The ideology of the mega-rich will shape our society for the next generation, in large part through philanthropy. The non-profit sector, the primary vehicle for inherited wealth to be laundered into political influence, has been growing rapidly; in the US, non-profits’ assets have grown nine-fold since 1980. In 2020, non-profits brought in $2.62 trillion in revenues, constituting over 5.6% of the US economy. Increasingly, much this money came from the new tech elite: among the most prolific donors were Jeff Bezos and his ex-wife, Mackenzie Scott; Bill Gates and his now-discarded wife, Melinda French Gates; Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan; and Laureen Powell Jobs, the Left-leaning publisher of the Atlantic and the widow of Apple’s founder.

This rise of non-profits is reminiscent of feudal times, when the rich and powerful donated to the Church to ensure that its message wouldn’t threaten their power. Indeed, our society is becoming more like the Middle Ages all the time, with entrepreneurial success becoming more difficult and property and wealth becoming ever more concentrated. “Inherited wealth”, notes Thomas Piketty, is making a “comeback”. In the US, according to the consulting firm Accenture, the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers will gift their heirs up to $30 trillion by 2030 and $75 trillion by 2060.

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By Joel Kotkin

Of course, the use of inherited wealth to push Left-wing causes is nothing new. As Heather Mac Donald demonstrated in 1996, big-money foundations in the US have been bankrolling far-Left politics for several generations. But the rise of the tech oligarchy seems likely to accelerate this move to the gentrified Left. Many of these billionaires are still in their 30s and 40s but have accumulated more cash than anyone since the Gilded Age. And unlike their early 20th-century counterparts, today’s robber-barons — with a few notable exceptions, such as Peter Thiel — are decisively aligned with the Left. In 2020, five of the top eight donors to Joe Biden came from people tied to tech firms.

This is partly explained by Trump’s toxicity, which engendered something of an oligarchical jihad to overthrow a man who was both needlessly crass and potentially threatening to their monopolies. Particularly critical in the 2020 election was the weaponising of the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, which poured over $300 million into state and local election administration to stoke turnout. Conservatives claim, with some justification, that these efforts were concentrated in highly Democratic areas of swing states, and therefore may have tilted the outcome. But what is beyond question is that Zuckerberg and the others participated in what Time — owned by yet another oligarch, Marc Benioff, co-founder of Salesforce.com — gleefully described as “a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes”.

But at least you could make a compelling argument that it was a good idea to get rid of Trump. On other issues, however, such as race, policing, education, and gender, oligarchs and their non-profits continue to agitate for what are often societally disastrous policies.

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By Joel Kotkin

The ultra-rich have been particularly attracted to draconian climate positions. By 2017, billionaires such as Tom Steyer — and powerful foundations like Rockefeller, Doris Duke, Walton, MacArthur, Hewlett, and George Soros’s Open Society — were sending hundreds of millions to leading environmental  groups. By contrast, the largest Right-wing foundation, Heritage, was attracting 50% or less than the biggest green non-profits. Jeff Bezos, amid his pandemic bonanza, announced $10 billion in gifts aimed mostly at progressive and green non-profits. The oligarchs’ philanthropy also provides a cushy home for climate bureaucrats, with the inheritor of the Jobs fortune now welcoming California’s chief regulator to head up her climate-focused $3 billion Waverley Street Foundation.

We can expect that this radicalisation will become even more obvious in the next generation of tech and finance heirs, such as the socialist offspring of the founders of Qualcomm, featured in a New York Times profile on “the rich kids who want to tear down capitalism”. Born into the gentry Left, these young trust-funders will be able to subsidise the most extreme elements of the progressive agenda without having to worry about how that agenda might affect a business they had nothing to do with building.

This rise of a small class of ultra-rich, yet non-productive, social influencers does not bode well for the future. In a profoundly dysfunctional political culture, the rich and their massive non-profits will enjoy an extraordinary power to set the public agenda by funding notionally grassroots activist groups and manipulating an increasingly gullible media, parts of which they already own or control.

