Read on Twitter
I worry that people who are not intending to vote for the incumbents in the Green leadership election are pinning problems in our party on them that are not their fault, and hoping that a new leader will change them, which they won't. Our issues are much deeper than that.
First off, we need a paid chair for however long that role continues to exist. It is an incredible amount of work, it is essentially a full time job. It means that the candidate pool is limited to those who can support themselves without the income.
Throughout my time in the party, things that seem to go wrong seem to be because of disfunction on GPEx, often led by the chair. I don't want to criticise any individuals because I think this is a structural problem.
I understand there are huge issues with how our executive oversee staff and the relationship there. There is not enough transparency or accountability for how our executive treat our staff. But having experience of neither myself, I'll leave that there.
Secondly we need to increase the salary of our Deputy Leader to match at least that of our Leader. They share the same powers internally and work just as hard as each other. I've never seen anyone work as hard as our current Deputy. Lack of fair pay limits the field of candidates
Thirdly, we need to elect the deputy and the leader separately, not in the same election. Nobody in the history of the Green Party has ever transitioned from Deputy to Leader. No Deputy has even ever ran for Leader.
When you depend on your position as Deputy for your livelihood, it is understandable that you may not want to risk that in order to run for Leader. This holds people back who would otherwise be competitive candidates for Leader.
We also need to extend our terms for both roles from 2 years to 3 or 4. No incumbent for leader has ever lost re-election, but we have to run this extremely costly election (in terms of money AND time) every 2 years anyway.
They say things move quickly in politics, but they do not in the Green Party. Change takes time, and we're expecting more and more from our candidates for internal office. We need to give them the time to do what they've set out to do.
We also need to change how the job sharing system for leadership / deputy work, but my views on this are already known so will avoid going into this too much. Here's a previous motion from me on this topic. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BXAnYBRVcVGNyT5Gx1bS-WlGuUgUs47YsMpP07V1mQs/edit?usp=sharing
Next up, we need the ability for our leadership to prioritise motions at conference. They're expected to be on the receiving end of the firing squad that is our media, but have no real ability to shape our policy. They face the consequences for our bad/out of date policy.
Over the past 2 years and longer, we've had serious issues with handling transphobia and antisemitism. And yet we currently have a leadership that could not be more committed to trans rights and anti-racism. We can't solve these problems by changing our leader. It's structural.
There's a lot more issues on a campaigning level with target to win not being properly followed and so on, but there are better placed people than me to discuss these.
There are also big issues with certain candidates who use the platform given to them as a candidate to stir up hate, and then frame any criticism given to them as negative campaigning and who play the victim. This is not on and it needs to stop.
This thread (/ rant) ended up a lot longer than I expected. I truly wish every success to whoever makes up the next leadership team. And members are of course free to vote how they see fit. But I hope people don't expect a change of leadership to fix what are structural problems.
