WE’RE here as the North with the rest of Britain prepares to mark the 30th anniversary of the start of the Miners’ Strike – a sombre anniversary of the hollowing out of communities, of the start of wealth and jobs being sucked out of so many regions.
It’s a story of Tory neglect that runs on: as Thatcher abandoned the mining communities, David Cameron has abandoned whole areas to floods.
But it’s also an anniversary to celebrate resistance, community spirit, people getting together to work for the common good.
Which brings me here to the North West, (which - despite the thoughts of Lord Howell - never looks in the least bit desolate to me) and to one of the top local issues – fracking.
Here, the Green Party view represents the majority view of the British public. That’s like so many other issues, from bringing the railways back into public hands, to making the minimum wage a living wage and keeping a publicly owned and publicly run NHS.
Our view is the public view.
Yet elsewhere on Britain’s political spectrum we’ve got David Cameron and George Osborne determined to pursue the fracking fantasy, making claims about cheap and instant gas that even the frackers are astonished at.
We’ve got a Lib Dem energy secretary who said “I love shale gas” twice, just in case anyone was too shocked to really take it in the first time.
And a Labour party that’s in favour of fracking, kind of… sort of...“well as long as that doesn’t upset anyone in this audience, in which case we might take a different position”.
Yes, we do hear a lot of that from Ed Miliband’s Labour Party
On energy as on so many other areas of policy, from bank regulation to housing, immigration to drugs, policy must be based on facts and evidence not wishful thinking or populist pandering.
The Green Party is the only party that works on that basis, and for policies that work not for the good of the few - the bankers, the multinationals, the tax evaders – but for the common good.
But fracking is an issue I’m convinced we will win on – in small part due to the logic of our position, in larger part due to the strength, the passion, the determination of our anti-fracking protesters.
One of those is of course our own wonderful MP Caroline Lucas. She showed that MPs can get arrested for standing up for their beliefs, not just for expense fiddles and driving dodges.
And there are so many committed campaigners, many of whom I’ve met on visits to Barton Moss and Balcombe. They’re standing up to disgracefully aggressive policing, camping out through storm and flooding rain, and we stand with them.
It’s part of a much bigger struggle with climate change.
After the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported last year, the scientific debate is over.
Outside the curious bubble of the US, UK and Australia, with their tycoon dominated media and oil industry-funded think tanks, that’s taken as standard. Yes each individual case is weather, but Britain’s record winter rainfall, the massive droughts in California and Latin America, Australia’s heatwaves, come together to deliver a powerful message – which the opinion polls show the British people have heard loud and clear – that climate change is reality, here, with us today.
Its threat is enormous and can no longer be ignored. And Mr Cameron, we can no longer have, in Owen Paterson, an Environment Secretary who denies the reality of climate change.
Having a man in his role who’s so clearly demonstrated his scientific illiteracy with the badger cull is astonishing.
But having him in charge of our preparation for - and prevention of - climate change is a huge black mark on your record.
There are other things that history will remember you for beyond your failures on climate change – the inhumanity of the bedroom tax, the ‘recovery’ built on consumer debt and a housing price bubble (what could possibly go wrong?), the chaos of your energy policy, your enthusiasm for arms sales to human rights abusers – but at least address this one black mark.
Owen Paterson has got to go!
Climate change and the state of our environment is going to be one of the key issues of the European election in May and it’s only the Green group, already the fourth largest in the European parliament, which will put it truly front and centre. Which will hold firm on fighting for a national renewables target for each European state.
We will demand that Europe provides global leadership in setting a target of at least a 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and demand high, binding energy efficiency standards.
On all of these issues in Europe the Liberal Democrats, a party from which we might have hoped to see some support for the Green stance, are as limp as their resistance to the failed Tory austerity agenda in Britain. Not that anyone really expects anything from the Liberal Democrats after their tuition fees “pledge” and the experts are predicting they could be wiped out in this European election.
It’s not surprising when we hear Lib Dems trumpeting the proposed EU free-trade deal with the US as some kind of economic salvation.
The Lib Dems are the lapdogs of corporate Europe, while the Tories are its War Horses.
In their support for the trade deal, the Lib Dems are repeating the propaganda of multinational companies only interested in swallowing up new markets - consuming new societies whole.
Let’s make no mistake, the proposed free-trade deal is a huge threat to hard-won standards for the quality and safety of our food, the sources of our energy, workers’ rights and our privacy.
One of the great contributions of the EU is to set a foundation of these standards – not good enough, not high enough – but a start.
The proposed free trade deal is a supertanker of dynamite that would blow those foundations apart. And more, it would blow apart the power of our democratic decision making.
The deal provides corporations with new rights to sue the Government for legislating in the public interest – that’s definitely not acting for the common good.
And there’s more.