Indeed, the power of these organisations could grow so great that the only real solution may be to check their influence through removing or altering their privileged tax status — non-profits generally pay 15% or less on their income than corporations — and forcing them to eschew politics. They may consider themselves, as progressive author David Callaghan suggests, the “enlightened rich”, but their bank accounts make them natural targets for redistribution. In some cases, the funded minions of the rich are morphing from grateful supplicants into something like the Jacobins of the French Revolution. Already, more Democrats support socialism than capitalism, with socialism particularly popular among the young. Much like their counterparts in the run-up to the French Revolution, our elites appear to be embracing revolutionary ideas that end up threatening, as Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “their own rights and even their existence”.

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How race politics liberated the elites

By Matthew Crawford

The adoption of self-destructive ideologies by the idle rich is nothing new; in fact, it’s a recurring pattern in modern history. In the 20th-century, members of the upper classes often embraced communism and even worked for the Soviet Union, whose founding credo was the annihilation of their own class. But while Stalinism may be out of fashion, charges of hypocrisy are not — and agitated young activists won’t long tolerate billionaires who lament climate change but fly their private jets to discuss the “crisis” in places like Davos. After all, if the world is on the verge of a global apocalypse, how can the luxurious lifestyles of so many of the world’s most public green advocates be acceptable?

Fearing the potential whirlwind, some tech titans and Wall Street oligarchs are already making emergency escape plans in case of civil unrest. But the real danger may be confiscation, as people recognise the enormous gap between oligarchic posturing and the reality of class relations. As the World Socialist Website puts it: “Charity and philanthropic patronage are aristocratic forms. They are a symptom of an unequal society in which resources have pooled to an irrational degree at one pole of society.”

Yet while the current oligarchs deserve opprobrium, the ultimate danger posed by the non-profit tsunami lies in their feckless embrace of a policy agenda that undermines the very essence of competitive capitalism. Like feudal lords, this new elite, emboldened by a common ideology, may continue to thrive in a world of frozen social relations, but only by destroying the very system that brought them their own good fortune. And, just as with Oedipus, it’s only a matter of time before that backfires in a disastrous fashion.

Second, there is a thing called the “degrowth movement”, which wants to stop economic growth. And, yes, this would lead almost inevitably to the unnecessary deaths of thousands of children a day.

Let’s deal with that first point first. For most of history, somewhere around a third of children died before their fifth birthday. That awful number has dropped enormously, but even now, it’s nearly one child in 25.

As child mortality has gone down, so has global poverty — while global economic output has increased. Correlation is not causation, of course – but this isn’t just true at a global level, but at a country-by-country level. Nowadays, if your country is rich, your children are more likely to live. That is amazingly obvious on this chart. If you live in the rich Iceland, for example, your child is 60 or 70 times less likely to die before its fifth birthday than if you live in the poor Central African Republic or Democratic Republic of Congo, where about one child in every 10 dies in its first five years.

And on that second point: some people really think that that economic growth should stop, right now. Jason Hickel is an anthropologist and one of the key voices in what is known as the “degrowth” movement. He argues that — in rich countries, at least[1. It’s worth noting that Hickel doesn’t think we should stop aiming for growth everywhere: just in rich countries. But rich countries that buy much of the goods produced in poor countries, driving their growth, so that would be a very difficult needle to thread.] — we ought to stop aiming for economic growth immediately. He thinks that “green” growth, the idea that we can grow our economies while reducing carbon emissions, is a chimera, or at least that it cannot happen fast enough to avoid disastrous outcomes from climate change.

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Hickel, of course, denies that economic growth saves lives. In fact, he doubly denies it. First, he denies that global poverty has gone down as a result of economic growth. In 2019, he argued that all those famous charts showing a huge decline in global poverty are false, because they focus on very extreme poverty — people living on the equivalent of $1.90 a day or less. If you look at some more reasonable threshold of “poverty”, he says, such as $15 a day, the decline disappears.

This is straightforwardly untrue, for the record. Whatever threshold you use, people are getting richer. People have generally shifted from lower incomes to higher incomes, and as a result fewer children are dying.

And secondly, Hickel denies that economic growth does save children’s lives: or, rather, that it does beyond a certain, quite low level. “Past a certain point, the relationship between GDP and social outcomes breaks down or becomes irrelevant,” he says. “After that, what matters is distribution and access to public services.”

