I’m all about fairness, me, so having written a blog outlining some of the reasons that my sympathy with labour doesn’t translate to support for Labour, it seems only polite to outline why I ain’t exactly a big fan of the Tories either. To keep it ideologically-focused, I’ll try to put my personal experiences to one side, like growing up in the 80s and 90s as the child of a single mother who worked as a nurse in the NHS and lived five minutes walk away from a coal mine. We’ll even ignore my family’s low socio-economic status, especially in my grandparents’ generation.

In the words of Spaced, we’ll skip to the end. All this greenwashing of the same old blue policies that David Cameron’s spearheading really gets my goat. Someone I work with at Community, a long-term Labour Party member, threw away his copy of the Independent On Sunday the weekend before last because it had DC doing a column on the environment.

In my post about the Labour Party, I explained how I wasn’t exactly keen on business’ influence over policy. That goes double for the Conservatives (and, yeah, for the Lib Dems too), and let’s not forget it. My issue with the boys in blue is not that their honourable history is sullied by the acts of recent decades; no, my problem is that the “nasty party” have got it wrong right from the start.

The thing about environmental politics, much like the planet itself, is that they kind feed into everything else. It is literally impossible – a spectacular feat of psychological gymnastics – to believe both in ecological wisdom and the free market. The free market cannot exist in a world with finite resources. The free market is driven by greed, and we’re not renowned as a species for considering ourselves and the world around us; if we were, we wouldn’t be in the situation we’re in now.

While all three major political parties have an ideological fondness for the free market, the Tories (and, in fairness, the old-school Liberals) are the ones who really pioneered it and pushed for it. They’re the archetypal capitalists that got Marx quite so agitated, and whose thirst for profit has devastated the environment the world over, while simultaneously crushing ordinary people like you and me underfoot.

Moreover, the Tories are not environmental activists. They are, at best, conservationists and, at worst, bandwagon-jumpers and political opportunists. A friend of a friend deeply distrusts all Greens, automatically equating us with those lovable old National Socialists from 1930s Germany and eco-fascism more generally. Basically, as he sees it, it’s that whole “reverence for the land” thing. While I’m certainly not going to say that the Tories are pitching themselves anywhere even close to eco-fascists, that sort of approach is more typical of conservationism than of environmentalism.

The difference is simple, I guess; the same old positive/normative divide, of what is or what should be, of defending the past or creating the future. Conservationism, in this sense, is all stately homes and drystone walls and rare species. Don’t get me wrong, those things (especially the rare species) are really important and worthy of our time and it’s neat that the Tories are on board with it. It’s just that, as a political standpoint, they’re a long way from ecological wisdom. It’s all a bit like locking the stable door after the horse has bolted – when it’s bolted because you chased the damn thing outside.

In contrast, Green environmental politics are further reaching, and better for it. It’s not just about preserving the world of the past (or, rather, some bizarre romanticised fantasy vision of the past where knights on white horses saved girls in white dresses, and wild boar roamed free in the primeval forest), but about saying what the future should be like – gentler, more compassionate, more sensible. It’s about changes to our way of life to ensure that everyone can continue to have a happy, healthy and full existence – not just in the Western world, but globally.

And that, of course, is the other big reason I’ll never vote Tory, much less join the Party. Green politics -- my politics – are about so much more than the environment; they’re a holistic vision for education (local, inclusive, well-funded, supportive, free), economics (an end to the poverty trap), employment (workers’ rights, Trade Union freedom, more flexible ways of working), edibles (locally- and, where possible, organically-grown healthy produce for all) and a whole range of other policy areas that begin with different letters of the alphabet.

People sometimes accuse the Greens of putting the planet before people – I guess an unsophisticated attempt to paint us as those eco-fascists I mentioned earlier. The truth of the matter is that we don’t make the distinction between people and planet; we all need somewhere to live, and our standard of living is directly contingent on the state of the planet. Similarly, our ability to care for the planet is entirely dependent on our being able to elevate our thinking beyond subsistence and welfare in the here-and-now – straightforward Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs stuff. And the Earth isn’t anyone’s property; it’s held in common by, well, everyone.

That’s why Green politics are about social and economic justice, peace and democratic participation just as much (if not more) as about ecology, and that’s why I’ve found my proper home in the Greens, rather than the Tories or the Labour Party.

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