Letter: Green ideas are alive and well but living under assumed names

GEOFFREY LEAN is quite right: 'It's Not Easy Being Green' (27 February). Especially with journalists like him around. They turn up at every Green Party conference and, for some reason, are willing to write only one story: the Green Party is dead. Jonathon Porritt and Sara Parkin are old news. They left because the Green Party is determinedly democratic and would not set up icons. David Icke is not much in favour either.

The Greens' real problem is that we cannot get our message out. We find that the press is willing to pick our brains but unwilling to give our ideas an airing. It was with bitter laughter that we saw the Green/Plaid Cymru Energy Conservation Bill ascribed to the Liberal Democrats.

We are consistently 10 years ahead of every other party in our thinking. Look at the following ideas, just on the brink of becoming politically mainstream. They have long been Green Party policies:

the promotion of public transport instead of motorways;

conversion of the arms industry to civilian production;

a social wage instead of DSS allowances; this should also be paid to farmers instead of environmentally disastrous production subsidies;

the strengthening of regional government as opposed to the centralising tendencies of Whitehall and Brussels.

Geoffrey Lean says we are not in favour of economic growth. We are certainly not in favour of supposedly 'sustainable' economic growth that pulls in increasing quantities of natural resources and creates greater levels of pollution in the satisfaction of artificially created demand. We are not in favour of an economic growth that is the very source and

engine of global environmental decline.

We are in favour of a massive growth in the environmental industry, dedicated to the healing, preservation and proper stewardship of the

global environment.

Paul Edwards

Prospective Green Party

candidate

Devon and East Plymouth