But this doesn’t seem to be true either. If it were, you’d see that very poor countries have consistently high child mortality, but that as you reach the middle-income and rich countries, it would be much more mixed. But in fact there’s still a strong relationship, and middle-income countries like China and Brazil have much higher infant mortality than rich countries like the UK and Japan. If you live in Brazil, there’s about a one in 60 chance that your child will die before its fifth birthday. In China, one in 100. In the UK, it’s way down at one in 250-ish.

You could look at the reduction in child mortality over time, as the world has become richer, as one of the great success stories of our time. In a way you’d be right to do so, but it is a hugely unfinished story. Children are still dying at an awful, unacceptable rate of about 14,000 a day — Max Roser of Our World In Data describes it as “equivalent to a crash of a jumbo jet with only children on board, every hour of every day of the year”.

Nonetheless, it is true that economic growth appears to have saved millions of children’s lives. That 14,000 a day would be something more like 100,000 a day, if children were dying at the rate they used to.

Also note that “economic growth” doesn’t necessarily mean “free-market capitalism”. As Noah Smith points out, a lot of the reduction in global poverty has been about smart government action (especially in Latin America), or China’s complicated industrial and economic reform, not simply free-market policies – although at the very least it’s fair to say that global capitalism hasn’t got in the way.

But this broadly positive story is a closed book to Hickel and the degrowth movement. It’s instinctively difficult to understand why anyone would want to deny it, but I have two theories.

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One is that it’s very hard to acknowledge that things can get better without being good. It’s a common problem. It is, for instance, almost certainly true that the UK is much less racist and sexist than it used to be. But it’s also clearly true that there are real problems that continue to exist. It is extremely hard to say “the UK has become better with regards to racism and sexism” without people hearing “the UK is not racist or sexist”.

If you’re Jason Hickel, you might see people arguing that poverty has decreased, and assume that they mean “and therefore global poverty is no longer a problem”. That is, of course, absolutely not the case.

The second hypothesis is a more complicated one — and has to do with something called “prevalence-induced concept change”. Imagine that you have dedicated your life to some problem: say, reducing littering in a local park. You work really hard. You set up a charity and solicit donations; you put together a workforce. And, bit by bit, you successfully reduce the problem. The park becomes a bit less litter-filled. What do you do? Do you say to your charity’s staff, “The park is doing a bit better now, we probably don’t need so many of you. And we should probably reduce our demands for donations, as well”?

Human nature being what it is, probably not. More likely (and as happens in laboratory settings), you will simply start focusing on smaller and smaller things. Before, you had shopping trolleys in the pond and a dead sheep in the playground, and you focused on them. But now that they’ve gone, your attention will focus on the crisp packets and fag butts. Partly that’s because you now have the attention to spare, because the bigger problems have been solved; but it’s also partly because, if you start saying “actually the situation is a bit better now”, it will be harder to rally support for your cause.

I think this is a really important driver of human behaviour. It is very hard to ever admit things are getting better along any axis, because if you do, it feels like you’re saying: “So you can stop working hard to fix this problem.”

Similarly, if you’re Jason Hickel and you’ve dedicated your life to fighting global poverty (and to saying that global poverty is all because of capitalism and colonialism and that economic growth is bad), then it will be really inconvenient if someone says: “Actually, global poverty has decreased significantly, that reduction seems to be correlated with economic growth, and it has had amazing positive outcomes such as a huge reduction in child mortality.” It will be very tempting to find ways of ignoring that reality.

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Eco-fascism is our future

By Paul Kingsnorth

I worry, though, that it is counterproductive to tell people that all their hard work improving some situation has had no effect. If all those decades of buying low-energy lightbulbs and reducing flights and eating less meat have not improved the climate, then why shouldn’t I just stop bothering? If all those anti-racism campaigns and hate-speech laws and so on made no difference, what’s the point? And in the case of poverty, if economic growth doesn’t reduce global poverty, then it does indeed make sense to give up on growth altogether. But in reality, economic growth does reduce global poverty, and reduced poverty saves children’s lives.

