Gluttons for punishment
The Green Party is taking it well.
A senior activist who won an unlawful discrimination claim against the Green Party of England and Wales has been expelled and told he cannot return for at least two years.
In February, a judge found that the Greens had unlawfully discriminated against Dr Shahrar Ali during a row over his gender-critical beliefs. Ali, who is a former deputy leader, was awarded damages of £9,100. The Greens were also ordered to pay him a further £90,000 in costs in September.
He has now been excluded from the party for a fixed term of two years as a result of complaints made about him in 2022.
What were the complaints? What terrible thing did he do or say?
It is understood that some of the complaints against Ali related to a social media post he shared in July 2022, in which he suggested that teaching the concept of transgender identity to two year olds was a “danger to children”.
In a message on X, he quoted a post by the campaign group Stonewall which said that research suggested that “children as young as 2 recognise their trans identity”. Ali added a comment which said: “Off scale of safeguarding risk. Would we teach 2 year olds concept of schizophrenia?”
That…that’s it? But teaching the concept of transgender identity to two year olds is a danger to children. Small children believe what they’re told.
The party has told him that any future readmission would be conditional on him publicly retracting tweets that had been complained about, apologising and undertaking safeguarding training.
What a pack of brain-dead Stalinists. Honestly.
The party is apparently having to fundraise or raise membership fees in order to keep up with the costs associated with these court cases. You’d think they’d want to rethink their strategy.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-66935750
I have to say I find it very bizarre that a political party can be sued for discriminating against beliefs. If the Greens kicked out a Muslim member for saying that women should be kept as slaves, would he have a case?
Aren’t they just repeating the unlawful discrimination, only worse? Seems like they must love paying him money.
I agree with maddog. They just got spanked by the court for discrimination against him on the grounds of his protected beliefs, so they’ve decided to retaliate by expelling him for an expression of his protected beliefs. They really are either astonishingly thick, or their membership department is being run by saboteurs from a rival party.
As for the hypothetical Muslim scenario? Depending on the exact circumstances, the putative member might well have a case. Expressing a belief that women should be kept as slaves, in and of itself, is free speech. Any attempt to translate that belief into action, however, is likely to fall foul of the law; and if the member had signed a form promising not to express such a belief on pain of losing their membership, then they could not sue.
Unlike expressing a belief that enslaving half the human race is a good idea, expressing a perfectly reasonable – and near-universal – belief that brainwashing babies is a safeguarding risk, is unlikely to have been subject to any kind of restrictive clause in the membership application.
The Green Party, in any given country in the West, has more closely resembled a cult of feelings far more than it has a political organisation. In Germany, where our Greens have been part of the actual government for the last few years, the party is not only completely through the looking-glass on social issues which have absolutely nothing to do with preserving the environment (and some of which threaten the very fabric of German social cohesion), it has done far more to harm the environment than any party since the founding of the Federal Republic.
This is not hyperbolic extrapolation from the Greens’ irraitional anti-nuclearism, either, though that is bad enough. It saw them follow through on Angela Merkel’s closure of *every single nuclear plant* in the country, for example. The end of this plan coincided with Russia’s reactivation of its adventure in the Ukraine, to which Germany stopped importing Russian gas in response…gas which Germany had spent the last thirty years, thanks in large part to Merkel and to her predecessor Gerhard Schröder (himself a close personal friend of Vladimir Putin), making Germany’s industry and domestic heating apparatus almost entirely dependent upon.
No, the Greens’ commitment to the environment not only saw them dogmatically follow-through on the death of the German nuclear industry, it saw them recommit to closing German coal mines and to filling them with concrete (along with other more “environmentally friendly” materials for the mines’ “restoration”), which on the face of it sounds reasonable, or at least good-hearted (if one can ignore the folly of rendering such mines permanently inoperable even in theory).
But the realities of German energy production in 2022 up to today meant that we had a choice between activating (and building) more coal-fired power plants or facing regular blackouts and brown-outs in the depth of winter. So the German State, for the first time since the Industrial Revolution (which means for the first time in history), has had to start importing coal to keep the lights on. This coal comes mostly from Columbia, which is…not exactly known for its environmental protections or worker safety laws, nor even for banning child labour.
And now we have German electricity produced on the back of coal dug out of the Andes, some of it by children, and shipped across the ocean so that the Greens can say they delivered on their twin promises of closing nuclear power plants and coal mines. Thanks, in no small part, to the Greens’ ideological intransigence when it meets geopolitical necessity.
But wait, there’s more. Even where Green environmental policy “works”, it has untold costs which will take us generations to sort out.
We have landfills filling up with fibreglass from wind turbines made and shipped out of China, which tend to last only a few years and which themselves cannot reliably produce enough energy to offset the carbon released during their manufacture, transport, installation, and disposal; a great many of these wind turbines are set up in forests, which necessitates removing one or more trees per turbine.
we have solar panels everywhere in a country where the *sunniest* region receives less sunlight in a year than the *least sunny* regions of the continental United States and thus cannot even theoretically produce enough energy to offset the carbon it takes to make, ship, and dispose of them.
In concrete terms, the city famed for the most sunny days in Germany is called Freiburg, a quaint little university town in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg. It receives, according to its own city’s website, “almost 1,800 sunshine-hours per year”, which in addition to giving it a “Mediterrannean flair”, makes it the most ideal place in the country for solar energy.
Seattle, Washington (where I believe our humble host has deigned to erect her domicile) receives, by way of comparison, 2170 sunshine hours per year.
The wisdom of basing a significant proportion of Seattle’s electrical grid on solar energy, much less a country whose *most-sunny location* receives only 80% as much sunshine, is an exercise left to the reader.
In any case, I could never countenance voting for the Greens in this country. I care about the environment far too much to ever do such a foolish thing as that.
@Der Durchwanderer
I was agreeing with you until you went off on your fact-free anti-renewables rant. It’s 2 am here and I’m seriously too tired to address all your (talking) points but I’ll just leave this here:
https://www.aap.com.au/factcheck/wind-turbine-energy-claim-is-all-spin-and-no-power/
Seconded, Francis.
“Sunshine hours per year” is meaningless in solar generation. Just as it is possible for a person to get sunburn on a cloudy day, so is electricity generated by solar panels because it isn’t the light, it’s the radiation.