THE TROUBLE WITH SHAW

Green Party co-leader James Shaw has been the target of flak because he backed the public funding of a private school, in breach of Green policy. But this is just another incident where Shaw has run roughshod over the Green Party's progressive tradition. And he has been allowed to do it. With the Green's struggling to stay above the five percent eligibility line, Shaw's right wing politics may be leading the party to its parliamentary demise.

WHILE GREEN co-leader James Shaw has been left with egg on his face because he decided it would be a really good idea to spend a lot of public money on an exclusive private school and flout Green Party policy in the process, it is the inevitable result of someone who has inexorably shifted the Green Party to the right.

While Green Party members might be justly furious about Shaw's decision to fund a private school , his cavalier breach of Green policy is the result of him largely been given free rein to do whatever he wants by a cabal of Green MP's who are largely comfortable with Shaw's conservative views.

James Shaw's bigger crime is, that at a time of an existential climate crisis, he has been allowed to subjugate the Green's environmental policies to the needs of corporate capitalism. So when over 100,000 people demonstrated last September demanding urgent action on climate change, not one Green MP took up the challenge. Despite Shaw offering platitudes about 'hearing' the message of the demonstrators, there was no effort to challenge him on the Green's inadequate policy target of so-called carbon neutrality by 2050 - which will be about twenty years too late.

Similarly efforts to convince the Green Party MP's that they should be lobbying for a Green New Deal, has been met with outright opposition by Shaw. Since it proposes an upending of the neoliberal economy, a market politician like Shaw was obviously never going to embrace it . But he has been allowed to 'spike' the GND because none of his fellow Green MP's appear to support it either.

Commenting on Shaw's support for the public funding of a private school, former Green MP Catherine Delahunty has tactfully suggested that Shaw has become 'unhinged' from the Green Party itself:

'... I think that James as minister has become isolated from the party to some degree, in the sense of his instinct didn't tell him that this was never going to fly with the Green Party, and that our policies are never to fund private schools.'

But its more than this. The Green Party rank and file have allowed the Green MP's to impose a set of corporate friendly polices on a Green Party which, historically, has been of a more progressive bent. While there is a small progressive faction, Green Left, within the Green Party it appears to have had little discernible impact on Green Party policy. When it should be calling for ‘system change not climate change’ the Green Party that Shaw has shaped is talking a neoliberal brand of environmentalism.