But the degrowth movement is right, in one sense. Growth almost certainly can’t carry on forever. If the economy grows at 2% a year every year, which it roughly has for the last century or so, then it doubles in size every 35 years.

That’s not sustainable in the long term. In 8,250 years — as Holden Karnofsky of the Open Philanthropy Project points out — the economy would have grown to 3*10⁷⁰ (that is, a 3 followed by 70 zeroes) times its current size. There are, for context, about one-third that many atoms in our galaxy. And 8,250 years isn’t very long: there are cities which have been around for longer.

Perhaps growth will continue into the far future. I could imagine some weird universe of simulated worlds and uploaded humans — and indeed others have. But probably, the more likely outcome is that growth slows or stops or reverses in the next few centuries.

The question, of course, is when it should stop. I, for one, would rather wait until the children stop dying so much. Hickel and the degrowth movement think it should be sooner. But if they want to make that case honestly, they should admit the reality of all the dead children.

That growth, of course, came with a few side-effects: a changing climate, collapsing ice sheets, mass destruction of ecosystems, the razing of forests and the highest extinction rate in sixty million years; not to mention growing social polarisation and massive economic inequality. Everybody had known about this since the late twentieth century, but they had all presumed, or hoped, that somebody else would sort it out. The World Economic Forum was on the case, after all, and Bono and that Swedish girl, and those weirdos who dressed up as dinosaurs or whatever and chained themselves to bridges. This sort of thing had been part of the furniture for so long that people barely noticed it anymore.

But it wasn’t working: everything had been going in the wrong direction since the Limits to Growth report had correctly predicted, back in 1972, what was on the way. By the 2020s it was uncomfortably obvious that the report’s predictions — mocked or ignored at the time by the great and the good — had turned out to be startlingly accurate. Spiralling global consumption had led to rising demand for resources, which were becoming exhausted as landbases and ecosystems were degraded by human use, leading to increasing prices, social and political strife, ecosystem breakdown and looming civilisational collapse. Limits to Growth had identified the period between 2008 and 2030 as the point at which the collapse would begin to bite, with stalling growth, climatic instability, rising death rates and social turmoil as evidence of overshoot. So it had proven.

Even the most committed apostles of Progress and Development could see the writing on the wall. Something radical would have to be done. The old-school greens who, in response to Limits To Growth, had preached about pie-in-the-sky stuff like “de-growth”, simple living, organic farming or foraging for nettle tops, didn’t have a sellable message in a world of demand, with Westernised consumers all insisting on their right to low-cost WiFi connectivity. Everyone was sick of being nagged by people like that, anyway. The more grown-up environmentalists — the kind who wore business suits and wrote policy papers about the regrettable but realistic need for nuclear power and geoengineering — knew this very well. Solutions had to be big, brave and global.

In the end, as the wildfires, droughts, ice melt and supply chain collapses mounted, a stark choice presented itself: an ambitious plan to Save The Earth, or a collapse into barbarism. That was how the media sold it, anyway, and since it had been long anticipated, nobody really minded much. We were all locked into the machine by now, after all: all reliant on its largesse to eat, sleep and work. The worse things got — and they were getting worse fast — the more appetite there was for bold, assertive, planetary-scale action. And since the Covid-19 pandemic, everyone had got used to obeying the authorities and submitting to behavioural monitoring, in order to prevent mass disaster.

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By Stephen Pollard

And so, the global empire arrived, largely on schedule. Corporations, well-heeled NGOs, states and regional blocs, trailing a bevy of media and intellectual lapdogs in their wake, consolidated their Green New Reset, or whatever they were calling it today, with impeccable ease. The new world would be progressive, inclusive, open, sustainable, gender-neutral and, above all, intensely profitable. The ongoing assimilation of any ecosystems, cultures, perspectives and lifestyles that conflicted with progress would be implemented in a manner which ensured carbon neutrality. The sustainable global machine — smart, interconnected, perpetually monitored, always-on — would encompass everything and everyone, producing cascading benefits for all. The long-held Western dream would finally be achieved: the world would become one. One market, one set of values, one way of living, one way of seeing.

