The Green Party We Actually Need

Britain's Green Party still owns the name. It has lost the meaning of green.

I say that with disappointment rather than detachment. In 2001, I stood for the Green Party in Hammersmith and Fulham. I believed then, as I do now, that the living world is not one political interest among many. It is the foundation of the economy and society. The party that once gave that conviction a political home has lost its way.

Its recent conference declared nature to be critical national infrastructure, called for stronger food, water and energy security, and proposed returning water services to public ownership. These are serious subjects, and they point towards a truth that conventional politics still struggles to absorb.

Every financial asset is ultimately a claim upon future productive capacity. However elaborate the instrument or distant the transaction, its value eventually depends upon people, energy, materials, institutions and living systems continuing to produce. A country that consumes those foundations while multiplying claims upon them is not becoming wealthier. It is liquidating the assets and preserving the paperwork.

Yet the same conference became defined by a resolution declaring Zionism a form of racism and supporting a single state across historic Palestine. Four of the party's five MPs opposed it. Its leader, Zack Polanski, missed the vote, subsequently defended the motion's broad diagnosis and said that no state has an inherent right to exist, while dismissing the two-state solution as "for the birds". These are matters a British environmental party may debate, but cannot responsibly reduce to a slogan or prescribe on behalf of Israelis and Palestinians. The argument consumed the headlines, divided the party and eclipsed the condition of the natural systems from which its name derives.

Zionism is not one proposition but a diverse and contested political tradition encompassing secular, religious, socialist, liberal, nationalist and expansionist forms. The Green Party's reductionism does not clarify. It turns a complex history into a convenient instrument for a politics increasingly untethered from its environmental purpose. It is quite possible to condemn the conduct of an Israeli government, the expansion of settlements and the immense suffering of Palestinians without treating Jewish national self-determination as uniquely illegitimate.

This was more than a distraction. It revealed the party's governing instinct. Environmental stewardship has become subordinate to a politics of moral display: adopt the approved position, identify the guilty party and make the strongest available declaration. The statement becomes the achievement.

Green politics cannot be indifferent to justice. Environmental damage is rarely distributed equally. Access to clean water, healthy places, affordable energy, food and nature belongs at its centre. Those without wealth or political influence are often the first to suffer when rivers are poisoned, air becomes dangerous or common assets are enclosed. That is not mission-creep. It follows directly from environmental reality.

But universal concern is different from selective ideological affiliation. Gaza is a legitimate subject for British politics. Turning it into a test of belonging, while prescribing the constitutional future of Israelis and Palestinians, is something else. A green party should illuminate the material foundations of injustice, not allow a distant conflict to consume the attention required to rebuild them.

The party's environmental programme survives, but it no longer disciplines its politics. Around it has grown a conventional hard-left method: identify an injustice, locate an owner or wealthy interest, tax, regulate or nationalise it, borrow and spend more, and assume that productive capacity will follow.

Sometimes taxation is necessary. Some monopolies should be publicly owned. Government must borrow and invest where markets cannot create the required capacity. But these are financial and institutional choices, not environmental outcomes. Public ownership does not replenish an aquifer. A larger budget does not create an engineer, restore a wetland or guarantee that a transmission line will be built. Declaring nature important does not establish its condition, the claims being placed upon it or the investment required to leave it stronger.

The Green Party's problem is not that it has become too environmental. It is that it is no longer environmental enough.

Green is not an economic system

For half a century, green politics has assembled an increasingly familiar collection of preferences: more renewable energy, cleaner rivers, lower emissions, greater public ownership, less consumption, stronger regulation, more spending on nature and fewer environmentally damaging activities.

Many of these preferences are defensible. Together, however, they do not constitute an operating system for a country. They do not tell us how to reconcile food production with habitat recovery, housing with water capacity, renewable infrastructure with landscapes, fishing with marine restoration, or cheap energy with the investment required to produce it reliably. They say remarkably little about the institutions, knowledge, skills and finance needed to deliver the desired result.

The absence becomes most obvious when ownership is presented as the solution. Britain's water companies may need to return to public control, but changing the shareholder does not repair a pipe, create storage, rebuild regulatory capability or restore a catchment. Nationalisation transfers responsibility for answering those questions. It does not answer them.

The same mistake appears in public spending. A government can spend billions treating ill health, repairing flood damage, importing energy or compensating for crop failure. That expenditure supports activity and may be unavoidable, but it does not follow that the country has become more capable. The money may be managing the consequences of deterioration rather than rebuilding the foundations whose failure caused them.

