing meat and dairy consumption, but British consumers have pretty firmly decided they’re going to keep munching on animals. It’s like having a vegetarian friend whose ethical choices you respect, but Jesus, that casserole could have done with some meat in it.
The conspiracy nutters
The anti-establishment Greens have always appealed to ‘free-thinkers’, ie. loons. A purge might be in order, as it’s hard to look like a credible party with chemtrail idiots claiming airlines are making the population sterile with secret toxins. Which they can’t be, because Ryanair would charge you for it.
Excessive liberalism
Zack Polanski retweeted a post criticising the police for kicking the Golders Green attacker in the head when he was already tasered. You don’t have to be an enthusiastic supporter of police brutality to feel that this is just the sort of thing that happens during an extremely violent incident, and it wasn’t the best time to prove your super-liberal credentials.
Fairly irrational anti-nuclear power policy
Renewables are good but electricity is extremely hard to store on a vast scale, so relatively non-polluting nuclear power may be a least-bad option. The Greens can’t let go of their anti-nuclear obsession, though, and fall back on bollocks arguments like nuclear power stations taking too long to build. Even if you only did one at a time, we could still have built three in the time it took to not build HS2.
Fairly irrational anti-nuclear weapons policy
Right now it seems to makes sense for nations to have nukes to deter the likes of Putin and Trump, unlike when we were just adding to the insane mutually assured destruction stockpile of the Cold War. Also if we go totally nuke-free it would ruin post-apocalyptic sci-fi. The Fallout franchise would be extremely tedious if the wasteland was just full of un-mutated humans rebuilding after a conventional war.
Handing ammunition to the Daily Mail
The Greens can’t resist being gratuitously radical. Britain, for example, clearly has big problems with the rental sector. The Greens’ solution? ‘Abolish landlords’. This just sounds odd, given that humans have been renting living space for most of history. And the Daily Mail can make it sound as if your decent-enough landlord Steve will be shot for the crime of fixing your shower.
Sandals
Some Greenies still wear sandals, which is unacceptable in a civilised society with aesthetic standards. Instant expulsion from the party is the only solution, and it’s hard to believe trendy Zack Polanski won’t be secretly glad to see all the beardo the weirdos go.
