The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

Link: BBC NEWS | Talk about Newsnight | Comment on What’s the point of the Green Party?.

Newsnight’s website has a forum discussion under the heading “What is the point of the Greens?”. It remains to be seen if they will publish my contribution (below), but why don’t you head over there and tell it like it is?

The first point of the Greens is to be the spiritual home of the repressed and puritanical luddites who are at the heart of the British nation. To the extent that the human race has problems it cannot solve with technology, we must simply adapt. But our Puritans can’t bear such a positive viewpoint. They loathe pleasure and despise fun. Green-ery gives them an ideological basis to suppress them.

Regressing to our pre-industrial state (if the poor of the world were even prepared to give up their hopes for the future) would do nothing but create human misery on an unprecedented scale.

Climate change is real, but it is monumental arrogance to believe that our gnat-bite civilisation is causing it, or that we will ultimately leave any greater imprint on the Earth than the dinosaurs did.

The second point of the Greens is to fill the void left by the death of religion in Britain. Doom is threatened as punishment for our sins. That’s a pretty good definition of religion, and the Green movement meets it.

The third point of the Greens is to give old Reds (whose ideology was exposed as a total, evil failure by the collapse of the Soviet Union) a new platform from which to denounce human nature and demand the right to deploy massive political force to change it. That’s why so many Greens are watermelons, red on the inside.