Green politics has also struggled to describe prosperity without embarrassment. Growth is treated either as an overriding objective or an ecological offence. Both positions confuse the financial measure with the physical reality. An economy can grow by extracting more from weakening foundations, and it can become more capable by producing better health, knowledge, energy, infrastructure and ecological resilience. The important question is not whether a number called GDP rose. It is what changed underneath it and what position remains.

A credible green politics must therefore become economically serious. Not by surrendering nature to conventional economics, but by completing the economic account.

Call it the Living Economy

The word green has become a tribal label. It describes a cultural affiliation as readily as an ecological proposition, carrying assumptions about class, identity, capitalism, consumption and foreign policy that have little necessary connection to the condition of the living world.

A Living Economy begins with a simple recognition: the economy is not a financial machine operating beside nature. It is a human system operating inside a living one. Its productive capacity arises from land, water, energy, organisms, people, knowledge, relationships, institutions and infrastructure. Finance connects claims upon that capacity through time, but it cannot replace the capacity itself.

This is not an argument against markets, profit or growth. Markets are extraordinary mechanisms for coordinating dispersed knowledge. Profit can reveal useful combinations of resources. Private ownership and competition allow people to experiment without awaiting permission from the centre. Economic growth can represent genuine improvements in capability and human life.

But markets work only as well as the signals, rights and boundaries within which they operate. A company permitted to pollute a river without recognising the liability is not demonstrating the efficiency of private enterprise. It is benefiting from an incomplete property right and an incomplete price. A financial return generated by consuming an unrecorded public asset is not wholly a return. Part of it is a liability transferred elsewhere.

The Living Economy would therefore be liberal in its trust of people and enterprise, but exacting about the foundations on which freedom depends. It would be strong where common assets, public goods, enforceable boundaries and monopoly infrastructure require collective authority, and restrained where individuals, communities and markets possess the knowledge and incentive to decide for themselves.

A country with accounts

The distinction becomes practical through accounting. Britain possesses detailed accounts of government income, expenditure, borrowing and debt. Companies report revenue, costs, assets, liabilities and profit. These accounts are indispensable, but they describe only a fraction of the productive system.

They tell us how much money moved. They do not tell us, with comparable discipline, whether people became healthier or more capable; whether soils, rivers and fisheries strengthened; whether infrastructure was maintained; whether institutions retained public trust; or whether knowledge was converted into useful capacity. A country can consume these foundations while reporting income, then spend heavily repairing the resulting failures while reporting further activity.

A Living Economy would place a national Position Statement alongside the financial accounts. It would establish the opening condition of six connected forms of capital: Natural, Human, Social, Intellectual, Manufactured and Financial. It would record the movements that strengthened or weakened them and show the closing position inherited by the next period and the next generation.

Policy could then be tested against a more demanding account. What existed before the intervention? Which asset or liability changed? Was expenditure current consumption, capital maintenance, remediation of previous failure or genuine investment? Who received the benefit, who carried the risk and which costs were transferred outside the decision? Did the country become more capable, or did it preserve apparent income by liquidating part of its inheritance?

Physical condition and capacity must come first. A wetland, workforce or institution cannot be understood through a single monetary number. Valuation nevertheless has an important role in connecting changes in the real position to investment, price, risk and allocation. Measurement is not ownership, and valuation is not permission to consume. An account makes consequences visible before they become emergencies.

Government budgets could then distinguish productive investment from political activity. Borrowing that creates resilient energy, useful housing, healthier people, knowledge or functioning infrastructure remains a liability, but it leaves something capable of supporting repayment. Borrowing used to sustain consumption or repeatedly remediate avoidable failure leaves a very different national position. The present fiscal debate treats both principally as debt. A Living Economy would account for what the debt built.

The foundations become the programme

Once the country's position is visible, policy stops appearing as a list of disconnected promises. The account reveals which foundations are weakening, where liabilities are accumulating and where investment can create lasting capacity. Land, sea, energy, people, intelligence, infrastructure and finance then become linked missions within one productive system.

Land is not merely an asset class or a surface awaiting development. It produces food, receives rainfall, stores carbon, supports biodiversity, captures energy and provides the space in which people live and move. A serious land policy would begin by asking what the country needs its finite territory to produce, protect and absorb. Housing, farming, water, nature and energy would be treated as interacting claims upon the same foundation rather than separate departments negotiating after the important decisions have already been made.

The sea is not the empty space surrounding Britain. It is a food system, transport network, energy resource, carbon store, source of biological intelligence, security perimeter and industrial frontier. Marine policy must move beyond alternating between extraction and protection. The question is how to maintain and increase the sea's productive capacity while allowing legitimate enterprise to develop within it. Fisheries, offshore energy, shipping, restoration, defence, biotechnology and coastal communities belong inside the same account.

