Beware the siren call of a strong Green opinion poll

The Green blogosphere has been energised in the last few days by a new IPSO/MORI poll for Reuters which has placed the Green Party at an unprecedented 6% in voting elections, if a General Election was called tomorrow. This level of support in a poll is exciting, but I'm afraid we should refrain from cracking open the champagne quite yet.

Looking at the detail of the poll, we can see that it is from a relatively modest sample of individuals (1008) and the pollsters themselves give the health warning that that the percentage for each party's share has a 4% margin of error. In our case, this means we could have any figure between 10% or 2% of the vote.

The truth of it is, polls are fickle things and we may hear from another pollster tomorrow with a radically different interpretation, due to their use of a slightly different methodology. We honestly need a consistent period of time to see if these figures hold up. If we are still seeing these sort of figures in three months, we can start to trust them more.

One question that isn't answered by the poll is why we might have received a bump in our electoral fortunes. I'd be the first to argue that we deserve it, with well-publicised victories at the General Election and in the recent Local Elections. We have a distinct policy offer in comparison with the dour, negative stances of our political opponents. But if this polling data turns out to be true, we need to analyse it carefully to see where it stems from and then build upon it accordingly.

Such an increase in support wouldn't necessarily be translated nationally into new seats. We still have the First Past The Post voting system to contend with - and other parties, most notably the Lib Dems, have found themselves at the mercy of this. Let's not forget the vast gulf between Clegg-mania at it's height and the shocking paucity of new Lib Dem gains at last year's General Election!

At the end of the day, we mustn't wait for polls to deliver us power. We have to work hard, building relationships individually, voter by voter. In allhonestly, can the Green Party argue yet that we've worked hard enough to prepare sufficiently-qualified candidates to step forward into Parliament? I'm not convinced - we should put our energies into THAT and the rest will fall into place in it's own time.

Messed-up morality: Conservatives fall "Back to Basics"

It must be dreadfully frustrating for David Cameron. He spent years (and a fair proportion of Lord Ashcroft's tax-free millions) trying desperately to detoxify the Tory brand and make their policies seem more palatable and human. However, now his colleagues are back in power, an unattractive tone of moral judgement and reactionary social engineering has crept back into public discourse around women and sexuality. Even if we were able to set aside Cameron's own recent patronising display of contempt to Angela Eagle when he told her to "calm down, dear" at Prime Ministers Questions, there are many other signs that there are unmistakable signs of a regressive social agenda bubbling under the surface of many of the Coalition's policies which infantilizes women and wants to draw a firm line under the successful gay legislative programme of the Labour Government.

Ken Clarke's comments about some rapes being less serious than others was a clumsy slip under fire whilst defending a wider cost-cutting approach to justice - but it still betrayed an unbelievably dismissive attitude towards the victims of sexual violence by the Justice Secretary.

Backbencher Nadine Dorries' 10 minute bill pushing for young girls to be taught abstinence (you read correctly -girls, not boys), leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth as it puts female sexuality in the dock as the cause of all lapses in sexual morality. This is at a time of diminishing budgets for HIV prevention and the tightening of health spending around sexual health. Nonetheless, this week it was announced that the well-respected British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) has been removed from the government advisory group on sexual health and replaced by Life, a conservative organisation that takes a hard-line stance against abortion and is strenuously pushing for abstinence programmes, even though they are known to be counter-productive in fighting sexually-transmitted diseases.

You would think on the positive side, that this is the sort of issue where having a coalition Government would put the brakes on these excesses. Right now (the argument goes), keeping the Liberal Democrats onside has meant that the Conservatives are working hard to ensure this remains a series of isolated incidents and does not become a larger narrative behind Government policy. Memories on the front bench are also short enough to remember John Major's ill-fated Back to Basics campaign, which crystallized the public's views of his party's hypocrisy around morality and sex.

Within the Home Office, Liberal Democrat Lynne Featherstone MP represents a trusted pair of hands as the current Equalities Minister. She is interviewed in this month's issue of Total Politics and hints that she clashes at times with her Secretary of State, Theresa May, over this agenda. That said, the article gives her a fairly gentle ride as she talks about ensuring the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is supported to deliver on equalities protection. The truth however, is that the remit for the EHRC has been severely restricted so that it works on the barest minimum needed to deliver it's core aims. Unsurprisingly, this has been accompanied with a significant funding cut.

You may also remember that I posted about the Government's Red Tape Challenge, which is currently consulting on whether we should scrap every law and regulation on the statute books. The presumption is that everything is marked for abolition to "reduce bureaucracy" unless a strong enough argument is given to retain them (or sufficient people can marshall a public stink enough to stop them). After years of campaigning by minority communities, the ink was not yet dry on the Equality Act before it fell into the firing line.

