Green Party co-leader Sian Berry has resigned over a trans rights row in the party. This follows the resignation of her fellow co-leader Jonathan Bartley last week…
In her resignation letter Berry writes:
“There is now an inconsistency between the sincere promise to fight for trans rights and inclusion in my work and the message sent by the party’s choice of front bench representatives.
“I can no longer make the claim that the party speaks unequivocally on this issue. And my conscience simply cannot agree with the agreement that there is anything positive in sending these mixed messages.”
Despite resigning Berry states “I love the Green Party” and promised to “put even more energy into my role as a Green London Assembly member”. If the Greens have any common sense they’d use this leadership election as an excuse to drop their loony left policies and focus on polar bear-hugging local Toryism that won them swathes of seats in the May elections…
When Labour’s shadow equalities minister Charlotte Nichols was caught distributing leaflets calling for the end to “traveller incursions”, Green party leader Jonathan Bartley was first on the scene with some performative outrage:
This is vile and obviously racist (“dealing with traveller incursions"). @Keir_Starmer how widespread is this kind of language in local Labour campaigns? Condemn this leaflet, apologise, and take appropriate disciplinary action.
— Jonathan Bartley (@jon_bartley) April 2, 2021
Standing in solidarity with the GRT community. https://t.co/vYDjoTxWre
Bartley asked Sir Keir “how widespread is this kind of language in local Labour campaigns?”. Guido can reveal it’s not just limited to Labour leaflets…
Green Party Solihull candidate Max McLoughlin was also out at the weekend delivering his local election leaflets, and readers won’t guess what he is promising:
“He works closely with the Police to keep Shirley as safe as it can be, and protect us against Traveller incursions”
To quote another of Jonathan’s Tweets almost word-for-word, “many questions remain unanswered – including how this happened and how widespread this unacceptable attitude to GRT communities within the [Green] Party is?”. Shirley Green Party won’t be happy to keep McGloughlin as their candidate. Or perhaps they will be – and don’t call them Shirley.
Westminster was dealing with a massive leak this afternoon. Not that of Geoffrey Cox’s legal advice to the PM, but the weather hammered down harder than a supreme court judge’s gavel (yes Guido knows UK judges don’t use gavels but the metaphor worked well).
Watch above as Kay Burley deals with a massive drip, and Guido’s not talking about Lewis Goodall…
The Greens got very worked up yesterday about Guido’s exclusive story that the party only paid one of their ‘co-leaders’, Jonathan Bartley, whilst Sian Berry got nothing from the party. Typical of the responses was from Jenny Jones, the Green Baroness tweeted that
“Sian has a full time job, Jon doesn’t. We Greens are not greedy. Hard to understand, isn’t it??”
Very noble, and it is fair to say that Sian is paid generously by the rate payers of Camden where she is a councillor and London where she is an Assembly member. Her co-leadership of the Green Party is the third of her part-time jobs.
Jenny and others owe Guido an apology because the co-leadership of the Green Party is the third of Jonathan’s part-time jobs too. He is paid a 5-figure allowance by the rate payers of Lambeth for being a councillor and will receive extra by virtue of being leader of the opposition on Lambeth Council. So his co-leadership is the third of his part-time jobs too. Except he is paid and she is not for “co-leading” the Green Party.
If Jonathan and Sian are both genuine co-leaders, both with two ratepayer paid elected positions, why is only one paid for their leadership of the Green Party? Academic research suggests that the gender pay-gap is often because men are more aggressive when it comes to pay negotiations. The inequality in pay implies Jonathan is the real (paid) leader of the party and Sian is just an unpaid fig-leaf for spin purposes. Otherwise why aren’t they paid equally for their equal work as the law insists they should be?
He’s Paid, She Isn’t!
The Green Party’s leadership election results were announced yesterday, and to no one’s surprise the joint ticket that already comprised ‘co-leader’ Jonathan Bartley won, with London Assembly member Sian Berry being swapped in to replace Caroline Lucas.
Bartley, according to Green Party press office is “paid the London Living Wage”, which is £19,890 per annum, whilst his ‘co-leader’ Sian is not paid anything at all for doing the same job. Either they’re not genuinely co-leaders, or the Greens have the biggest gender pay gap in all of politics…
Sian says that “co-leadership really does embody the values of the Green Party.” Values like paying men and women different wages for the same job? Or is Bartley really the leader and Sian’s role is merely to be the Green Party’s fig-leaf?
A tiny number of people take the vast majority of flights. We need a frequent flyer levy. Simple and fair. pic.twitter.com/uOfM1oYS91
— Green Party (@TheGreenParty) 21 July 2017
Green co-leader Jonathan Bartley has proposed a new tax to “penalise those who take flights multiple times per year“. Frequent flyers are already clobbered by air passenger duty: the state taxes flights on a sliding scale from £13 to a whopping £450 per passenger depending on service class and distance flown. As such frequent flyers already pay much more in duties than occasional travellers. The Greens’ tax isn’t anywhere near as progressive as they’d like to claim: frequent flyers are not just businessmen and jet-setters, what about migrant workers visiting their families? Do the Greens really want to go after them? The disincentives for business and trade are obvious. Chillingly, the proposal would require the government to spy on the flight patterns of every single citizen, treating every flyer as if they were on a watch list. Even Gordon Brown thought it was a bad idea…
Bartley’s tax isn’t a new idea: it’s supported by a coalition of environmentalist groups under the front campaign A Free Ride. The Greens might be pretending to be on the side of holidaymakers and non-frequent flyers, but the A Free Ride website reveals their true aim:
“The best thing for the climate would be if everyone were to stop flying immediately.”
Then Green Party leaders couldn’t jet around the world for those environmental conferences…
