This is a guest post by Jacob Campbell, a Research Fellow at the Institute for Middle Eastern Democracy (IMED)
Ask anyone to name an extremist British political party, and they’ll most likely say the BNP. Depending on whom you ask, you might also receive answers of the Tories (“homophobes”) or my party, UKIP (“closet racists”). But what about the Green Party? Surely not! They’re lovely.
Or are they?
Here’s Lisa Camps, Campaigns Officer for the Young Greens, shilling for Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez at the University of York:
When I took Ms Camps to task over her support for a man who has spent the last thirteen years running roughshod over Venezuela’s democratic institutions and sponsoring narco-terrorists in neighbouring Colombia, she responded with the following tweet:
“Democratically elected” my foot! According to Freedom House’s unequivocal assessment, “Venezuela is not an electoral democracy.” Nor is there anything remotely democratic about Chávez’s re-election strategy, which comprises a nefarious combination of fear and fraud.
Having outed a senior member of the Green Party’s youth wing as an apologist for authoritarian regimes, I asked rhetorically why such a person could publicly express such repugnant views without expecting to be sacked from her position as Campaigns Officer.
The answer is obvious. It’s because the Green Party agrees with her.
In 2006, for example, Green MEP Jean Lambert shared a platform with Chávez himself, heaping praise on the dictator “for the changes and achievements he has made in Venezuela over the last few years.”
Which “changes” might they be, I wonder?
Former Green Party Principal Speaker (2006-08) Derek Wall, speaking in 2010, provides us with a clue:
“I think you have to take state power and change the state. That’s the lesson we learnt from Hugo Chávez and Morales. There has got to come a point where you have things on a party political level and you take power. This may not be realistic everywhere but you have to do that and then change the structures. I think what has been very impressive is the way that the social movements have been able to create constituent assemblies and new forms of democracy.”
“Take state power and change the state… Change the structures… New forms of democracy…” Incoherent though Mr Wall’s words are, any ambiguity as to their meaning is dispelled by his upholding of Chávez as an exemplar.
Does this mean that if – God forbid – the Greens ever came to power in the UK, they would immediately set about undermining British democracy in a devious bid to consolidate their own hegemony, a la Chávez? We ought to be thankful that we will never have to find out.
What is more, the Green Party’s extremism goes beyond its admiration for Latin American autocrats.
In keeping with their party’s presumably Chávez-inspired contempt for freedom of the press, Green London Assembly member Jenny Jones and Green MEP Jean Lambert were both signatories to a recent letter, published in the Guardian (and co-signed by representatives of such pro-Hamas outfits as MEMO and the Islamic Forum of Europe), demanding “an alternative [Leveson] inquiry” into “reporting on Muslims and Islam in the British media” in order to “improve ethical standards” in relation to such coverage.
Establishing a panel of government appointees to summon and interrogate journalists for their suspected political agendas…?
They could call it the House Un-PC Activities Committee.
I’m sure that readers of Harry’s Place are no strangers to being labelled extremists by politically correct types. So next time a sandal-wearing Green activist flings that accusation your way, go ahead and fling it right back at them.
