London Greens advise against contesting Barking

Just got back from the London Federation of Green Parties meeting where we voted to advise Barking and Dagenham Greens not to stand a candidate at the coming General Election and focus their efforts on their local election candidates.

The background to this is that Barking is the only constituency in the country where the British National Party are strong enough to have a fighting chance of winning a seat (although it is certainly not the most likely outcome) and that we have to assess the effects that standing a paper candidate would have on the result.

I'm certainly not of the view that the sky would fall in if Griffin were elected but I am glad that the London Green Party is taking the prospect seriously and has given the matter some serious thought and discussion.

I'm extremely pleased that we voted against a narrow party interest in favour of a more nuanced approach that takes into account the fact that our party in the area is, well, a little on the weak side.

A paper candidate here would be little more than a vanity candidacy and the fact is that we can have our cake and eat it. We can help mobilise voters and give them Greens to vote for in the local elections whilst not risking the outside chance that we could be blamed for 'letting Griffin in'.

Of course, it is still the local party's decision but now London Fed's position is clear it is difficult to see how a very small local party is going to spontaneously find money, candidates and run a democratic selection procedure that would be necessary to stand.

I certainly would not like to see the position where Griffin were elected (which would be bad enough) but for him to win by a margin of 1% where we'd collected 2%. Whether or not we would have been 'responsible' for his victory we would be blamed for it and the damage to our reputation nationally would far outweigh the minuscule gains we might make by standing a paper candidate.

My position might have been different had we a strong party on the ground that could fight its corner and had proven electoral support, but sadly that is not the case here. I think we win the battle of ideas by fighting elections, not just standing in them. A weak and inexperienced party could find itself seriously out of its depth in this constituency and I would not want to see them get hurt.

Pouring resources into a campaign that would make little to no impact makes no sense when those resources could go to the three areas where we may win a seat in Lewisham, Norwich and Brighton.

We can make a genuine contribution to stopping Nasty Nick by standing in the locals, giving people a positive vision and turning out the anti-fascist vote for the parties who have a stronger Parliamentary presence in the constituency. Whatever we do in Barking it will be sideshow compared to the choice most people will be making between the war criminal and the fascist.