“No one in our bit of the village bothered to vote yesterday,” said our local villager as he walked his dog this morning. I asked him why not. “Photo ID. My neighbours don’t have any. Anyway, what’s the point? Nothing ever changes.” There’s not much to say about that, except that for Rishi Sunak, that’s job done because the needless introduction of Photo ID was designed with only one thing in mind: to stop certain groups of people voting, those being the people who might not vote Conservative. As it was, the only election we had here in South Gloucestershire was for the Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) whatever the fuck that is. All I know is that it pays over £88,000 a year so it must be important, right?
Whether Sunak’s vote suppression tactics had any effect on the results in the Bristol City Council elections is anyone’s business, but certainly the Greens got their vote out, with them becoming the largest single party. Look the other way, please, if you are a Green voter because, while I support some of the stuff they stand for – climate change is very real: fact – I am surprised that so many Bristolians do.
My feeling about the Greens is simple, simplistic, even. A group of affluent middle class luvvies who, by and large, live in the leafy well-off parts of the city. This is a bit of a generalisation, I know, because the Greens also made gains in what one of their number told me were ‘more working class areas’. But what have the people of Bristol voted for? It’s quite surprising really.
Put simply, it’s things like this:
- Congestion charging
- More car free areas
- Spending £200 million on more cycle lanes
- A Workplace Parking Levy (this means taxing people for parking at their workplace)
- Introducing a carbon tax
- Cancelling £27 billion pounds worth of national road building schemes
And so on.
To be fair, much of their manifesto is like a wish list. They aim for this, they push for that, the campaign for and against the other. I understand their concerns about the endless growth in Bristol’s traffic – I spent a fair bit of time last week sitting in gridlock – but I had no choice other than to drive because in Bristol, almost every bus leads to the centre of the city. If you want to go anywhere else, you are in the realms of changing buses two or three times, safe in the knowledge that many buses will be running late, if they turn up at all.
The outgoing Labour mayor, Marvin Rees, so useless that the people of Bristol voted to get rid of the mayoral post altogether, has already left a grim legacy where it’s harder and harder to drive anywhere. If the Greens have their way, Not very marvellous Marvin’s time in office will seem like the good old days.
So, what do we do? How about we start off by being honest? Our buses are run by a private company, First Bus (known as Worst Bus in Bristol). They exist to make a profit. They are not a public service so can hardly be described as public transport. You could only run a bigger service if it was a) council or state controlled and b) subsidised by way of tax or council tax, unless you bump up fares. Given that we are in the middle of a cost of living crisis, made in Downing Street, would people really be prepared to pay extra taxes in order to subsidise public transport? If the answer is yes, then fair enough, but let’s at least have a debate about it.
Mayor Rees had a barmy idea of building an underground line in Bristol. Okay, you want to build it, who pays? Maybe a light rail transport system, trams in other words? Well yes, but who is paying for it? Me? I think Bristol more than deserves a light rail system and I’d like central government to pay for it by borrowing if necessary. But is it going to happen? Really?
It seems to me that the outgoing mayor and now the Greens know what they don’t want, but not what they do. Tax motorists to death, make it increasingly difficult to drive anywhere and talk about aiming for, pushing for and campaigning for alternatives that are, in all likelihood, pipedreams.
You could say, “At least the Greens care about the environment and the planet we are destroying” but you’d just be telling part of the story. I want better, more affordable public transport, but without it nothing will happen.
Some of the Greens I know in Bristol are hard left Corbynista cranks, who could never accept the need to build the broad coalition of voters needed for Labour to win. Frankly, the Greens are welcome to them, they’re a fitting place for the politics of protest rather than the politics of government and actually changing people’s lives and making the country better. And, I repeat, they will be perfectly home with the middle class luvvies in the Green Party.
I guess it’s not really for me to criticise the choices of Bristol’s voters who have turned Green in increasing numbers. Indeed, I should respect their democratic decisions, but don’t come back whining when it becomes even more expensive and inconvenient to get around Bristol and having to pay to park in the works’ car park. That’s literally what voting Green is for. And it does matter who you vote for. Always.
