by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
In a talk delivered on February 4, 2011 entitled “The Green Response to Cuts, Tuition Fee Rises and the Deficit”, Adrian Ramsay was trying to make a strong case against the Conservative-Lib Dem cuts programme.
Adrian Ramsay explained the Green Party’s policies for large-scale investment in jobs-rich green industry, which the party believes are a fair and progressive alternative to the coalition cuts that Greens say have already started to hit the poorest hardest and Councillor Ramsay also explained his party’s principled opposition to tuition fees, arguing that higher education should be paid for through general taxation.
Adrian Ramsay, now 29, was the Green Party’s youngest ever councillor when he was elected at the age of 21. He is the Co-ordinator for Norwich Green Party, which, with 14 councillors, has the largest local authority Green Party group in the UK. In the 2010 General Election Councillor Ramsay secured the second highest Green vote in the country, doubling the party's vote share in the Norwich South constituency.
All the talk sounds very grand but where precisely is the money for such investment to come from? The coffers are empty; not that there was really any money in them to begin with. We have been living on credit, the nation and its people as individuals, for way too long.
I am sure that even Councillor Ramsay would be hard-pressed, as would be the Green Party as a whole, to not just explain as to from whence to take the money but explain how it is meant to work without incurring a further and greater national debt than we have already.
You cannot spend money that you have not got. Not that that has stopped any of the politicians and political parties so far when they talk, talk and talk some more. Let's see it in reality.
The Lib-Dems had a lot of grand talks too until, in coalition, they found that the previous government of the British Labor Party, who has become a disgrace to the name, has squandered nigh on every penny that was in the coffers.
So, please, dearest Green Party, explain how precisely this is to work without going further into debt, though cutting the military expenditure would be one idea, which I, for one, would wholeheartedly back, as readers will know.
© 2011
