You might have missed the news that this weekend is the Green Party’s spring conference. They appear to have been saving paper by not getting any publicity for it, but an interview with their leader, Natalie Bennett, has somehow evaded the waste monitors and made its way into the Evening Standard.
It’s an extremely soft, unchallenging piece but still serves as a handy reminder of quite how nannying and bossy the Greens are.
Here are just a few of the policies she lays out:
- Ban drivers from keeping their engines running while stationary. Just in case the police don’t have enough to do already, they will now clamp down on the evils of popping into a shop, pulling over to check a map or collecting passengers at a taxi rank.
- Increase taxes on air travel to make European city breaks unaffordable. Evidently Britain implementing the highest rates of aviation tax in the world have failed to achieve the desired aim – namely, preventing people from going on holiday. One of the greatest expansions of opportunity in British history is the way international travel has opened up to people on average and low incomes. The Greens want to take it away.
- Higher council tax. Bennett applies a hefty layer of gloss to the extra burden on Brighton and Hove’s residents, blithely assuming they will be willing to pay “60p a week”. She, and the interviewer, conveniently neglect to mention that the people of B&H are already furious as the Green administration has cast the council into chaos, with rubbish piling up in the streets while councillors fight each other.
- Tolls for driving at rush hour. Because people driving to work are obviously doing so just for kicks.
Higher taxes, more meddling, less fun, all garnished with a hefty dollop of judgemental snobbery.
It’s an interesting demonstration of why the Greens have been so electorally unsuccessful – and why their movement prefers to push their policies through via undemocratic means rather than at the ballot box.