UK Green Party MP elected

China Post editorial:

Small parties — important, irrelevant or dangerous?

As The China Post went to press last night, the United Kingdom was still without a new government, despite polls closing last Thursday evening. Normally the new prime minister would visit the queen the following morning to get her assent, and then begin his new term of office, which can last for up to five years.

For the first time in almost half a century, however, Britain's first-past-the-post electoral system, which tends to give exaggerated power to the two main parties, has produced a hung parliament. With the third-largest party, the Liberal Democrats, holding the balance of power and demanding electoral reform so that its habitual 20-25 percent of the vote is never again translated into less than 10 percent of legislators, negotiations are still taking place.

One result that is clear, however, is that after decades of trying, the Green Party has its first member of the national parliament, Caroline Lucas, who was elected in Brighton. Without having improved its share of support, which remained consistent at about 1 percent, the party has perhaps come of age through its adoption of some of the strategies of its more established competitors. For example, it focused a disproportionate amount of party resources on its two most winnable seats, Brighton and Norwich. Furthermore, having eschewed the concept of party leader for ideological reasons throughout most of its history, it recently adopted such a figurehead, with Lucas being elected to the post.

Perhaps it was the growing specter of climate change that provided the final nudge to persuade voters of the Green Party's relevance.

But although the Green Party might sound nice, middle-class and cuddly, behind its voter-friendly name it has a radical agenda by no means limited to environmental protection, preventing climate change, or even opposing nuclear power stations.

The party's mission statement begins: “Life on Earth is under immense pressure. It is human activity, more than anything else, which is threatening the well-being of the environment on which we depend. Conventional politics has failed us because its values are fundamentally flawed.”

From this plausible beginning, the Green Party of England and Wales is led down an increasingly left-wing path. Encouraging more sustainable transportation not only means advocacy of buses and trains, but is also translated into re-nationalization of the train network and punitive taxes on fuel.

Without using the word socialism, the Greens also campaign for increased levels of income tax on richer people, increased corporation tax on big businesses, and “eco taxes” on polluters. They seek to reduce drug companies' influence on Britain's health service, and community self-reliance to treat and prevent a growing mental health crisis they claim is caused by the market-driven culture.

Greens see economic growth and mass consumption of the capitalist lifestyle as incompatible with the planet's finite resources, and so promote a sustainable economy.

The only sense in which the Green Party is “republican” is in seeking an end to the constitutional role of the British monarchy.

Given these left-wing standpoints of the UK and other green parties, it is ironic that their most influential moment was probably in helping George W. Bush into office in 2000. U.S. Green Party candidate Ralph Nader received 2.74 percent of the popular vote, almost 3 million in total, making the party third-largest nationwide. But it was in Florida, where Bush defeated Al Gore by just 537 votes, that the almost 100,000 votes cast for Nader led many supporters to accuse the Green Party of spoiling the election for the Democratic Party. A decade on, there is still much bad blood between the two sides.

But what, if anything, has all of this to do with Taiwan? Not much perhaps. Taiwan's Green Party is minute, even by comparison with the UK's, and musters only handfuls of supporters to its events.

More importantly, Taiwanese political parties have surely learned the danger of third-party politics. The KMT learned the hardest way, with incumbent Huang Ta-chou losing the 1994 Taipei City mayoral election to the Democratic Progressive Party's Chen Shui-bian, when what is now called the pan-Blue vote was split by Chao Shao-kong of the New Party. This was followed in the 2000 presidential election with James Soong, who left the KMT to stand as an independent, spoiling the election for the KMT's Lien Chan, once again allowing Chen to slip in the back door with less than 40 percent of the total vote.

Now it is the opposition DPP that is in danger of learning this lesson through defeat, as it tries to maintain discipline in its own ranks in advance of the yearend elections.

So while neither the UK nor Taiwan Green Party has anything like enough influence to cause an electoral upset, the issues of democracy, hung parliaments and third-party politics should not be ignored by our political combatants.