Real Leadership?

With ballot papers for the referendum on whether the Green Party should have a Leader arriving today, I have decided to write one final post on Leadership in the Green Party.

Leadership can take many forms: inspiration, empowerment and support on the one hand; control and dictatorship on the other. I strongly believe that when an individual is elected to become leader, the environment will favor the control and dictatorship side of the spectrum. This is not because I believe people are essentially evil but because we expect leaders to take the lead, to control things. If we keep a leadership structure which the Green Party has at the moment, of collective leadership, it is much harder to corrupt. Our current structures help empower all members of the party to get involved and participate in our decisions. At meetings, everyone can speak and is treated equally. There is no ‘leader’ who is revered above all others. I also have to ask whether it will stop at just a leader: will we instead develop an entire hierarchy with members who haven’t climbed up a greasy pole sidelined and ignored?

Even if the new Leader were to try to avoid being dictatorial, the media would expect them to come up with policy statements ‘off the cuff’:they will be forced to show leadership at its worst… by making decisions for the entire group of people who make up the Green Party which the party would then find difficult to overrule later through any accountability structures.

In which case, we will be just another political party with little new to add to the structures that dominate our society today. Models based on Leaders have failed to tackle social ills: it is about time the world tried the alternative. Is the Green Party brave enough to continue to push for this?

It is for these reason and others, including those outline here, here, here, here and here, that I support the Green Empowerment campaign and strongly believe that the referendum should have a ‘NO’ vote.

NHS! (again)

NHS demo yesterday was a success with a good number of people from the Greens there. Well done to all those who helped with the Green Party placards: they were out in force on the day! Wish I could have helped with them too!

The following motion in support of the demonstration and against private involvement in the NHS was passed at the Green Left meeting on Saturday last week. I am not sure if it has been publicised since (having been somewhat out of the loop with e-mails, aside from during procrastination time, due to a heavy week on the wards trying to finish off my A&E module! – also the reason I haven’t blogged for a while):

“Green Left notes the attempts at increasing private involvement in the national health service. Recognizing that healthcare commissioning is to be tendered to private companies (including some with a bad reputation in the USA) and that implementation of the Darzi plan for polyclinics will probably involve some private sector companies, we affirm that this is against the public service ethos central to an ecosocialist future.

We strongly encourage involvement and support of the Keep Our NHS Public demonstration on Saturday November 3rd 2007.”

Anyway, best get back to work… Have a dissertation to write and wouldn’t mind getting a bit further on the new edition of Joel Kovel’s book.