It’s a deal being proposed with a state that Edward Snowden has shown is profoundly untrustworthy. Yet there’s no openness – no democracy – about the negotiations: the mandate that the EU Council gave to the Commission is still classified as “secret”.
You might have noticed that two of Britain’s noisiest political minnows, two of yesterday’s men, Nigel Farage and Nick Clegg, are planning on having a debate on Europe.
So we’ve got a man who’s telling voters that pulling out of Europe will magically restore some past golden age debating a man who’s not only prepared but delighted to hand us over to the untender mercies of multinational business, and the “safety” standards of a United States that’s poisoned the water supplies of 300,000 residents of West Virginia and supports an antibiotic-flooded, growth hormone-contaminated meat and milk chain.
Now I can’t in all honesty claim that I really want to be in the same room as Nigel and Nick.
Who would?
But I do want to be there to put the case for being in Europe, but a Green Europe that works for people, a reformed Europe that respects and supports the principle of “subsidiarity” – local democratic decision-making by the people affected by every decision, while a foundation of standards is maintained across the continent.
In short, a Europe that works democratically for the common good.
And in Britain Greens are the only major party to reject the race to the bottom in immigration rhetoric. We say that the rights of refugees, the rights of Britons to a family life, the wonderful opportunities to benefit from foreign students in our universities and colleges all need to be respected, need to be embraced.
So I say today to the television producers, to the media executives, to the public, that if there’s a debate on Europe, the Green Party, I, must be there, and will fight to be there.
The voice, the interests of the people of Britain, the people of Europe, need to be heard. That’s what we are fighting for in the Council elections in May and what we will fight for in next year's General Election.
We made real strides at the county council elections in 2013, and I’m confident we’ll do the same at this year’s council polls.
Our Association of Green Councillors is going from strength to strength, growing in numbers. And we’ve got a new secret weapon – a manual written by some of our star campaigners. It’s a guide to taking up the opportunities before us. For what is coming here in Britain, in Europe, around the world, is change.
Business as usual, politics as usual, trashing the planet as usual, are no longer available options. Voters are tired, angry and disillusioned with the same old politics of say one thing and do another.
But we don’t just need change, we need the right sort of change.
If we look back over the past year, huge nations, mass societies, have been through dangerous, uncontrollable, unfinished turmoil – and huge suffering.
From Syria to Ukraine, from Egypt to Thailand, Mali to South Sudan, all political certainty, all real sense of safety, has dissolved. And that reflects a more general global feeling – an understanding that you find on doorsteps around Britain.
The dominant neoliberal narrative of the years of the Blair and Thatcher has now been exposed as hollow, empty failed.
We are at an historic moment. In 1979 the UK changed direction, started on the path towards where we are today, with inequality at Victorian levels the social safety net snatched away, the path for a comfortable decent life blocked to most young people who face starting life under a crippling weight of debt in a world of low pay zero-hours contracts and chronic insecurity levels of empty consumption far greater than the planet can bear.
Now, today, we have to grab the steering wheel away from the control of the bankers, the multinational companies and their servants in our parliaments and take control of it ourselves.
Everyone needs a say in the direction. The Green Party says that two principles must guide that direction: that we should ensure that every person in Britain (and eventually the world) has sufficient resources for a decent quality of life, and that we have to live within the environmental limits of the planet.
So what does that mean?
A decent life doesn’t just mean not sleeping on the street, and being able to eat by means of the charity of food banks.
It means a warm, comfortable, affordable-to-heat home. It means healthy food and the means for at least little luxuries.
It means the chance to build a fulfilling, respected life with useful things to do and an education system that offers the chance to grow your capabilities throughout your life. How do we deliver that?
Well we can begin with a minimum wage that is a living wage.
When the Green Party started saying that a decade ago it was a radical idea. Now it’s almost mainstream, an idea whose time is clearly now.
Ed Miliband's Labour Party is still sitting on the fence offering companies tax breaks if they’re generous enough to pay the living wage. We will tell them that will be the minimum wage.
And another step on a path to a society that works for the common good is to end the disastrous outsourcing of public services to private companies whose one skill is bidding for public contracts, not delivering on them. Put public money back into delivering the common good, not private profit.
And, critically, we will truly rein-in the bankers.
Unlike Labour we recognise that no banking product should exist - unless it can demonstrate its benefits outweigh its risks and harm.
Then we can get more radical.
The Green Party has Strong Policy – land value tax, basic income, damage taxes replacing VAT – the kind of progressive solutions that Britain, Europe, the world needs.
You, the Green Party members here in this hall - and around the country, have doubled in number since 2008.
You have developed those solutions. You are spreading those ideas and well done to you all.
There’s so much to do, and so little time, but I want to finish by taking a very Green Party step, acknowledging that we are all leaders that we all have a place in changing our society so that it works for the common good.