By the time some of the environmentalists realised who they had sold their soul to, it was too late. But what, in any case, had the alternative been? The small-is-beautiful crowd, with their patchouli-scented jumpers and their 1970s talk about limits and sovereignty, had been cancelled as eco-fascists long ago, exiled to distant smallholdings and housing co-ops with their well-thumbed copies of Tools for Conviviality and other yellowing tomes by dead white men. Now that an actual eco-fascism was on the horizon — a global merger of state and corporate power in pursuit of progress that would have made Mussolini weep like a proud grandfather — there was nothing to stand in its way.

Unlike previous empires, this one knew how to present itself: with wind farms rather than dreadnoughts, pictures of smiling children rather than squares of redcoats. It used eco-friendly, inclusive language as it enclosed land, funnelled wealth upwards and coated wild landscapes in renewable technologies made from rare earth metals (a regrettable necessity, but a temporary one: sustainable asteroid mining was well on the way). But it was curious how the wealth and power seemed to stay in mainly the same hands; odd too that the rolling eco-crisis never seemed to actually go away, however many billionaires and NGOs attempted bright new techno-fixes. In fact, the tighter the empire gripped, the more everything seemed to slip away from its grasp. It was almost as if the techno-fixes themselves were the problem.

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Over time, the inevitable happened: the age-old progress trap closed in like a Venus Flytrap patiently digesting its victims. The genetic modifications and the nanotech “solutions” went awry, as Earth’s inscrutable systems refused to behave the way the computer models had predicted. The mass dumping of iron filings into the ocean did not sequester as much carbon as hoped, but it did lead to an unexpected collapse in whale numbers. The Bill Gates-funded sun-dimming technologies had succeeded in lowering the planet’s temperature, but the feedback loops that kicked in lowered it much more than expected, leading to mass crop collapse and famine, which in turn caused riots across the world. The early 2040s saw half of Africa subsisting for several months on locust swarms while Silicon Valley’s finest dined on sustainable insect burgers in their New Zealand redoubts.

Tower farms, superpigs, eco-drones, cloud seeding, space reflectors: everything was tried, but the trajectory didn’t change. Earth’s limits refused to budge. To the Faustian West, “saving the world” had been just another means of trying to control it, but Gaia, like God, would not be not mocked. Life went on, but civilisation, increasingly, didn’t. Cities fell, waters rose, deserts spread. Jeff, Mark, Richard and Elon went into low Earth orbit on separate rockets, all claiming to have got there first, but their head-freezing facility in the Sonoran desert suffered a tragic thawing episode when the solar farm formerly known as Kansas was knocked out by a freak solar flare.

By the late 21st century the oil wells were slowly bottoming out, the rare earth metals were exhausted, and the boundless renewable future of electric cars and limitless green energy had been filed away and forgotten like an embarrassing teenage crush. The asteroid mines never got off the drawing board. The population peaked and started falling, along with the sperm counts. The suburbs and the oceans slowly emptied, and the stuttering Internet became so poisonous that even Mumsnet came with a trigger warning. Everyone told themselves that progress would be happening properly if only those people weren’t in charge.

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Most of all, a great disappointment seemed to spread like an ink stain through the remnants of the West, as it dawned on everyone that there was to be no spectacular denouement. There was no revolution and no restoration; no Star Trek, but no Matrix either. There were no robot soldiers to fight and nobody was building a Death Star. The best anyone could manage at this point in industrial capitalism’s downward curve was a weedy little spaceship built by a glorified bookshop manager, which could stay up in space for all of three minutes. The end of the world, it turned out, was less like Terminator and more like a Star Wars prequel: you wait for years in anticipation, and then it’s just a let-down.

In other words, it was history-as-usual, as the latest grandiose human project faced a long, grinding decline. The apocalypse, in the end, had turned out to be… boring. But maybe this shouldn’t have been surprising. The word Apokalypsis, in the original Greek, simply meant unveiling, or revelation. In an apocalypse, something is exposed that we all need to see, but are refusing to look at. What we saw, as our delusions crumbled, was that we had never really been in control at all. We had misunderstood the world, and our place in it. We had come to it as conquerors, boors, abusers, rather than lovers or friends — so obsessed with orbiting Earth that we had forgotten to look at what we were orbiting.