Until this attack, these policies and the funding that underpinned them were in the front line of ensuring that in a country where inequality has steadily increased over the last thirty years, we had an independent voice arguing for concrete changes to close this gap. They ensured that people were able to make adult choices around their health and were treated with dignity in their dealings with the state.

Gender and sexual equality is under more sustained attack than ever before. Cameron's rebranding campaign is over. The Conservatives have learnt a lesson - they are moving back to basics, but aside from the odd slip, this time they aren't making the mistake of telling us.

Notes from the online frontline...

As well as my regular posts, I thought it was about time I started highlighting things that have caught my eye: news articles that are falling beneath the radar, showcasing fellow bloggers in action and giving quick glimpses of topics I don't have time to be able to cover on Green Politics: Sustainable Futures.

So, here are some of the things that have I've been inspired, challenged or intrigued by in the last couple of weeks.

1. As a newly accepted member (!), I'll be heading up to London for the Compass Conference 2011 "Building The Good Society" on Sat 25 June. There will be an amazing mix of campaign organisations, NGOs, politicians and progressive activists throwing forward ideas on how to recapture the initiative from our current Government. Let me know if you're going and I'll try and say hi!

2. Over at The Daily (Maybe), Jim Jepps has written a strikingly robust argument in favour of the Ryan Giggs injunction and I surprised myself by being carried by his argument. Although super-injunctions are pretty toxic things and pose a more fundamental threat to serious investigative journalism, there is truth to the call for tightening constraints around public interest in these more salacious cases.

3. In the week that it seemed like Chris Huhne has scored victory in keeping the Coalition Government to it's carbon emission cuts, it was timely to read Derek Wall's article "The flaws in coalition climate policy" via Red Pepper to remind myself of how difficult this is going to be in reality - and how there are enough caveats and cop-outs built into their strategy to water down the effectiveness of their efforts.

Finally, I wanted to thank all of you who have become regular readers of the blog over the past few weeks. It's really heartening to see it grow and provoke some constructive debates about how the Green Party can develop and grow in the next few years. Keep reading, I've got some really interesting articles coming up!

Is twinning the key to success for the Green movement?

Unsurprisingly, the big story for the Greens since the local elections has been the success achieved in Brighton & Hove, where we added a further ten councillors to our local party and took control of the local Council. Whilst this historic victory gives us a fantastic moment to savour, it has masked a deeper question we need to contemplate.

In spite of the unpopularity of each of the three main political parties, the Green Party only succeeded in increasing our number of councillors from 116 to 130. Taking into account the Brighton & Hove gains, this means in reality we just picked up four additional seats, although I appreciate the various losses and gains in different constituencies complicate the picture slightly. Nonetheless, with the higher profile of the party as a result of Caroline Lucas's election as our first MP and the consequent jump in membership and activists this resulted in, it does feel as we should have enjoyed a more significant upsurge in our fortunes.

A national strategic decision has been made in the last couple of years to focus our scant time and money in those seats where we are strongest and most likely to elect a Member of Parliament. Living in the parliamentary seat where this has reaped the biggest dividend, I'm not going to argue too strongly against that approach! I do think however, especially in light of the AV referendum failure, that we must now re-adjust our strategies in light of the real difficulties of obtaining further First Past The Post successes.

For that reason, I would argue that we now need to invest our energies in the short to medium term objective of increasing council representation. Where we do so, we soften the ground for the larger battles of general and European elections, consequently making success there more likely. The Local Party Support role on GPEX has been responsible for putting together the fantastically useful "Party in a Box" kits to assist activists in launching local parties in those areas where we have no active party structure. But I'm convinced we need to go further.

I would like to see a commitment from those established local parties to join a mentorship network across the Green Party that would share best practice and ideas from around the country. Local parties that volunteered to participate could be paired together. Of these, those parties fortunate enough to have elected at least one local councillor would become paired with another that has yet to do so. This would enable a larger spread of local parties to take part whilst not overwhelming bigger parties with demands for their assistance. The twinning relationship can be forged easily and cheaply: linking similar individuals with particular roles (Chair, Membership, Secretary, External Communications) and using email and video conferencing to have regular discussions around strategy, systems, processes and organisation. Visits can be arranged in person to provide bodies on the ground for canvassing and around elections time too.

Together, the partnership could focus upon targeting one council ward in the constituency over a period of two or three years. Where done well, the collaboration would spark creativity and enthusiasm on both sides at what can be achieved and also contribute to longer term investment in capacity building. From my experience, those constituencies where candidates achieve office for the first time will be transformed by the experience and will forge real credibility amongst their communities.

This work can be done with very little financial cost to either local party, but will gift the party nationally with a sense of solidarity, purpose and achievement. In providing concrete support, bigger parties can repay some of the confidence placed in them by the Green Party as a whole. Most importantly, at a time when the Green Party is expanding in size and influence, this would serve to strengthen and build relationships between our activists in communities spanning the country and ensure that we never write off any part of the UK as being out of bounds to a Green challenge!