I had been looking for an opportunity to post this interesting pamphlet for a while, and the recent 50th anniversary of the Green Party in England and Wales gives me just such an excuse…
Weaving A Bower Against Endless Night is an 80 page pamphlet- “an illustrated history of the UK Green Party”
Written in 1994 by our friend Derek Wall it was an official publication of the Green Party. Nonetheless, Derek does not attempt to white(green?)wash some of the failings of the GP or hide the sometime rancorous rows and debates within it, making it a more interesting read for that.
As I said, I had been thinking about when to publish this as it is quite far outside the remit of Splits&Fusions. There are two good reasons for doing so: one, many of the internal debates, the ways they were played out and resolved (or not resolved) have a similar form to the ways debates in the Trotskyist and wider left organisations have presented themselves.
Secondly, despite their essentially centre-right origin, the Green Parties in Britain have long been a site of two-way traffic with sections of the far and not so far left. Many comrades from a Trotskyist background have ended up in, or merely passed through, the GP and the author of this pamphlet himself was formerly an adherent of a certain Pabloite grouping…
The GP has had at various times in its history sizeable left and ecosocialist currents within it- particularly after 2010 and its shift to the left, and engagement with the growing anti-austerity movement- something outside the scope of this pamphlet, of course.
We will look at Green Left, the GP’s ecosocialist tendency, and some of the alliances it made, in due course.
Splits and Fusions 