Modern humanity had turned on both creator and creation but our rebellion, as long predicted, had failed. Now the post-apocalyptic skyline belonged to those who had always known that: to the monks, the hermits, the anchoresses and the forest tribes; to the workers on the margins, steadily improving lives human and non-human with no desire to shout about it. To the small nations and the edge-dwellers, the quiet and the unambitious. To the earthworms and the shy hedgehogs, the suckering plants and the ever-flocking birds, foraging in the ruins of the latest fallen empire. To those who had seceded, and who had generated rather than draining the finite pool of life.

By the 23rd century, some of those who still remembered quite what had happened (it was hard to piece the facts together, since everything of value had been stored on the now-obsolete “Internet”) noted with some irony that the society which had grown out of the rubble of the machine age looked curiously like the one proposed by those early eco-fanatics: land-based, low-tech, community-centred, cored around a religious story, and highly suspicious of any grandiose claims. Much of England now looked like the fourteenth century, only with CB radios and better dental work. Over in America, the Amish had bought up most of what had once been New York state, and the remnants of the self-build hippie culture of the Pacific Northwest had begun restoring the deserts created by the megacities of the 2070s. The blades of giant wind turbines were bent into ploughshares. The meek had — after a very long detour — finally inherited the Earth.

There is still a faded Friends of the Earth “Nuclear Power— No Thanks” logo painted on a property near my home, a slogan that exemplified this sentiment. I also struggled to share their concern with genetically modified crops, particularly if they could help feed impoverished people on our planet.

Now climate change has pushed Green issues firmly back up the political agenda. Yet a new poll has revealed a strange quirk: some people inspired by scientific evidence to fight against climate change do not seem to trust Covid-19 vaccines created by other scientists to save society in a pandemic.

This curio comes from a new Oxford University survey that found a sharp rise in the number of Britons saying they are “very likely” to be vaccinated, with about nine in ten willing to have the jab. There are, however, still some pockets of concern, driven by age, ethnicity, income — and political affiliation. It is hardly surprising there was most hesitancy among supporters of the antediluvian anti-lockdown Reform Party founded by Nigel Farage. But the study also detected significant scepticism among voters backing the Green Party, who are at least 14% less likely to accept the jab than people supporting the Tories, Labour, Liberal Democrats or Scottish National Party.

Such scepticism is another depressing indication of the breakdown in trust between citizens and the institutions that shape lives. And this matters since a successful vaccination policy — and escape from this dystopian nightmare — relies on mass inoculation to minimise the potential host bodies for the wretched virus to infect. So why would nearly one in four people identifying with Green politics be so mistrustful — and what does this mean for the environmental lobby?

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Perhaps the findings merely prove that there is some truth to that hoary old stereotype of hippy environmentalists, besotted with their healing crystals and hooked on the absurdity of homeopathy. Such folk clearly still lurk in the undergrowth of the Green movement. These are the sort of people fixated by “natural” remedies, forgetting that Mother Nature can be such a deadly force; bear in mind that measles was the biggest killer of children under five in Africa until the arrival of vaccinations. One Green MP in New Zealand even advocated use of homeopathic medicines in the 2014 West African ebola epidemic.

In Britain, the Green Party has long been dogged by anti-science views. Its solitary MP Caroline Lucas has admitted using homeopathy and once signed a parliamentary motion in support of such treatments, while Natalie Bennett, her successor as leader, insisted the bogus medicines had a place in the NHS. Meanwhile, its 2019 election manifesto argued rightly that the science is clear on climate change, yet dismissed nuclear power as a “distraction” from renewable energies. It also demanded a moratorium on production and import of GM foods. So while misguidedly saying Britain should ramp up aid spending under a “moral imperative” to “alleviate suffering”, they ignored how science ensures rising global populations have fed themselves through advances in farming.

Crucially, Green voters are more likely to be young — another group showing greater hesitancy over Covid injections since the virus is more lethal to older people — and sceptical of a capitalist system they see as destroying the planet.