Energy is the capacity to do work. A Living Economy would pursue abundant, resilient and progressively cleaner energy rather than presenting scarcity as virtue. It would judge technologies across their full systems: materials, land and sea use, intermittency, storage, networks, skills, security and cost. The objective is not to win a contest between preferred technologies. It is to create an energy foundation upon which households and enterprise can plan.

People are not units of labour or permanent clients of public services. Health, education, skills, housing and participation determine the freedom and capability of a population. National service could provide young people with structure, experience and a stake in the country while strengthening social care, ecosystems, infrastructure and national resilience. Its legitimacy would depend upon choice, useful work and real opportunity, not compulsory cheap labour for the state.

Intelligence includes science, engineering, culture, artificial intelligence and the functional knowledge accumulated through billions of years of living systems. Britain is adept at producing ideas and less reliable at turning them into durable productive capability. Universities, research institutions, businesses and public procurement should form a system through which knowledge becomes better health, technology, industry and public capacity.

Infrastructure connects all of these foundations. Water, housing, transport, communications and energy networks are long-lived productive assets, not annual political announcements. Their condition should be visible, their maintenance protected and the difference between money allocated and capacity delivered impossible to disguise.

Finance completes the circuit. Credit should bring future productive income into the present, not merely increase the price of existing assets. Pension savings should support long-duration capacity where risks and returns genuinely match. Public guarantees should be explicit and conditional. When finance claims a return from the future, the account should show what future capacity was created to support it.

Not left or right but underneath

The familiar political argument begins too late. The left asks how the proceeds should be distributed and which activities the state should control. The right asks how much should remain with individuals and markets. Both frequently assume that the productive foundations already exist and that financial accounts provide an adequate description of them.

The Living Economy starts underneath that argument. It asks what makes either public provision or private prosperity possible, whether those foundations are strengthening, and which institution is best placed to act.

This will sometimes produce answers associated with the left. Common resources require protection. Natural monopolies require public control or strict regulation. Every person requires access to essential water, health, education and justice. Those who impose costs upon others should meet the corresponding obligation.

At other times it will produce answers associated with the liberal right. Central government cannot possess the knowledge required to direct every useful decision. Enterprise, property, competition and voluntary exchange are powerful generators of adaptation and discovery. Regulation should establish clear boundaries and liabilities rather than prescribe every action. Government should stop performing functions that individuals, communities and markets can perform better themselves.

This is not centrism assembled by averaging two exhausted positions. It is a different organising principle: protect and rebuild the common foundations, make the signals honest, then trust people to act.

The political home that does not yet exist

There are millions of people who care deeply about the living world but do not hate enterprise. They value markets without believing financial markets measure everything. They want capable government without wanting government to run their lives. They support human rights but recoil from turning distant suffering into a contest of ideological affiliation. They believe a country should invest in its people and common assets while remaining honest about costs, limits and responsibility.

They have no natural political home.

That is not simply an absence to be lamented. It is a political opening.

The Green Party is now lost. Its environmental inheritance remains visible, but it is no longer a credible vehicle for the economically serious, politically liberal and ecologically grounded programme Britain needs. Labour and the Conservatives occasionally recognise parts of the problem, but remain trapped within financial accounts and short electoral cycles. The Liberal Democrats defend individual liberty but have yet to connect it convincingly to the natural and productive foundations that make liberty real.

Perhaps Britain does not immediately need another registered political party. New parties are easy to announce and exceptionally difficult to build. What it needs first is to define the Green Party it actually needs: the organising idea, the economic machinery and the accounts capable of distinguishing a programme from a collection of promises.

That idea is green, but not tribal; liberal, but not careless; economically serious, but not financially blinkered. It is strong enough to protect what belongs to everyone and restrained enough to leave people free to build.

Britain does not need another party competing to spend the proceeds of a deteriorating economy. It needs one capable of rebuilding the foundations from which prosperity, security and freedom arise.

Call it the Living Economy.

Strong foundations. Free people.

Sources and notes

- UK Parliament, 2001 General Election result for Hammersmith and Fulham

- Green Party, No national security without nature security

- Green Party, Creating a Fairer Greener Economy

- Green Party, Green Party adopts anti-Zionist policy

- Green Party, 2024 General Election Manifesto

- The Guardian, Green Party votes to adopt policy that equates Zionism with racism

- The Guardian, Zack Polanski on Zionism and the right of states to exist

- Route2, Change the Signal

- Route2, The Planet's Savings Account

This essay began as a line of enquiry developed through the work on Value2Society. ChatGPT was used as a thinking and editorial partner, testing the argument, challenging its edges and helping shape it for publication.