Ben Ansell, the professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at Oxford who led the study, told me he found that Greens responded in a similar style to other opposition party voters in their verdicts on government performance, rollout of vaccines and in deference to scientists (unlike Farage’s fan club, who are suspicious of experts). But they had less faith in government scientific advisers and were more wary of the regulatory system. “This may be down to mistrust of Big Pharma rather than scientists in general,” he said.

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It is all too easy for lack of trust — in the authorities, in capitalism, in experts — to tip over into scepticism over vaccines. Jill Stein, the US Green Party’s presidential candidate in 2016, sparked worry over her ambivalent vaccine stance after saying people had “real questions” over side-effects. Michèle Rivasi, deputy leader of the French Greens and a former Greenpeace chief, attracted controversy after issuing an invitation to Andrew Wakefield, the British doctor struck off for his discredited paper linking the MMR jab to autism. She has called also for an end to the “quasi-religious” cult of vaccination.

During the pandemic, there have been concerns in Australia over anti-vaxxers infecting the Greens after data found an overlap between low immunisation rates and high levels of party support. “There certainly are people who hold concerning views about vaccination,” said Sarah Hanson-Young, a senator for the party. “To those people I say we are a party of science, we are a party of evidence, and we are a party of making sure the community is looked after. The public health response needs to be underscored by science.”

She is right. One leading British activist argued to me there is a generational divide between younger supporters — who have strong faith in science since it has informed their deep-held views on importance of climate issues — and the remaining vestiges of an old guard who were alarmed by issues such as GM crops and nuclear power. Yet both sides seem to coalesce around antipathy to capitalism, evidenced by their shock troops of Extinction Rebellion, despite its crucial importance in the climate change battle.

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By Tom Chivers

Behind these issues of scepticism over science and capitalism lies a profound question for the party, one which I first came across in my post-graduate study days. My journalism thesis pondered if Green politics might take off in Britain, which felt prescient when the Green Party surged to 15% vote share in the 1989 European elections. Yet my conclusion was negative. First, I thought the party unlikely to thrive in our two-party system, since mainstream rivals would simply shift positions if Green issues became embedded in the electorate. Second, behind the media-friendly face of Sir Jonathon Porritt, the Green Party’s best-known figure at the time, I saw too many hardliners and obsessives to permit the sort of compromises needed to gain or even influence power.

Sure enough, the impressive surge soon turned out to be a blip as the party slid back in polls. It still struggles with this internal conflict: is it serious about changing the world or content to remain a fringe force, stuffed with too many cranks, conspiracy theorists and loopy ideas to be taken very seriously? Only last week, one of the party’s two peers called for a curfew on men after 6pm in response to Sarah Everard’s death. Baroness Jenny Jones told the Lords that this “will make women much safer, and discrimination of all kinds would be lessened”. Perhaps she may be right. But her draconian solution is not likely to be an election-winning proposal with at least half the electorate, let alone underline their credentials as serious political players amid the soul-searching over women’s safety.

Ultimately this is a party divided between “watermelons” (green skins but red in the middle) and the more pragmatic “mangoes” (green exteriors but yellow, like Liberal Democrats, in the middle) — as seen so disastrously in the splits when it won its first big local authority in Brighton. This has long been the problem for Green politics, even in Europe where it has made more advances by capturing major cities and participating in governments. Charismatic German leaders claim to have reshaped politics by transcending the left-right divide. But Winnifred Kretschmann, branded the world’s most powerful green politician after running Baden-Württemberg for a decade, had to see off fresh challenge at the weekend from a new party founded by activists who deem him too cosy with big business.

It might feel a long way from an Oxford study on vaccination scepticism to ructions in the politics of a German powerhouse state, but they are linked by a common thread — the difficulty of reconciling people with conflicting outlooks who are united only by their concern for the environment. Climate change has become the third most important issue in this country after health and the economy as Brexit fades in importance, yet the Green Party remains a largely irrelevant force in Britain. Yes, its leading lights have stood firmly in favour of vaccination. But the level of hesitancy in their ranks shows the pressing need for a sharp injection of reality if they really want to shape our nation’s future.